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Ask HN: Anybody else quitting Facebook over privacy concerns?
It just doesn't seem like Zuckerberg is going to let up until all of our personal info, connections, interests, etc. are being sold to the highest bidder. So today, I quit. It's really not that bad. Just 2 clicks, and then 14 days without a login attempt. http://bit.ly/chsPFo I'm curious if anybody else on HN has quit and why.
- marilyn 17y agoI'm definitely tempted to quit. I don't like the way Facebook is going for sure, nor do I like the idea of one company, a foreign one at that (I'm Canadian), having so much control and power over my digital identity. Though I fear I may be too addicted to quit.
- brandonkm 17y agoI'm deleting my account after I relay to all the friends I want to keep in touch with where else they can reach me at. Its a personal decision and never before have I been so personally offended by any one company's vision of what the internet should be. I disagree with the notion of a "social by default" web so much that I can no longer entertain being part of Facebook. There's an educational component to this recent bit of news as well. People by and large don't care enough to really cause the critical mass exodus that would make Facebook backtrack on these announcements. I think this may largely be because people don't know anything about the origins of the internet or even how it works on a basic level. It makes me think that knowing these things should be taught in schools in some capacity. I would assert that if people knew more about the internet then they could form more of an opinion when a company tries to hijack it it and change the paradigm. No one company can or should ever be allowed to change what the "default" of the web is.
- blaix 17y agoYou have every right to pull out of Facebook if you disagree with what they're doing, but thinking it has to conform to what your vision of what the web's "basic paradigm" is is just silly. Blogging and commenting changed things before this social stuff took it further. The web is always changing. Saying people need to learn about the origins of the web before they can use it is arrogant and I don't see how it could affect how anyone views what's happening with this Facebook stuff. Regardless though, "social by default" is rhetoric. When you launch a site Facebook isn't going to be able to hijack it and start inserting social features without your permission. In general, I think the concerns are overblown. Facebook is basically the Twitter that my family uses, and that's why I use it.
- PG-13 17y agoI'd like to know the ages of the people "quitting" Facebook and how much you actually used it in the first place. Most of Hacker News is too old to actually use Facebook the way young people use it. You're just there so you can feel as though you're in tune with tech trends or whatever. You have never really used Facebook, which is why almost all the comments on here about Facebook are so bad. You sound like old people screaming at kids to get off the yard. If you were a real Facebook user (hundreds of photos documenting years of your life), you wouldn't be able to just quit like that over something like this. I seriously don't understand why anybody over 30 even bothers to write things about Facebook, something that isn't meant for them, and something they clearly don't understand. Old wantrepreneurs on here are so bitter about Facebook's success. I remember someone giving career advice actually recommending Google over Facebook. You have to be completely out of touch to even think such a thing. Google is yesterday's news. They are a bloated company filled with talentless individuals, people who would kill for the chance to have the skills necessary to work for Facebook, but their brains just aren't good enough If you're over 30, please stop posting your "opinion" on Facebook. Your opinion on Facebook is about as insightful as an 80-yr-old's opinion about the internet. Instead, you guys should be begging the real users of Facebook, i.e. people who actually understand social media, to explain these things to you so that one day, with significant effort and training, you might be able to understand it.
- brandonkm 17y agoI'm 23, signed up for Facebook my freshman year of college (when it was only college students and had ~40 schools). I use Facebook frequently but will no longer be doing so. Good riddance if you ask me.
- pedalpete 17y agoI'm 36, all of my friends and I use facebook at least daily. Photos, events, links, news, feed, chat, all of it. I'd say for the majority of us, it is our main form of communication. Don't forget PG-13, it was us 30+ year olds who built much of the foundation which made Facebook possible. We're thankful to the 40+ who developed the technology and environment for us to do that. Understand the concept of 'Standing on the shoulders of Giants', and you'll have more respect for those who made what you build and dream of today possible. Along the way, you'll hopefully realize age has very little to do with anything. As much as I am appreciative of what Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreessen have created, I am equally in awe of what Zuckerberg has been able to envision.
