No. I actually created a Facebook account in 2018.
The problem is that without Facebook you will miss out. Sure, close friends and family will invite you to their social events, but more distant acquaintances will not; you know, the bloke you met at the pub last week and had a 20 minute chat with, or that cute girl you talked to but then she suddenly she was dragged off to a birthday party by her friends.
By missing out on the social opportunities you lose the chance to upgrade these people from acquaintances to friends (or even lovers), as well as meet new people.
Some back story: I moved to a different country two years ago with my ex-girlfriend (for her job), and we both didn't really know anyone there. I work remote, so I don't meet a lot of people from work, either.
We broke up after a year and much to my dismay I discovered I had not really made any new friends in that year, and that I was quite ... alone. So I set out to change that. Facebook – as much as I dislike the company – was helpful. I moved to yet another country two month ago, and again Facebook has been helpful.
I dislike Facebook for all the standard reasons. I had an account but I deleted it about 5 or 6 years ago, but I decided that having a good social life was (and remains) vastly important to the quality of my life, and that Facebook is a tool to help achieve that goal.
(Facebook didn't really "delete" my old account, as after I rejoined it remembered many of my previous friends; some of whom I had no contact with outside of Facebook, like many Egyptians I was in contact with during the 2011 rebellion whom I had met through a friend and only knew through Facebook; my "suggested friends" list was full of Arabic names).
On a more deeper level, I am a little bit exasperated of always being the "different" and "difficult" person (which extends to things beyond Facebook). Standing up for your principles and "voting with your wallet" is good and all, but ... I'm not so sure it's all that effective. In this case, a more effective strategy is probably to first create a really good Facebook alternative (I'm not so sure there is one now), make sure decent privacy laws are enacted, etc.
> Sure, close friends and family will invite you to their social events, but more distant acquaintances will not; you know, the bloke you met at the pub last week and had a 20 minute chat with, or that cute girl you talked to but then she suddenly she was dragged off to a birthday party by her friends. By missing out on the social opportunities you lose the chance to upgrade these people from acquaintances to friends (or even lovers), as well as meet new people.
Man, missing those events is the BEST part about not being on facebook. I have way more than enough stuff to do, I don't need more things with random people. I have enough time for my wife, my kids, and a few outings a month with friends. I can fill that time easily, the thought of having to politely accept invitations from some bloke you met at the pub sounds horrible.
I missed my friend's 50th birthday party because I wasn't on Facebook (haven't been for around 3-4 years), and he assumed that everyone he wanted there was. That stung enough for me to think about it, but whenever I see people scrolling through their feeds there's so much drivel that I immediately go off the idea again.
Counter point, I deleted my account (not just deactivated.) I haven't missed any significant events. You can absolutely have an active and fulfilling social life without.
A Facebook account which is accessed only via web browser with third-party cookies and notifications disabled is not the worst thing. It essentially becomes just another website.
What is the worst thing though, it's installing one of the Facebook's apps on your smartphone. Because then you basically give up the entire private data of your day-to-day life.
(I imagine, very few people have actually seen the full permission list of Facebook for Android, which includes almost every single possible one.)
The reason your friend suggestions were still there is because your email or phone number is in your friends contact list on their phone, and that data is shared with Facebook. This indirect information about you is called a shadow profile, deleting your FB account does not delete the shadow profile because the data belongs to your friends, not you.
I left Facebook as soon as I realized they weren't reputable (some time around 2010 or 2011). By the time I left FB had already repeatedly betrayed user trust via "opt-out" security settings.
having a good social life was (and remains) vastly
important to the quality of my life, and that
Facebook is a tool to help achieve that goal.
From 2017: "A New, More Rigorous Study Confirms: The More You Use Facebook, the Worse You Feel"
Standing up for your principles and "voting with
your wallet" is good and all, but ... I'm not so
sure it's all that effective.
From July of this year: "Facebook on Thursday posted the largest one-day loss in market value by any company in U.S. stock market history after releasing a disastrous quarterly report."
Imo, those are valid points but still not worth giving up your privacy to Facebook for. I’d rather keep my data to myself until a non-ad supported version of either FB or some other platform comes out
I think I want to start using Facebook more in 2019 for these reasons. I have barely used it at all in the past ten years, mostly posting 3-4 pictures per year, and I never look at my feed. I'm actually afraid of looking at my feed today due to social anxiety, similar to entering a bar full of strangers talking.
Almost. I started the process—downloaded all my data, etc. Unfortunately, I couldn’t go through with it for reasons I’m embarrassed to admit:
1. One entire side of my extended family relies on it for all familial communications. I was forced to use Facebook Messenger recently to help with wedding planning, for example. These people are addicted to it an have invested everything in it—Facebook knows their entire lives.
