The annoying thing about Facebook from a Danish perspective is that everyone uses it to plan social events. There are a lot of articles on how you’ll get a richer social life and still get invited, but the truth is that you become a bit of a hassle for everyone else.
They have to text you the details outside of Facebook, or alternatively, have to adopt a new platform because of you.
Of course I still think you should delete Facebook. With all this recent controversy they had a chance to right the wrong, instead they chose to double down on exploiting their user base - not only in the legal department but also by quickly running their facial recognition stuff before the GDPR goes into effect.
On the plus side, the more people leave, the less Facebook will lose its justification because right now, the sole reason to be on Facebook is that it’s where everyone is.
I totally agree. I deleted my facebook about 5 years ago and I now find myself extremely isolated socially. Friends made the effort for a little while, but eventually I'm sure I was just forgotten by the more distant friends and my social circle has dwindled to almost nothing. This doesn't really bother me though, it's sort of a natural filter whereby "low value" relationships are weeded out.
Probably more significant is the impact of not being able to make new friends in the same way. The communities that surround my hobbies seem to be concentrated on facebook. When I make new friends at the face-to-face events the friendship doesn't transition to anything more significant because there's no followup connection on social media. This seems to be one of the modern ways that friendships are built - meet IRL, connect via social network and then always have a connection of some sort which allows the relationship to grow if nurtured. In my case I don't see or talk to these people until the next physical meetup and so I'm "out of sight, out of mind". It seems to me that other newcomers join the group IRL and on social media and are quickly integrated, but I'm just some guy that occasionally shows up.
Same experience in the UK. I shut down facebook for a while a couple of years ago. Net result? I found myself getting invited to fewer social events. Basically, you make yourself a PITA for all your friends and acquaintances[1]. As much as I dislike facebook, for now, leaving really isn't a viable option.
[1] Granted, this may be age group specific. My friends tend to be 30-40-somethings, or late 20s at the youngest. Not so surprising, given I'm in my early 40s.
My solution was to keep my account, but use uBlock to remove the news feed. This allows me to use Facebook to reply to events and messages, but avoid the rest.
It's not optimal, but as others said, getting out completely can make you a bit of a hassle to others.
I just attended an event I had two lucky ways of knowing about:
1) Find out through Facebook as if I'm friended to "the right people" like it's 1987 [my "usual network" would never have heard of these people, not even a little bit]
2) Find out through an acquaintance live and in person by them randomly inviting me simply because I was around the right place at the right time like it's 1987
I'm not on Facebook, even if I was it's still 1987. Perhaps this is "the discovery problem", but even so in "current year" it still exists if only in ever-smaller measures. Choose your intensity of flavour, I guess.
One of the reasons why I left Facebook was because I was tired of invites. I got tired of getting harassing messages from people upset I hadn't yet logged in to Facebook to RSVP yes/no/maybe to events I had zero interest in. No, I don't want to go to your child's birthday party. Leave me alone.
Deletion is too extreme for most people. Facebook is a monopoly for users and in an oligopoly for advertisers. This is a market failure [1].
More reasonable: escalating partial dis-engagement. Here's what I did, sequentially, over the years:
1. Turn off notifications for the Facebook app on your phone;
2. Turn off notifications for the Facebook Messenger,
Instagram, et cetera apps on your phone;
3. Delete the Facebook app from your phone;
4. Delete the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps from your phone; and finally
5. Log out of Facebook on your desktop.
It took me 2 years to go through from step 1 to step 5. It has made me happier and more productive. I still have a Facebook account. But the friction of grabbing my laptop and logging in forces me to consider "is this what I want to do? Or am I thoughtlessly reaching for the crack pipe?"
Turning off messenger notifications seems drastic and unnecessary (it's real people contacting you). It's like turning off sms notifications of call notifications, I do it whenever I need to concentrate , but not by default.
The problem are apps that notifies us about useless or non direct communication stuff.