- thecombjelly 17y agoI started using it as soon as it was opened to high schools. I deleted my account around a year ago. I quit because of privacy concerns but also because it was a time sink, at it had really lost it's focus.
- dfranke 17y agoI was one of Facebook's earlier adopters, back when it was still restricted to a handful of universities. I found it to be a useful tool for getting to know classmates. Then the feature creep started and it turned into a product that I have no use for, so I left. I never at any point gave a damn what their privacy policy was, because it would never have crossed my mind to post something there if I didn't want it to be public.
- CaptainMorgan 17y agoEarly adopter here too. I fully enjoyed the linked university concept - before universities started to engage more in their online departments, facebook was the only way outside of email or class to connect to a classmate about the course in question. I was deeply disappointed when they removed the university/courses currently taking, feature.
- rphlx 17y agoBut, now there are probably over 18,000 apps providing that!
- shaddi 17y agoAnd not a one does it as well as Facebooks did, not the least because none of those apps have near-universal adoption. I actually hadn't thought about that feature in a few years now. I completely forgot there was a time when I found Facebook genuinely useful. Now I never feel like I'm actually doing anything when I use it.
- pak 17y agoThe problem with Facebook was never what you posted about yourself. The more nefarious thing was that other people, in theory your friends but more like people you know for whatever reason, could post information that was linked directly to your tangibly real identity. In the era of the freeform Wall this was pretty silly stuff, but by the time it expanded to picture tagging and the news feed it started to get quite a bit out of your control. You could opt out of some of these things, but doing so generally made you seem a little asocial. The real diabolical thing about Facebook was that it combined general social anxiety with on-by-default feature rollouts to coerce its userbase into feeding more and more personal info to the datamine. Expect it to only get worse as the userbase grows to epic proportions... they are sitting on a Scientology-scale vault containing the personal details of people's lives.
- Amanjeev 17y agoI want to quit but then where and how else can I keep in touch with the contacts on FB?
- petercooper 17y agoI found.. you don't. But that's not such a bad thing, because if you're associating with people who you wouldn't otherwise keep in touch with except for some stupid Web site, are they people worth keeping around?
- Amanjeev 17y agoI am not associating. Many of these are contacts from my school, college, internships. No all of them are on lickedin or such websites. It seems FB is ubiquitous.... You have a point though. Some of them ARE stupid.
- duck 17y agoCan't you just disable it? Maybe I'm missing something though. http://www.simplehelp.net/2010/04/22/how-to-reclaim-your-privacy-by-disabling-facebooks-open-graph/ http://www.simplehelp.net/2010/04/22/how-to-reclaim-your-pri... I mainly use Facebook to keep updated on family and close friends, and don't use anything besides status updates and some photos/videos. I don't see myself changing how I use it based on these latest changes. Like Google, Facebook and privacy all depend on how you use it, not the tool itself. Also, like anything other 3rd party app, I don't rely on it and would be happy to walk away from it at any point if need be. I currently doing that with Google search using duck duck go.
- kprobst 17y agoYes, but I believe there's a "feature" that allows your friends to share your photos and other content without your permission. This is separate from the "feature" that was just helpfully introduced that allows other websites to identify you or whatever the hell it was. Seriously, I'm finding this Facebook thing more and more of a bother. It's great for connecting with old friends and keeping in touch with family, but if I have to be on edge all the time keeping an eye on the thing to make sure it doesn't breach my privacy then it's just pointless. Everything that affects privacy should be opt-in, not out. But FB can't resist the siren call of those billions of pieces of personally identifiable information they are sitting on.
- adammichaelc 17y agoMy big beef is that it becomes a hassle to have to go in and opt-out every time Zuckerberg decides to opt me in to some new information-sharing service that I don't want to be a part of. So yes, you can disable it, but the trend seems to be to make it a convoluted process to disable these things, followed by new "features" in a few months that force me to jump through a few more hoops. It's just become more of a headache than it's worth.
- webwright 17y agoEr, nope. This doesn't concern or phase me in the least. Assuming I don't say/do anything stupid on Facebook, can someone explain to me why I should be worried about this? I just don't get the outrage. I'm happy to have the entire world know everything I post on Facebook.