2. People post pictures of me on Facebook despite my objections. Continuously. They tag me—despite my objections. With an account, I can make it difficult for an average person to find photos of me.
3. I have zero faith that Facebook will stop tracking me, storing my data, or doing stuff I don’t want them to do if I delete my account. I have zero faith that they’d stop even if I got a court order.
I know several people who work at various positions in Facebook. Every time they talk about the company, it sounds worse and worse. I’m slowly transitioning from, “They’re just another big data miner,” to, “They’re a truly evil company that goes out of their way to be deceptive and would sell their soul—no, my soul—for a cheeseburger.”
> I couldn’t go through with it for reasons I’m embarrassed to admit
Quitting Facebook may not a choice without severe consequences. I'm lucky enough to be able to stay away from Facebook, but I know everyone isn't in the same position. It's important to acknowledge that Facebook is inextricably intertwined with many peoples professional and social lives.
Your workplace may require you to Workplace by Facebook for collaboration. The parents group at your childs school may only communicate via Facebook. Perhaps the bachelors party of a dear friend may be planned via Facebook.
Embarrassment is the last thing you should feel for being trapped by this tyrant.
> People post pictures of me on Facebook despite my objections.
We need to make legislation against this. I know taking pictures in public places is fair game. I also know celebrities are subject to having this information published due to the public nature of their lives. But for those wanting to live private lives, we should be able to ban tagging or indexing and sue those parties that enable this to happen without consent.
> People post pictures of me on Facebook despite my objections. Continuously. They tag me—despite my objections. With an account, I can make it difficult for an average person to find photos of me.
In the privacy settings there's a control so that you need to approve taggings of you before they go public.
Why delete though? Just keep it inactive. I use my account maybe like a few times a year, as well as a couple of fake accounts for logins to other sites.
I think it will hurt more if you don't delete the account but don't use it much because it reduces revenue per user, or ad views per user.
Yes, deleting all posts (using Social Book Posts Manager[1] IIRC) and other footprints as much as possible before I did. Of course, I can't control whether Facebook actually performed those deletions or just simulated it to my satisfaction.
On retrospect I'm now just sick that I was ever caught up in their "engagement at any expense" Skinner Box to the extent that I was. I'd have Facebook open in one tab and start typing f-a-c in a new one before being aware of what I was doing.
Facebook is digital lead, digital radon, digital asbestos—pick your metaphor. Life is much better without it.
I also did this, except I went through and mostly manually deleted everything first. It took weeks, I'm not kidding. There's a page where you can batch delete most posts, but only 50 at a time, and it doesn't always work because the calls take so long that they quite often time out. Most anything else is snappy, certainly posting stuff is, but deleting things can take several seconds per post. I ended up hacking together a script I could run on my activity log to delete most things all at once – Facebook doesn't seem to rate limit this and it didn't trigger any lockouts or captcha like forms. Some things couldn't be deleted by the script, so I just manually tried deleting them. Some things stuck around no matter what, they just couldn't be deleted and would always generate an error. I think these were songs I played on Spotify about a gazillion years ago.
I wouldn't recommend anyone do this. Use whatever automation tools you can find. One thing that was interesting though is that it made me review my "Facebook life" and boy was this depressing. It was more of a digital graveyard of past relationships and memories best left forgotten, than anything else. I deleted all my social media accounts except HN and LinkedIn (because believe it or not, I actually get some good offers there, despite me never having posted anything) the same week, sometime in October I think. It's great, I've read books, took up learning to play the piano and guitar, and just generally feel less anxious about life.
The only downside so far is that mom Is really pissed that she can't spy on my life anymore, and have to call me. Actually nevermind, that too is probably an upside.
(I also deleted everything Google. Damn it feels good to be a gangsta.)
You have described exactly how I feel about this subject. My solution wasn't to delete facebook though, instead I ended up unfollowing every person I've ever argued with and unliked nearly every page. This has turned my news feed into a wasteland, and I've slowly become less of a Facebook junkie as a result.
So some background. I used facebook as a normal user from 2010 to 2012. I thought it was stupid on day 1 but was peer pressured into it (thanks high school) and by 2012 I still thought it was stupid and useless so I quit.
At various intervals between 2012 and now I've had shitposting accounts. Fake names and fake pictures but most people in the friends list knew who was behind the mask (and frustratingly would address me instead of the mask). At some point I was posing as an over the top Chinese nationalist, reposting everything from China daily and xinhua. Using FB in this quasi anonymous way is so liberating. You're not playing the same status game as all those other suckers. You're free to touch any political third rail. In fact you're touching the third rail just to touch it. You don't even care what you're saying. You can completely make a mockery of the banality which consumes social media. I used to begin posts with "speaking as a mother" despite being very obviously male. It is like you're the only one who sees the emperor has no clothes, and you're sitting there jiggling his willy and everyone else is still insisting he's wearing pants.