About 2 years ago I unfollowed all my friends. When I login there's nothing to see now. I feel that I've switched it from a push to a pull service and am much happier using it.
Is anyone else in the strange position of never using Facebook, and not really knowing anyone else who uses it?
Neither my dad nor my mom use it, nor the rest of my family. I've never used it. I'm starting to wonder if I'm the only one so thoroughly insulated from Facebook addiction.
I skipped step 5 but instead I un-followed & unsubscribed from most of my friends (so when I login, there is basically nothing to see)... I can still manually search for them...
Since facebook is addictive, I’ve replaced the facebook newsfeed with an extension so that I can only effectively use messenger and visit user profiles. It limits my facebook usage to only intentional things, and preserves it for the few cases where I have to use the platform for something.
I feel like Messenger is fine since it’s not a facebook exclusive feature (instant messenging).
This is my strategy as well! Although I did this in single sitting when facebook message notifications started popping into my android phones main UI. I was already irritated by my constant habit of opening facebook and that was the last straw.
> As a social media user, you should have the right to leave a platform that you are not satisfied with... Furthermore, if users decide to leave a platform, they should be able to easily, efficiently, and freely take their uploaded information away and move it to a different one in a usable format.
Data is not the one thing stopping people leaving facebook... friends are.
This force stopping people leaving is the same one that drove social media into a monopoly - there is no cross platform protocol. Platforms do not communicate with each other like email clients. In this scenario the very nature of communication encourages people gather into a single large group for convenience (if it wasn't facebook it would have been another).
The abuse of a company in such a position is inevitable.
The _question_ is not going to be how can we make a protocol now (it's too late, facebook doesn't care), the question is how long will it take for enough people to become disgusted enough to switch to something more open where protocols could be developed, or where the platform is open source anyway and corporate forces are not an issue.
> the question is how long will it take for enough people to become disgusted enough to switch to something more open where protocols could be developed, or where the platform is open source anyway and corporate forces are not an issue.
There are some other options:
- Phone makers create a "message center", a central place where emails and feeds are shown. Facebook must now adhere to these standards, and they lose their "gatekeeper" position.
- Someone develops an API to interact with facebook on behalf of a user. This API performs a live export of friends, feeds, etc, so that other applications can use them. After a while, people will use those applications instead of facebook itself, and are ready to leave facebook.
> Facebook and other companies must respect user privacy by default and by design.
That would be really nice, but before that happens a major cultural shift would have to take place and I can't see that on the horizon anywhere. Until then, the only language those companies understand is losing users, or not gaining them in the first place. And that's only the part where we consciously decide whether we're users or not. It still doesn't touch the part where our data is grabbed beyond our influence.
The public needs to demand anything like respect for user privacy by putting pressure on the company. For that, the public needs to be aware of the issue. And for awareness a discussion needs to be kept alive. Like we do here in this post. So posting and commenting in HN matters.
I was participating this year in a big street protest calling for police to keep investigating the prime minister for corruption.
The pressure lead to public exposure and accelerated investigation immediately.
Zuckerberg revealed his true colors years ago. I had a facebook for a moment in perhaps 2005-06. I deleted it. I have never regretted that, quite the contrary. I have enjoyed a life free of social media, and free of its trappings and influences. I watch my friends get sucked into "comparing mind," scroll through streams of advertorials and recieve the corresponding subliminal stressers, and constantly have their mindfulness interrupted by notifications. I think the general concept of social media is great, and a necessary thing for the world at large. I think facebook is evil, and it blows my mind that people still continue to use this platform (And similar ones) even though the company sells users out again and again. This era goes way beyond "jump! how high?"
I think the thought of deletion is pretty much just one of the problems.
I managed to delete my Facebook profile a few months ago, but the amount of pressure I often receive from people so that I create a new account is what impresses me the most -- not from the personal level, since I already made up my mind, but from the point that most of the people think Facebook is just an essential, irreplaceable tool which everyone MUST have. I'm glad this did not yet affect my work or study, but this "disease" seems to have already infected most of my family and friends.