- InclinedPlane 17y agoI may be out of the prime facebook demographic by several years but even I understand the significance of this for a huge number of facebook users. A lot of people view facebook as something in the same genre of livejournal or blogger, a tool that allows you to keep in touch with friends but that is nevertheless still fairly public and limited. However, a huge number of people have taken facebook far more into their private lives. They use it as a replacement for email, for example. These people's entire digital lives are in facebook. Every sordid detail of their personal relationships. Every little bit of letting off steam about coworkers and bosses. Every piece of personal information from their home address and phone number to the sex toys they bought last week. For these people facebook's privacy settings are critically important. To put yourself in their shoes imagine if your email provider or phone company made an announcement that they were making a change to their privacy settings. If you thought that there was a serious chance of your email, text messages, or phone conversations accidentally becoming public because you failed to tick the right checkbox somewhere you might demonstrate just the slightest bit of consternation at that prospect. For myself I've been lucky since I hardly use facebook, and then only grudgingly (more out of a hatred for the UI than anything else), but for many of it's heaviest users facebook does not appear to be operating in, let alone even considering, their best interests.
- retube 17y agoBecuase it's not just what you put on there, it's what others put on there about you. Plus - do you really want _anyone_ who feels like it to be able to find out stuff about you? Insurance companies, potential employers, the tax man, debt collectors and so on? Or how about a scorned ex-gf/bf, someone you've had a dispute with etc etc.? Basically, it makes you vulnerable.
- groaner 17y agoNope. I saw this coming on day one and never joined. How else could you have expected Facebook to make money?
- seven 17y agoPrivacy concerns where the reason why I never joined Facebook in the first place. But still they do know me. As some people typed my email address into it, to request my friendship... I am part of one social network that is more about professional relationships. As I got many contracts through this network, I am a happy paying customer and the benefits outweight the privacy problems. Joining a social network that is mostly about private stuff is a no go for me. I just do not see a benefit in putting that kind of information into other peoples hands. I do not want my future customers to know that I am friend with 'Beer-Bong-Bob'. But as I just turned 30, I will listen to PG-13 and keep my mouth shut now. :)
- davidmurphy 17y agoSlightly half-considering it for the first time ever.
- si2 17y agoI also joined facebook when it was only universities like 6 years ago, and I was reluctant to join then, but friends convinced me too. I never really got into it, accumulated 200+friends from parties and now login only to post my website. So I hate facebook, I dont store photos or anything, but if I can get about 200 easy clicks to my website when i release a blog, i guess my facebook membership is useful.
- datums 17y agoThinking about it. I don't want to have to manage my privacy setting every time FB decides that this small component of the app will be exposed to non friends on these sites. It starts becoming something you worry about and is a huge turn off. 2006 member
- adammichaelc 17y agoClickable link to delete your account. Deleting is different from deactivating; deactivating keeps all your data there. Deletion is supposedly permanent. http://bit.ly/chsPFo http://bit.ly/chsPFo
- dmoney 17y agoReal URL: http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_ac...
- mdolon 17y agoA lot of people seem to share the same opinion about quitting Facebook but are hesitant because there aren't many better alternatives. Does this mean there's a market for a secure, more private social network? Maybe one where everything is completely private, unless you decide to make it public to other members. If people want/need something like that it sounds like a fun weekend (or two) project.
- loup-vaillant 17y agoIf you want an alternative that will never disrespect privacy, you will need to make it distributed. This is because the only way to control your data is to lock it up on your machine, or encrypt it. I wonder if there are standards (protocols) related to distributed "social network".
- retube 17y agoYeah, it what properties/features such a protocol would require. Distributed is the only way to go, where YOU host your data, or at least get to choose a third-party hoster a la e-mail.
- drewp 17y agohttp://www.foaf-project.org/ http://www.foaf-project.org/ is one of the main standards. http://code.google.com/p/xoperator/ http://code.google.com/p/xoperator/ is a bit weird, but I think has some of the right ideas of the distributed SN.
- aneth 17y agoPrivacy is dead, and I (and most people) have very little to hide. What I do have to hide can be under pseudonyms. Besides, I think Fb is doing a reasonable job allowing people to control their privacy settings. Most people don't mind being out in the sunlight.