Anyway my last account was one "Fiona Lockhardt". Her profile pic was a purple pen which had a smiley face and boobs added in ms paint. For people who know me, Fiona really is the name of my pen. It is a pen that I built but it is also a lockpick. I named it after a girl in the office who was caught stealing things. I would use this account to interject into conversations with ostensibly on topic information but secretly I was making lock puns. I would post sterotypically girly vacation photos but with the pen in various poses such as sitting on an airplane or drinking starbucks.
Importantly, none of the pictures posted were me. 100% of uploaded photos were the pen with a face added in ms paint. So one day facebook decides that something about my login is suspicious. They ask me to upload a picture to confirm my identity. They won't let me upload a picture of the pen because they failed to detect a face in the picture. So I upload a photo of Mark Zuckerberg. It goes to manual review and then my account gets locked. Ironic, Fiona could unlock things for others, but couldn't unlock her own account.
Do I care? No not really. Facebook was just a stupid site on the internet from day 1. It never deserved to be taken seriously.
I agree, it never deserved to be taken seriously. When my wife deleted her account, I found it quite bizarre that people were asking questions like 'how are you coping?'.
To me, it's just a website - I wondered how absurd that same question would sound had it been a pistonheads or mumsnet account she was deleting.
No. As an introvert with a rich inner life, it’s one of the only ways for me to share that life with friends. People who have known me for years find they don’t really know me unless they’ve read my writing or seen my experiences through pictures. (I almost never share third party links; all my Facebook content is self-created and is a form of self expression — I suspect I’m in the minority of Facebook users)
There are egg people and onion people. Egg people are knowable once you break the shell, but with onion people there are many layers to peel. I’m one of those people who, despite being outgoing, are hard to know in real life because I communicate much more easily through writing. Friends have told me it’s through my posts that they learn there’s a whole other side of me.
Yes I could start a blog or send emails, but everyone knows it’s not the same.
To me there’s inhererent utility in a platform like Facebook for introverts. If there was another platform that’s as widely accepted I would switch but due to the objective function to monetize, any company going down this path will be faced with the same ethical challenges.
Deleted my account permanently two months ago. In the beginning it was interesting too see how it had become a habit to write the url almost without thinking, and for three weeks I found myself opening a new tab and writing the Facebook.com address every time my mind started wandering. Also deleted my Instagram account at the same time and currently in the process of deleting WhatsApp as well, as soon as some projects depending on it as the communication platform conclude.
Can’t say I missed it. The things I’ve lost in terms of communication power are far outweighed by the positive effect it has had on my wellbeing and time management. Other than that the effect has been relatively small on my life.
At the time of deletion I had around 700 “friends”, most of which I hadn’t seen in years and many of which I had had no connection after becoming friends on Facebook. Now two months after is feels weird to have used this service daily, when in reality it worked mostly as an address book than a communication platform.
Another thing I noticed was how invested I had become in other people’s lives by mostly just consuming their status updates, stories and pictures. This combined with lack of updates from my side had really distorted my relationship with people, and had me feel more connected to people than I really was. It has wonderful to notice how much more interesting and easier it has become to converse with people when you don’t know what they’ve been up to recently
I deleted my account in April this year. At the point of deletion I had created some Facebook pages and had been a very active user for many years. I tried downloading my data through Facebook's built-in account download feature. And I was quite happy with the download.
I then wrote up a post about my motivation for leaving which I shared on my Facebook: https://nilsnh.no/2018/04/04/leaving-facebook/ I figured it would be better to be vocal about leaving instead of just disappearing without a word. I answered questions and helped some friends join me on Signal.
Personally, I'm happy to be investing more of my time in platforms which respect my privacy. And I eagerly encourage people I meet to consider ethically-minded platforms like Signal.
Ultimately, I hope to see real, legal consequences towards corporations that disrespect the privacy of its users. Also, if monopoly laws were revised for the digital age we might see that some large corporations should be broken up in order to cultivate better competition.
Dude thank you for the blog post. Its short and straight to the point, you nailed it. When I was reading it (mobile) I was hoping you would mention Signal.
Do you mind if I quote your post (and link to it) if I decide to leave facebook?
How did it go? It might be pointless, but I'm curious of the outcome/reactions
No, but I've just completed exporting as many of my contacts as possible to vcard format and have added them to my Protonmail account. I've also set my existing Gmail accounts to forward to my Protonmail, and I'll sunset those accounts down the road once I'm confident I've transitioned everything off it.