Now personally, I think people fool themselves most of the time to find what seems to be a reasonable answer to why they use Facebook: be it networking, be it a way to communicate with family and friends, be it a way to stay "in touch" with the news (and that also opens up for the whole fake news discussion, but oh well). I'm not saying those are not legitimate reasons to have a Facebook account (these are actually the primary services that it claims to offer), but I really wish people could see that there are other means to that. Some don't even involve having any social media accounts.
How is that not the question? Do you believe Facebook violated their users privacy rights? Do you believe in accountability? Then the question is why not delete facebook?
If you hold facebook accountable, then you send a message: users DO value privacy, and any platform that abuses the privilege may find themselves with far fewer users and a less profitable product. Don't hold them accountable, and you'll get a sorry note from Zuckerberg, and he'll violate it later when you aren't looking.
In fact, this article raises another question: how much does the EFF value privacy? Apparently violators just need to say "I'm sorry" and continue what they were doing, and the EFF will argue on their behalf that the benefits of their service outweigh the cost of your lost privacy.
If you look beyond just Facebook, these are issues that will continue to crop up no matter what platform you use. The EFF also makes the claim that there are people for whom deleting Facebook is not a viable or tenable option, and maybe they're right, maybe the tools for them to drop Facebook altogether just don't exist. In that case, they should still have an expectation of privacy and data portability.
Facebook's practices are a societal problem, but theirs aren't the only ones, and services that have the same exact problems are probably being developed right now or will be developed within the next few years.
So my takeaway from this, reading the EFF's post is 1. we should be looking beyond hashtag campaigns targeted at one specific corporation and 2. if for whatever reason #DeleteFacebook is not a viable option, then you should still have your privacy protected and 3. the subtext to point two reads to me as: if you can #DeleteFacebook, you should, but we're not in the business of telling you what services to use winkwinknudgenudge.
I wonder if there are any other tools out there that are capable of mining valuable data (for the personal user) from the "Download my Facebook" .zip file dump .. it seems like this is a data format that is ripe for exploitation by other apps/services in the effort of freeing Facebooks' grip over peoples faces.
Has anyone looked into the data that Facebook provide, to see what potential apps/services could be built on it? It seems really ripe for exploitation, to me .. but I have yet to download the .zip and inspect its contents. Off to do that now...
Everyone is using facebook ... because everyone is using facebook. The more people delete it, the weaker will the network effect be.
I would say that as a person who understands technology and the ramifications of facebook, you have a moral duty to not use it. And you have a duty of educating people about facebook.
You can't stop it alone (no single person can - even shooting Zuck would probably not stop facebook) but you can stop voting for it, just like you probably aren't voting for alt right/nazi parties in your local elections.
The problems that Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal highlight—sweeping data collection, indiscriminate sharing of that data, and manipulative advertising
No. The problem is that Facebook as a company has the data and the capacity to manipulate any election in any country. And there is no law that is forbidding them from doing that.
That's what the Cambridge Analytica scandal proved
I'm doing some research on alternatives to facebook. Social networks with different business models. Hopefully will have a spreadsheet with descriptions and info in the next few days.
As a user the value is not in the technology, but in the 'other users', yes, the old 'network effect'. So the essential question is ho to get overnight adoption of one of those alternatives by all your friends, which means, by extension, everyone.
Since this is unlikely, regulating Facebook into a privacy respecting business, hard and erring on the safe side, is the true alternative.
I’m not sure it’s possible for facebook to fundamentally respect privacy by default. It is completetly antithetical to both their stated mission of “connecting people” and their defacto mission of making money off advertising.
In order for them to achieve either of those goals, they have to increase time spent on site and engagement, in order to maximize ad revenue. That results in them serving content the user wants to see at all costs. Besides the fact that content a user wants to see may not be the best for the user, and can simply waste time, this can also mean a massive echo chamber reaffirming peoples’ own beliefs. While it may serve to connect them with their like-minded peers, it emotionally and intellectually results in disconnecting them from the rest of society. This results in a dangerous shift in factionism and idealogical siloing.