- jrockway 17y agoI believe that you are violating Facebook's ToS if you use a pseudonym. Just sayin'. (As though a name our parents give us is more "real" than one of our own choosing. There is no such thing as identity.)
- fauigerzigerk 17y agoThere are a few issues with the "I have very little to hide" attitude. One problem is that the information you provide may not be what you want to hide, but the information that could be inferred from it may be problematic for you. For instance, what if some financial institution computes a credit score based on the profiles of the people you are connected with and makes you pay more for a loan because you have some friends with a bad credit rating? What if health insurance providers sift through your data to find out about your lifestyle and adjust rates accordingly? What if a potential employer or their HR service provider computes some kind of loyalty/reliability/risk score based on lifestyle data you provide? What if none of that is possible based on your current facebook data but when facebook gets acquired in the future their datasets are combined with other data about you? All of the conclusions drawn from such analyses may be completely wrong. But they are nonetheless information about you and they may have an effect on your life. Was that the kind of information you were thinking of when you said "I have very little to hide"?
- aneth 17y agoI don't see how you would have an expectation of that data being private when you put it on facebook. The whole point of facebook is to publish your identity, and you are a fool if you think somehow what you post to your friends will never get around. And how does what happens to your data after an acquisition have anything to do with their current privacy policies? If that's you worry, there is nothing they could do - it's your choice to put data there.
- braindead_in 17y agoI quit around one and half years ago. I wasn't really drawing any value out of it.
- SkyMarshal 17y agoI tainted my Facebook data and bailed long ago. Facebook just ain't right. (http://www.freeinfidel.com/2007/12/08/taint-the-data-how-to-quit-facebook-the-evil-way/ http://www.freeinfidel.com/2007/12/08/taint-the-data-how-to-...) Trusting Facebook with the ability to track you across the entire Internet is like trusting a Wall Street investment bank with your money. In both cases, they're the G, you're the mark, no matter how sweet the sales pitch. They wouldn't be selling you if the deal wasn't better for them.
- apphacker 17y agoI'm not going to quit, I'm connected to my family on there. I just don't post stuff there, except for some family pictures and videos, which I can do from iPhoto. I post everything to my tumblr blog which reposts it on Facebook and Twitter so I never have to log in to FB unless someone comments. Also I work on apps that I integrate into Facebook so I'll use it for that.
- pkulak 17y agoI'd like to, but everyone I know (almost literally) uses it. The feed really is a great feature. If I could get everyone I know to move over to Buzz or anything else with The Feed that isn't evil, that would be nice, but it's not going to happen. Facebook owns me.
- arimat 17y agoYes. Facebook has progressively and consistently been trying to "slip under the radar" with privacy time and time again. This is not a one time thing, it's a habit and a consistent assault on users. They've never suggested they've ever "gotten" privacy and their flawed assumption that just because i'm on a social network means I want to share everything with everyone is pretty asinine. I've spent a long time messing with privacy settings and groups and i've never really gotten the results that I wanted. Social networks badly need to start getting the clue that people don't want to give up control over their information. All Facebook needed to do was look at the stories of people who got fired or never hired based on what was on their Facebook to learn this lesson, but they've proven they don't want to do it. Facebook has gone way off the rails and continues to go off the rails. One wonders whether anyone there is possessed of clue.
- jorgecastillo 17y agoI signed once, I checked the settings and had a quick glance but didn't add people. After that I canceled my account and whit recent developments I think I will never again make a FB account. If something like XMPP was made for social networking it would be awesome and if data portability was added it would be even better. <will probably never happen> Lots of independent social networks that are compatible with each other so that you only have to be a member of one but can still interact with everyone you wish to and can easily switch to another network. <will probably never happen> This open source project might be (or not) a good start. http://elgg.org/ http://elgg.org/
- kwamenum86 17y agoI'd go win might not. Last time I checked elgg does not scale well and the code is really REALLY awful as in not optimized and not conducive to customization. It is kind of a toy IMO
- arihant 17y agoNot deleted account, nor planning to. Just clicking logout button does it. Now, I just login once every 2 days to interact, also saves time.