Facebook and Google will soon be eliminated from my life. Amazon will probably be next, but I'm less concerned with Amazon(with the exception of Alexa, which I no longer use).
My Facebook account is still around mostly because much of my family still uses the site and our private group is where most family news, photos, etc. get posted. Otherwise, my account is basically a "husk". Very few of the people I know who are under 40 use it much at all at this point. The site, in relation to my social circle, is tumbleweeds blowing around. I don't know if I'll ever truly delete my Facebook account, but I hardly go to the site and I've purged my phone of all their software.
No, and I won't delete my Facebook account in 2018 or 2019.
I log in to Facebook Feed maybe once every 2 - 3 months, just to see how the space looks like, always disappointed in how irrelevant the information is to me. No friend posts, no insightful publishing, just randomly shared articles, ads, sponsored content and page suggestions.
I also do Instagram sometimes, that feels a bit more towards what I want in that I can actually see what some friends are doing but seeing my wife and close friends scrolling on and on on their feeds and praising it really makes me wary of immersing myself too much in this gamified addiction center.
I use Facebook Messenger to keep contact with my friends and WhatsApp to talk to my family; I have my track blockers on, I have my ads blocked and notifications disabled on my phone so Facebook is minimally invasive for me. Not sure what point I'm trying to make, I think it's a bit counterproductive deleting your account on the biggest network on the planet. What I think we should be pushing for is people disengaging with their devices and their notifications and being in charge of when they want to connect.
I was once a daily Facebook user, I felt connected, I felt empowered, I felt knowledgeable and I never stopped to consider if it is truly so. The change for me happened when I decided to disable notifications on my phone. Ever since then, I've been a lot better at managing my daily attention and random apps don't really hold my attention any more than what I am willing to offer them.
Again, I'm feeling like I'm rambling without a cohesive thought, so I'll end it with the personal insight that it's not necessary to drop a service as long as you get to control how it works for you. The data mining and shadow profiling are the cost you pay for a free service, but being on it constantly is a choice individuals can make for themselves.
Deleted in 2017! Life’s been great since. I’ve taken a bunch of classes, read a bunch of books, and I’m no longer plagued by the political and social ideas of the uneducated on a regular basis.
Yes. I did it for the privacy issues, and for being personally opposed to advertising in all forms. But I also did it because social networks are harmful even beside that. They are attention suckers, they distract, and they also depress and mislead you. All in all, I feel measurably worse for having them in my life. I feel it was doing me harm, to my mental health, my free time, my overall well-being. The (small) benefits, which I can mostly replace with messaging via other services, do not outweigh this harm. That's why all the posts about "an open-source/distributed/decentralised facebook substitute" don't really appeal to me either.
Yes. Too much BS from FB piled up... So I've started the process on Nov. 25th and in two days it will be a point of no return (yay!). FYI: After deletion, there's one-month period when you can change your mind and undelete the account.
I was a very active user since 2007. and I've made the decision literally overnight and made it into action one week later, after announcing it to friends and downloading my data. I've also sent a canned message to almost all people I have communicated with. It said something like: I'm deleting FB account, here's my email, phone nr and name, as FB will replace my name in that conversation with "Facebook user" when I'm gone.
I've also deleted my Yahoo account 10+ yrs ago, for inserting ads in email signatures and became obsoleted by Google, Linkedin after they sold my data and trust to MS and Twitter when they announced censoring posts.
Google and Amazon accounts could be next.
P.S. I've just signed up here to post this comment (:
I didn’t delete FB but I cut my usage by >80% using a chrome extension I built to block the newsfeed. That way, I could still use messenger and view tagged posts without getting sucked into the blackhole that is the newsfeed.
Yes! My primary reason for my deleting FB was that it was a waste of time. The privacy issues were there from the beginning. I never doubted our data wasn't used in all kinds of unsavory ways but this is the cost of having a "free" social network. What else did anyone expect? What really surprised me was how addicting FB is and how it changed the way almost everyone interacts with each other. Facebook's biggest crime is deliberately addicting its users, especially young people. If for nothing else, I hope MZ gets a subpoena for that.
I deactivated it for a few months. I've reactivated it since. I live in a small town of about 300 homes, all the city information is posted in the city facebook page. It doesn't suck time from my day anymore since I broke the addiction (now reddit is my only addiction left) and I have the firefox container extensions and ublock origin so i'm satisfied it's not tracking me.
1) Friends in California who keep the social group messaging on Messenger despite pleading with them to migrate so that I can at least uninstall Messenger from my phone. If you have lived in a variety of places, made friends in those places, and it's important to you to keep in touch with them, then they're on Facebook. The End.