So the negative effects of simply serving what the user wants to see at a primitive level is fundamentally tied to an advertising business model. This makes it probably impossible for facebook to positively incentivize users without fundamentally changing their own incentive structures.
You may think there’s nothing wrong if facebook is merely delivering what users want, but facebook uses manipulation to only deliver what users want in the short term for immediate gratification. It’s similar to addictive drugs and cocaine. People’s long term thinking know it’s bad for them even thhough their short term brain wants it now.
Therefore if anyone is to create a facebook killer, all they have to do is provide a social platform that has a business model that is both sustainable and not reliant on short term engagement and selling ads. Instead it should focus on ceding control of social interaction to the user, rather than it being the byoroduct of manipulative user experience. It should tie its own success to ensbling users to achieve their own long term social goals. Since it would be the antithesis of facebook, they’d have too much inertia in their ad model to effectively clone it. Any other social platform can simply be cloned by facebook.
I found the generalization above regarding computer literacy of "most people" unfounded and very troubling. This comment also handwaves the inconvenience caused to users who were promised access to the information they need across their devices.
One, we are in a market failure. Unilateral withdrawal is difficult. Two, even if I withdraw, I am still subjected to Facebook’s surveillance and negative effects on my democracy. The latter is what pisses me off. (The cluelessness of Facebook’s management and culture, in respect of this problem, coming in at a close second.)
My only connection to other people outside immediate family was Facebook. I deleted mine, and now am stuck with no methods of contacting many people I know or once knew. I miss most of the major events in their lives. It's interesting to see how easily disconnected one can be when you're no longer seeing people involuntarily in classes and through a university community.
Every time there's a scandal and you don't delete your Facebook account, you're telling them that you're fine with that behaviour and that they're welcome to abuse you further. They'll keep pushing, whittling their users to a group who tolerates anything.
Disclaimer - I was subscriber 7454 to FB, however I moved on and never used it. I'm a little surprised that the EFF didn't mention the proprietary nature of FB in the article. The EFF used to champion open standards... what has changed?
We need an API to interact with Facebook, so that other tools can shield us from it and help us migrate away.
Facebook will never build this API, but perhaps someone can use DOM traversing as the underlying mechanism for an open source service that provides the API.
The question is: what signal do we want to send ?
Please go on (FB or every over ones sitting on privacy, past or future companies), or the game is over.
Perhaps, with the actual attention of the medias, it’s the right time to make a point, whatever it is.
[+] [-] eksemplar|8 years ago|reply
They have to text you the details outside of Facebook, or alternatively, have to adopt a new platform because of you.
Of course I still think you should delete Facebook. With all this recent controversy they had a chance to right the wrong, instead they chose to double down on exploiting their user base - not only in the legal department but also by quickly running their facial recognition stuff before the GDPR goes into effect.
On the plus side, the more people leave, the less Facebook will lose its justification because right now, the sole reason to be on Facebook is that it’s where everyone is.
[+] [-] mandrake-c-papi|8 years ago|reply
Probably more significant is the impact of not being able to make new friends in the same way. The communities that surround my hobbies seem to be concentrated on facebook. When I make new friends at the face-to-face events the friendship doesn't transition to anything more significant because there's no followup connection on social media. This seems to be one of the modern ways that friendships are built - meet IRL, connect via social network and then always have a connection of some sort which allows the relationship to grow if nurtured. In my case I don't see or talk to these people until the next physical meetup and so I'm "out of sight, out of mind". It seems to me that other newcomers join the group IRL and on social media and are quickly integrated, but I'm just some guy that occasionally shows up.
[+] [-] hamandcheese|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bartread|8 years ago|reply
[1] Granted, this may be age group specific. My friends tend to be 30-40-somethings, or late 20s at the youngest. Not so surprising, given I'm in my early 40s.
[+] [-] distances|8 years ago|reply
It's not optimal, but as others said, getting out completely can make you a bit of a hassle to others.