- endtime 17y agoNope. I've been a member since 2004, when they opened it up to my school just before my freshman year. I just keep in mind that Facebook isn't private and I can't rely on anything I put on it to be private. But even under the stipulation that everything I put on Facebook is public, it's useful to me.
- ihodes 17y agoYes, I really am. The only use I will miss if being able to contact a targeted group of people when I make my own ads. Which is a sick reason to not want to leave. But I feel as though my rights as a user of their service have been violated not just this time, but many more (the frequent privacy policy changes, Beacon, now Connect etc etc.) It's bullshit. (Plus keeping in touch with people is easier on Facebook, I suppose. And it's a sort of asynchronous chat toy as well, which is fun.)
- raintrees 17y agoI just went back into my profile and deleted all of my personal/bio info, and made sure my settings were as tight as I could make them. Two older acquaintances were still able to find me, so success. I should also point out that I use it mostly to keep up on family reunions, and classmates, etc. and frequent the site maybe twice a month? And I have always considered it public, so I have posted accordingly. And chided my "friends" to do the same.
- HowardRoark 17y agoI deleted my Facebook account yesterday. I quit Google search 2 years ago. With Wikipedia, Stackoverflow, Github and Bing, I don't miss Google search much.
- SkyMarshal 17y agoBing > Google Search?
- Calamitous 17y agoSince you dumped google, I'm curious if you've tried/have an opinion on DuckDuckGo?
- there 17y agoAnybody else never join Facebook over privacy concerns?
- gradschool 17y agoI never have despite frequent requests, and not all automatically generated (at least by conventional criteria). I'm beginning to worry about whether people get that not joining Facebook could be a conscious choice rather than a mere oversight.
- jrockway 17y agoI stopped using Facebook because it's useless. If I want to talk to my friends, I just msg them on IRC. Why bother with ads and "identity verification"!?
- keefe 17y agoI was on facebook for a while. One day, I realized I was publicly linked to my boss, my colleague, all my x's and everyone I went to high school with. The next day, I deleted my account. I was never particularly interested in it in the first place.
- aj 17y agoI am. I'm done. Tried suicidemachine.org but that service seems to be spotty. Did not work twice and now apparently I don't have slots. Will have to do it manually.. But I am going to do it.
- bradgessler 17y agoI've always viewed Facebook as a self-updating address book. I never got into all the other crap it offered and I loathed at their app platform when it was released years ago.
- ElbertF 17y agoI canceled my account this morning. I never had any information on there that I wanted to be completely private but I don't like where Facebook is going.
- ErrantX 17y agoNah, I made a concious decision to open up my Facebook account "publicly" about 18 months ago. So in my mind it is just like my public facing blog (with a handy added address book). Once you have it in your mind like that it is easy to remember not to post private stuff in there.
- revorad 17y agoI also thought of doing that but I don't know if it's a good idea. Because it's not just up to you to not post private stuff. What about the private stuff your friends post about you on your wall? On the other hand, limiting my profile also has only limited privacy benefits because my friends and family don't understand and can't be bothered to tweak fifty different checkboxes to get their privacy settings right. So anything I say or do on their Facebook pages is out in the open. I'm wondering if it's even worth thinking about so much. Ugh.
- ErrantX 17y agoAbout the only thing I do really limit is the privacy of things friends post on my wall etc. In terms of other stuff they do (controlled by their privacy settings) I think you just have to be aware of what's going on. I've de-tagged a few photo's etc.
- revorad 17y agoOh I remember de-tagging photos once. It made me laugh when I realised Facebook was making me do work and there was no end to this chore!!!
- raquo 17y agoIn the internet only Facebook can quit you. All your data are belong to Zuck.