2) Facebook properties are huge locally (Tel Aviv). Need to find housing? Facebook groups. Looking for local events? Facebook events. WhatsApp is endemic here: if you get somebody's number, the default is to contact them on WhatsApp. Want to make an appointment? Nobody needs some kind of business-focused WhatsApp - the guy just gets a cheap phone, sets up normal WhatsApp on the number, and publishes that number. Every social group imaginable is on WhatsApp - roommates, work, family, various social groups, coordinating weekly exercise groups, absolutely everything.
I visualize people who quit Facebook as the kind of person who always lived in one place, probably rural, is friendly with a handful of people from work, maybe a couple of people from school/college, and family. Sum total maybe fifty people who they've ever been close to in their life. If they're quitting Facebook, it's because Facebook didn't provide them much added value in the first place. And they either don't live in a place where WhatsApp is huge, or their social group is small enough and close enough that it's not a big deal for them to drop off the grid.
Yes because I found it absolutely useless since I didn't interact with people much besides a friend who I forgot to tell I was leaving Facebook. Thankfully she emailed me so we could stay in touch.
I wasn't using FB a whole lot since it made me feel bad but what pushed me to the edge was their utter contempt for their users.
I doubt it means much given how big of an influence it has in the world however. And I'm not sure I'll get all those productivity benefits since I'll waste time on something else.
I quit using Facebook in early 2014. I asked them to delete my account. Later, in 2017, I logged into Spotify for the first time ever, using the same email I had registered with Facebook in the past. Magically my account was restored and linked to Spotify.
After that I was sort of at a loss, but I did delete my account again this year after seeing a link on a thread here that claimed it would “really” allow me to delete my account. I still don’t trust it.
People have commented that they have missed out on friends 50th parties and even their death due to not being on Facebook. And therefore not being on Facebook is a big decision with consequences for your life.
However I think if you are not on FB, and you don't want to miss out, you need to do some old fashion stuff, like call your friends on the phone if they are long distance, or meet with them in person if they are local. And you'll have to do more of that to not miss out on stuff. You might then have to be more fussy about who you class as friends.
Even given all that I think it is worth giving up FB.
I'd been on it since high school in 2005 and treated it like the new version of MSN Messenger (oh 2002...). After a while it just got stale and it felt like I was pouring way too much of my personal data on to the platform. I think the turning point came after a friend of mine had committed suicide and his profile continued to live on the platform for at least a year. People kept posting to it and it just didn't sit well with me at all and I didn't like the idea of having an FB profile tombstone for myself either.
[+] [-] Carpetsmoker|7 years ago|reply
The problem is that without Facebook you will miss out. Sure, close friends and family will invite you to their social events, but more distant acquaintances will not; you know, the bloke you met at the pub last week and had a 20 minute chat with, or that cute girl you talked to but then she suddenly she was dragged off to a birthday party by her friends. By missing out on the social opportunities you lose the chance to upgrade these people from acquaintances to friends (or even lovers), as well as meet new people.
Some back story: I moved to a different country two years ago with my ex-girlfriend (for her job), and we both didn't really know anyone there. I work remote, so I don't meet a lot of people from work, either.
We broke up after a year and much to my dismay I discovered I had not really made any new friends in that year, and that I was quite ... alone. So I set out to change that. Facebook – as much as I dislike the company – was helpful. I moved to yet another country two month ago, and again Facebook has been helpful.
I dislike Facebook for all the standard reasons. I had an account but I deleted it about 5 or 6 years ago, but I decided that having a good social life was (and remains) vastly important to the quality of my life, and that Facebook is a tool to help achieve that goal.
(Facebook didn't really "delete" my old account, as after I rejoined it remembered many of my previous friends; some of whom I had no contact with outside of Facebook, like many Egyptians I was in contact with during the 2011 rebellion whom I had met through a friend and only knew through Facebook; my "suggested friends" list was full of Arabic names).
On a more deeper level, I am a little bit exasperated of always being the "different" and "difficult" person (which extends to things beyond Facebook). Standing up for your principles and "voting with your wallet" is good and all, but ... I'm not so sure it's all that effective. In this case, a more effective strategy is probably to first create a really good Facebook alternative (I'm not so sure there is one now), make sure decent privacy laws are enacted, etc.
[+] [-] cortesoft|7 years ago|reply
Man, missing those events is the BEST part about not being on facebook. I have way more than enough stuff to do, I don't need more things with random people. I have enough time for my wife, my kids, and a few outings a month with friends. I can fill that time easily, the thought of having to politely accept invitations from some bloke you met at the pub sounds horrible.
[+] [-] frereubu|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pfhreak|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krn|7 years ago|reply
What is the worst thing though, it's installing one of the Facebook's apps on your smartphone. Because then you basically give up the entire private data of your day-to-day life.