[+] [-] J-dawg|8 years ago|reply
Could someone explain what this means? Is Facebook’s facial recognition illegal under GDPR?
[+] [-] drdeadringer|8 years ago|reply
1) Find out through Facebook as if I'm friended to "the right people" like it's 1987 [my "usual network" would never have heard of these people, not even a little bit]
2) Find out through an acquaintance live and in person by them randomly inviting me simply because I was around the right place at the right time like it's 1987
I'm not on Facebook, even if I was it's still 1987. Perhaps this is "the discovery problem", but even so in "current year" it still exists if only in ever-smaller measures. Choose your intensity of flavour, I guess.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] txsh|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|8 years ago|reply
1. Turn off notifications for the Facebook app on your phone;
2. Turn off notifications for the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps on your phone;
3. Delete the Facebook app from your phone;
4. Delete the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps from your phone; and finally
5. Log out of Facebook on your desktop.
It took me 2 years to go through from step 1 to step 5. It has made me happier and more productive. I still have a Facebook account. But the friction of grabbing my laptop and logging in forces me to consider "is this what I want to do? Or am I thoughtlessly reaching for the crack pipe?"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure
[+] [-] cdancette|8 years ago|reply
The problem are apps that notifies us about useless or non direct communication stuff.
[+] [-] scottdupoy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sillysaurus3|8 years ago|reply
Neither my dad nor my mom use it, nor the rest of my family. I've never used it. I'm starting to wonder if I'm the only one so thoroughly insulated from Facebook addiction.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] trumped|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrischen|8 years ago|reply
I feel like Messenger is fine since it’s not a facebook exclusive feature (instant messenging).
[+] [-] fsloth|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gbacon|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomxor|8 years ago|reply
Data is not the one thing stopping people leaving facebook... friends are.
This force stopping people leaving is the same one that drove social media into a monopoly - there is no cross platform protocol. Platforms do not communicate with each other like email clients. In this scenario the very nature of communication encourages people gather into a single large group for convenience (if it wasn't facebook it would have been another).
The abuse of a company in such a position is inevitable.
The _question_ is not going to be how can we make a protocol now (it's too late, facebook doesn't care), the question is how long will it take for enough people to become disgusted enough to switch to something more open where protocols could be developed, or where the platform is open source anyway and corporate forces are not an issue.
[+] [-] amelius|8 years ago|reply
There are some other options:
- Phone makers create a "message center", a central place where emails and feeds are shown. Facebook must now adhere to these standards, and they lose their "gatekeeper" position.
- Someone develops an API to interact with facebook on behalf of a user. This API performs a live export of friends, feeds, etc, so that other applications can use them. After a while, people will use those applications instead of facebook itself, and are ready to leave facebook.
[+] [-] tempodox|8 years ago|reply
That would be really nice, but before that happens a major cultural shift would have to take place and I can't see that on the horizon anywhere. Until then, the only language those companies understand is losing users, or not gaining them in the first place. And that's only the part where we consciously decide whether we're users or not. It still doesn't touch the part where our data is grabbed beyond our influence.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|8 years ago|reply
Or being broken up. This is a classic case of market failure. Waiting for users or advertisers to force a change is futile, and not their faults.
[+] [-] anoplus|8 years ago|reply
I was participating this year in a big street protest calling for police to keep investigating the prime minister for corruption.
The pressure lead to public exposure and accelerated investigation immediately.
[+] [-] stratigos|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 4lch3m1st|8 years ago|reply
Now personally, I think people fool themselves most of the time to find what seems to be a reasonable answer to why they use Facebook: be it networking, be it a way to communicate with family and friends, be it a way to stay "in touch" with the news (and that also opens up for the whole fake news discussion, but oh well). I'm not saying those are not legitimate reasons to have a Facebook account (these are actually the primary services that it claims to offer), but I really wish people could see that there are other means to that. Some don't even involve having any social media accounts.