(I imagine, very few people have actually seen the full permission list of Facebook for Android, which includes almost every single possible one.)
[+] [-] sjf|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sfilargi|7 years ago|reply
There is a price to pay for sticking to your principles.
[+] [-] charlesism|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spiderPig|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] starpilot|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmlnr|7 years ago|reply
Yes, you will. You will miss out on things that are completely fine to miss out.
We need to learn that we can't and shouldn't be everywhere, know about everything, get constantly updated about everyone.
Go to meetups. Find classes. Sign up for a (make|hacker)space instead.
[+] [-] rohan1024|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saagarjha|7 years ago|reply
Do you happen to live in Europe, by chance?
[+] [-] zenexer|7 years ago|reply
1. One entire side of my extended family relies on it for all familial communications. I was forced to use Facebook Messenger recently to help with wedding planning, for example. These people are addicted to it an have invested everything in it—Facebook knows their entire lives.
2. People post pictures of me on Facebook despite my objections. Continuously. They tag me—despite my objections. With an account, I can make it difficult for an average person to find photos of me.
3. I have zero faith that Facebook will stop tracking me, storing my data, or doing stuff I don’t want them to do if I delete my account. I have zero faith that they’d stop even if I got a court order.
I know several people who work at various positions in Facebook. Every time they talk about the company, it sounds worse and worse. I’m slowly transitioning from, “They’re just another big data miner,” to, “They’re a truly evil company that goes out of their way to be deceptive and would sell their soul—no, my soul—for a cheeseburger.”
[+] [-] unicornporn|7 years ago|reply
Quitting Facebook may not a choice without severe consequences. I'm lucky enough to be able to stay away from Facebook, but I know everyone isn't in the same position. It's important to acknowledge that Facebook is inextricably intertwined with many peoples professional and social lives.
Your workplace may require you to Workplace by Facebook for collaboration. The parents group at your childs school may only communicate via Facebook. Perhaps the bachelors party of a dear friend may be planned via Facebook.
Embarrassment is the last thing you should feel for being trapped by this tyrant.
[+] [-] echelon|7 years ago|reply
We need to make legislation against this. I know taking pictures in public places is fair game. I also know celebrities are subject to having this information published due to the public nature of their lives. But for those wanting to live private lives, we should be able to ban tagging or indexing and sue those parties that enable this to happen without consent.
[+] [-] sahaskatta|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Carpetsmoker|7 years ago|reply
In the privacy settings there's a control so that you need to approve taggings of you before they go public.
[+] [-] hkai|7 years ago|reply
I think it will hurt more if you don't delete the account but don't use it much because it reduces revenue per user, or ad views per user.
[+] [-] CharlesW|7 years ago|reply
On retrospect I'm now just sick that I was ever caught up in their "engagement at any expense" Skinner Box to the extent that I was. I'd have Facebook open in one tab and start typing f-a-c in a new one before being aware of what I was doing.
Facebook is digital lead, digital radon, digital asbestos—pick your metaphor. Life is much better without it.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social-book-post-m...
[+] [-] mstade|7 years ago|reply
I wouldn't recommend anyone do this. Use whatever automation tools you can find. One thing that was interesting though is that it made me review my "Facebook life" and boy was this depressing. It was more of a digital graveyard of past relationships and memories best left forgotten, than anything else. I deleted all my social media accounts except HN and LinkedIn (because believe it or not, I actually get some good offers there, despite me never having posted anything) the same week, sometime in October I think. It's great, I've read books, took up learning to play the piano and guitar, and just generally feel less anxious about life.
The only downside so far is that mom Is really pissed that she can't spy on my life anymore, and have to call me. Actually nevermind, that too is probably an upside.
(I also deleted everything Google. Damn it feels good to be a gangsta.)
[+] [-] porlune|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devereaux|7 years ago|reply
It's hard to not see a relationship. The (lack of) digital footprint and engagement can come back and bite you.
[+] [-] IIAOPSW|7 years ago|reply
So some background. I used facebook as a normal user from 2010 to 2012. I thought it was stupid on day 1 but was peer pressured into it (thanks high school) and by 2012 I still thought it was stupid and useless so I quit.
At various intervals between 2012 and now I've had shitposting accounts. Fake names and fake pictures but most people in the friends list knew who was behind the mask (and frustratingly would address me instead of the mask). At some point I was posing as an over the top Chinese nationalist, reposting everything from China daily and xinhua. Using FB in this quasi anonymous way is so liberating. You're not playing the same status game as all those other suckers. You're free to touch any political third rail. In fact you're touching the third rail just to touch it. You don't even care what you're saying. You can completely make a mockery of the banality which consumes social media. I used to begin posts with "speaking as a mother" despite being very obviously male. It is like you're the only one who sees the emperor has no clothes, and you're sitting there jiggling his willy and everyone else is still insisting he's wearing pants.
Anyway my last account was one "Fiona Lockhardt". Her profile pic was a purple pen which had a smiley face and boobs added in ms paint. For people who know me, Fiona really is the name of my pen. It is a pen that I built but it is also a lockpick. I named it after a girl in the office who was caught stealing things. I would use this account to interject into conversations with ostensibly on topic information but secretly I was making lock puns. I would post sterotypically girly vacation photos but with the pen in various poses such as sitting on an airplane or drinking starbucks.
Importantly, none of the pictures posted were me. 100% of uploaded photos were the pen with a face added in ms paint. So one day facebook decides that something about my login is suspicious. They ask me to upload a picture to confirm my identity. They won't let me upload a picture of the pen because they failed to detect a face in the picture. So I upload a photo of Mark Zuckerberg. It goes to manual review and then my account gets locked. Ironic, Fiona could unlock things for others, but couldn't unlock her own account.
Do I care? No not really. Facebook was just a stupid site on the internet from day 1. It never deserved to be taken seriously.
[+] [-] ksangeelee|7 years ago|reply
To me, it's just a website - I wondered how absurd that same question would sound had it been a pistonheads or mumsnet account she was deleting.
[+] [-] b1r6|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justwalt|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] busterarm|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nradov|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] wenc|7 years ago|reply
There are egg people and onion people. Egg people are knowable once you break the shell, but with onion people there are many layers to peel. I’m one of those people who, despite being outgoing, are hard to know in real life because I communicate much more easily through writing. Friends have told me it’s through my posts that they learn there’s a whole other side of me.
Yes I could start a blog or send emails, but everyone knows it’s not the same.
To me there’s inhererent utility in a platform like Facebook for introverts. If there was another platform that’s as widely accepted I would switch but due to the objective function to monetize, any company going down this path will be faced with the same ethical challenges.
[+] [-] plahteenlahti|7 years ago|reply
Can’t say I missed it. The things I’ve lost in terms of communication power are far outweighed by the positive effect it has had on my wellbeing and time management. Other than that the effect has been relatively small on my life.
At the time of deletion I had around 700 “friends”, most of which I hadn’t seen in years and many of which I had had no connection after becoming friends on Facebook. Now two months after is feels weird to have used this service daily, when in reality it worked mostly as an address book than a communication platform.
Another thing I noticed was how invested I had become in other people’s lives by mostly just consuming their status updates, stories and pictures. This combined with lack of updates from my side had really distorted my relationship with people, and had me feel more connected to people than I really was. It has wonderful to notice how much more interesting and easier it has become to converse with people when you don’t know what they’ve been up to recently
[+] [-] nilshauk|7 years ago|reply
I then wrote up a post about my motivation for leaving which I shared on my Facebook: https://nilsnh.no/2018/04/04/leaving-facebook/ I figured it would be better to be vocal about leaving instead of just disappearing without a word. I answered questions and helped some friends join me on Signal.
Personally, I'm happy to be investing more of my time in platforms which respect my privacy. And I eagerly encourage people I meet to consider ethically-minded platforms like Signal.
Ultimately, I hope to see real, legal consequences towards corporations that disrespect the privacy of its users. Also, if monopoly laws were revised for the digital age we might see that some large corporations should be broken up in order to cultivate better competition.
[+] [-] int_x|7 years ago|reply
Do you mind if I quote your post (and link to it) if I decide to leave facebook?
How did it go? It might be pointless, but I'm curious of the outcome/reactions
[+] [-] ravenstine|7 years ago|reply
Facebook and Google will soon be eliminated from my life. Amazon will probably be next, but I'm less concerned with Amazon(with the exception of Alexa, which I no longer use).
My Facebook account is still around mostly because much of my family still uses the site and our private group is where most family news, photos, etc. get posted. Otherwise, my account is basically a "husk". Very few of the people I know who are under 40 use it much at all at this point. The site, in relation to my social circle, is tumbleweeds blowing around. I don't know if I'll ever truly delete my Facebook account, but I hardly go to the site and I've purged my phone of all their software.
[+] [-] ThalesX|7 years ago|reply
I log in to Facebook Feed maybe once every 2 - 3 months, just to see how the space looks like, always disappointed in how irrelevant the information is to me. No friend posts, no insightful publishing, just randomly shared articles, ads, sponsored content and page suggestions.