[+] [-] rgbrenner|8 years ago|reply
If you hold facebook accountable, then you send a message: users DO value privacy, and any platform that abuses the privilege may find themselves with far fewer users and a less profitable product. Don't hold them accountable, and you'll get a sorry note from Zuckerberg, and he'll violate it later when you aren't looking.
In fact, this article raises another question: how much does the EFF value privacy? Apparently violators just need to say "I'm sorry" and continue what they were doing, and the EFF will argue on their behalf that the benefits of their service outweigh the cost of your lost privacy.
[+] [-] SllX|8 years ago|reply
Facebook's practices are a societal problem, but theirs aren't the only ones, and services that have the same exact problems are probably being developed right now or will be developed within the next few years.
So my takeaway from this, reading the EFF's post is 1. we should be looking beyond hashtag campaigns targeted at one specific corporation and 2. if for whatever reason #DeleteFacebook is not a viable option, then you should still have your privacy protected and 3. the subtext to point two reads to me as: if you can #DeleteFacebook, you should, but we're not in the business of telling you what services to use wink wink nudge nudge.
[+] [-] amarkov|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hsljekskfh|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ibidibi|8 years ago|reply
Has anyone looked into the data that Facebook provide, to see what potential apps/services could be built on it? It seems really ripe for exploitation, to me .. but I have yet to download the .zip and inspect its contents. Off to do that now...
[+] [-] glogla|8 years ago|reply
I would say that as a person who understands technology and the ramifications of facebook, you have a moral duty to not use it. And you have a duty of educating people about facebook.
You can't stop it alone (no single person can - even shooting Zuck would probably not stop facebook) but you can stop voting for it, just like you probably aren't voting for alt right/nazi parties in your local elections.
[+] [-] slim|8 years ago|reply
That's what the Cambridge Analytica scandal proved
[+] [-] tomglynch|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PeterStuer|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diasp|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrischen|8 years ago|reply
In order for them to achieve either of those goals, they have to increase time spent on site and engagement, in order to maximize ad revenue. That results in them serving content the user wants to see at all costs. Besides the fact that content a user wants to see may not be the best for the user, and can simply waste time, this can also mean a massive echo chamber reaffirming peoples’ own beliefs. While it may serve to connect them with their like-minded peers, it emotionally and intellectually results in disconnecting them from the rest of society. This results in a dangerous shift in factionism and idealogical siloing.
So the negative effects of simply serving what the user wants to see at a primitive level is fundamentally tied to an advertising business model. This makes it probably impossible for facebook to positively incentivize users without fundamentally changing their own incentive structures.
You may think there’s nothing wrong if facebook is merely delivering what users want, but facebook uses manipulation to only deliver what users want in the short term for immediate gratification. It’s similar to addictive drugs and cocaine. People’s long term thinking know it’s bad for them even thhough their short term brain wants it now.
Therefore if anyone is to create a facebook killer, all they have to do is provide a social platform that has a business model that is both sustainable and not reliant on short term engagement and selling ads. Instead it should focus on ceding control of social interaction to the user, rather than it being the byoroduct of manipulative user experience. It should tie its own success to ensbling users to achieve their own long term social goals. Since it would be the antithesis of facebook, they’d have too much inertia in their ad model to effectively clone it. Any other social platform can simply be cloned by facebook.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jankotek|8 years ago|reply
Facebook has web interface. Uninstall the app from phone, and login once a week to check messages and to plan events.
[+] [-] shervinafshar|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xab9|8 years ago|reply
He removed it from his phone (but still using the messenger app).
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] christofosho|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ratsimihah|8 years ago|reply
The data leak was just the trigger to take the jump.
[+] [-] hordeallergy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] regeland|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|8 years ago|reply
Facebook will never build this API, but perhaps someone can use DOM traversing as the underlying mechanism for an open source service that provides the API.
[+] [-] ClintEhrlich|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JeanMarcS|8 years ago|reply
Perhaps, with the actual attention of the medias, it’s the right time to make a point, whatever it is.