I also do Instagram sometimes, that feels a bit more towards what I want in that I can actually see what some friends are doing but seeing my wife and close friends scrolling on and on on their feeds and praising it really makes me wary of immersing myself too much in this gamified addiction center.
I use Facebook Messenger to keep contact with my friends and WhatsApp to talk to my family; I have my track blockers on, I have my ads blocked and notifications disabled on my phone so Facebook is minimally invasive for me. Not sure what point I'm trying to make, I think it's a bit counterproductive deleting your account on the biggest network on the planet. What I think we should be pushing for is people disengaging with their devices and their notifications and being in charge of when they want to connect.
I was once a daily Facebook user, I felt connected, I felt empowered, I felt knowledgeable and I never stopped to consider if it is truly so. The change for me happened when I decided to disable notifications on my phone. Ever since then, I've been a lot better at managing my daily attention and random apps don't really hold my attention any more than what I am willing to offer them.
Again, I'm feeling like I'm rambling without a cohesive thought, so I'll end it with the personal insight that it's not necessary to drop a service as long as you get to control how it works for you. The data mining and shadow profiling are the cost you pay for a free service, but being on it constantly is a choice individuals can make for themselves.
[+] [-] ashelmire|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrepd|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sm4rk0|7 years ago|reply
I was a very active user since 2007. and I've made the decision literally overnight and made it into action one week later, after announcing it to friends and downloading my data. I've also sent a canned message to almost all people I have communicated with. It said something like: I'm deleting FB account, here's my email, phone nr and name, as FB will replace my name in that conversation with "Facebook user" when I'm gone.
I've also deleted my Yahoo account 10+ yrs ago, for inserting ads in email signatures and became obsoleted by Google, Linkedin after they sold my data and trust to MS and Twitter when they announced censoring posts.
Google and Amazon accounts could be next.
P.S. I've just signed up here to post this comment (:
[+] [-] troquerre|7 years ago|reply
Here’s the extension if anyone is interested https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/marathon/nkhecjgkf....
[+] [-] Mugwort|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ngngngng|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] solatic|7 years ago|reply
1) Friends in California who keep the social group messaging on Messenger despite pleading with them to migrate so that I can at least uninstall Messenger from my phone. If you have lived in a variety of places, made friends in those places, and it's important to you to keep in touch with them, then they're on Facebook. The End.
2) Facebook properties are huge locally (Tel Aviv). Need to find housing? Facebook groups. Looking for local events? Facebook events. WhatsApp is endemic here: if you get somebody's number, the default is to contact them on WhatsApp. Want to make an appointment? Nobody needs some kind of business-focused WhatsApp - the guy just gets a cheap phone, sets up normal WhatsApp on the number, and publishes that number. Every social group imaginable is on WhatsApp - roommates, work, family, various social groups, coordinating weekly exercise groups, absolutely everything.
I visualize people who quit Facebook as the kind of person who always lived in one place, probably rural, is friendly with a handful of people from work, maybe a couple of people from school/college, and family. Sum total maybe fifty people who they've ever been close to in their life. If they're quitting Facebook, it's because Facebook didn't provide them much added value in the first place. And they either don't live in a place where WhatsApp is huge, or their social group is small enough and close enough that it's not a big deal for them to drop off the grid.
[+] [-] fgandiya|7 years ago|reply
I wasn't using FB a whole lot since it made me feel bad but what pushed me to the edge was their utter contempt for their users.
I doubt it means much given how big of an influence it has in the world however. And I'm not sure I'll get all those productivity benefits since I'll waste time on something else.
[+] [-] twodave|7 years ago|reply
After that I was sort of at a loss, but I did delete my account again this year after seeing a link on a thread here that claimed it would “really” allow me to delete my account. I still don’t trust it.
[+] [-] quickthrower2|7 years ago|reply
However I think if you are not on FB, and you don't want to miss out, you need to do some old fashion stuff, like call your friends on the phone if they are long distance, or meet with them in person if they are local. And you'll have to do more of that to not miss out on stuff. You might then have to be more fussy about who you class as friends.
Even given all that I think it is worth giving up FB.
[+] [-] 0x4d464d48|7 years ago|reply
I'd been on it since high school in 2005 and treated it like the new version of MSN Messenger (oh 2002...). After a while it just got stale and it felt like I was pouring way too much of my personal data on to the platform. I think the turning point came after a friend of mine had committed suicide and his profile continued to live on the platform for at least a year. People kept posting to it and it just didn't sit well with me at all and I didn't like the idea of having an FB profile tombstone for myself either.
So, I nuked it. Haven't missed it for a second.
[+] [-] jogjayr|7 years ago|reply
If you only get updates about someone from their social media, you don't really know them. They're a stranger you know far too much about.
[+] [-] colsandurz|7 years ago|reply