- shadowsun7 17y agoI joined Facebook this year for a class in Facebook app development. I never really wanted to join the network - like some of the posters here, I saw something like this coming and told myself it wasn't worth the investment to join Facebook. After four months of using it, I've come to several conclusions. 1) Facebook is a huge timesuck. Time I used to spend reading on the Internet, or programming I now spent watching stupid videos on Facebook itself. What Facebook needs is a noprocras feature (but even then - the content isn't worth the time). 2) Related to point 1: I began to think that what Facebook really does is to use my need for connection to keep me returning to the site. And I didn't like that. It felt as if ... well it feels as if they're trying to use my friends for their benefit. 3) Superficial communication != valuable communication. There is no centralized discussion on FB, and your profile page tends to be this highly decentralized echo chamber. How many people, if ever, argue against your (bad) ideas on your very own profile page? 4) Privacy has always been and will always be an issue on a social site this big. It's too easy to mess things up. And so, after four months: I'm quitting.
- piguy314 17y agoAs long as facebook maintains some semblance of a concern about privacy and allows people to opt out of their invasive and intrusive new features I will stick around. It's a great way to keep in touch with old/current classmates and family members. I of course don't allow facebook applications to share any of my info, have all my settings on "friends only," and have all applications blocked except the baseline/stock ones (calender, etc...)
- retube 17y agoI just spent 30 minutes going through all my privacy settings and switching everything to "Friends only". It was time consuming, and given the number of config pages, I'm sure I've missed stuff. And there's still stuff visible on my profile. I'm just so pleased I signed up with an alias. Only my actual friends know it's me.
- ritonlajoie 17y agoDo you know what was the name of this project which lets you, with a firefox extension, post your facebook messages using PGP or something similar ? I can't find it again, still there was some buzz about that some months ago.. edit : this software was aimed at creating short life messages. After some time the data was deleted from the net.. It was using some P2P technology
- weixiyen 17y agoI tried to quit last year and then my wife started an argument with me, rationalizing that people would think she's single if I quit. I'm still on Facebook, it's still completely useless, and and I still want to quit. However I need some ammo if I'm going to approach this subject with her again.
- Aron 17y agoLet her create a fake husband account.
- loup-vaillant 17y agoNot sure this counts, but I quit Gmail over privacy concerns. My mail and my web site are currently hosted on a remote virtual machine on which I am root. But this is not enough. I eventually plan to use a real personal server, one that will be locked behind my walls. Of course, I won't ever use Facebook.
- Kilimanjaro 17y agoIt is not what you post, it is what they post about you. A friend of mine decided to give facebook a try and he was received with a warm welcome of "Bring the cocaine, snuffy is here finally!" Closer to home, a cousin went to a bachelorette party and posted pictures of her and everybody doing their stuff, you know, sucking fake cocks and stuff. Totally inappropriate for the world to know, but they thought that was just funny. See? you can't control what they post about you.
- CulturalNgineer 17y agoThe individual in a tribe of hunter-gatherers has a very different concept of privacy. In his/her world everyone pretty much knows everyone else's 'business'. The whole concept of privacy is relatively new to humanity. This doesn't mean its not important. Its actually an emergent property of a scaled civilization. Its an unavoidable situation there but, of course, in that case 'everyone' is a fairly small number. The Internet is revolutionizing privacy and proximity for the FIRST time since the rise of organized agriculture. This isn't going to be an easy transition and will require revisions in law, credit-creation and finance, governance and especially cultural norms. I don't know how it will turn out but I suspect it will be a deal 'maker or breaker' for humanity's future development and the role and rights of the individual. It's a true evolutionary landscape and its design whether arising by accident or intent will determine the nature of our future evolution. How would hunter-gatherers run the world? (pssst... They Do!) http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2009/11/how-would-hunter-gatherers-run-world.html http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2009/11/how-would-hunte... The Problem in Scaling Altruism: Where's the Intelligent Life? http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2010/04/problem-in-scaling-altruism-wheres.html http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2010/04/problem-in-scal... On Social Energy, Enterprise & Expanding the Technology of Money http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2010/01/on-social-energy-enterprise-expanding.html http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2010/01/on-social-energ... Unhindered Speech and Association must be maintained as inherent qualities of this developing landscape. And the information inherent in this speech and association, if it is to have ownership at all... Must be owned by the Commons! The Individually-controlled / Commons-dedicated Account, I believe is an essential element necessary as part of this transition. But I'm an anthropologist and not a computer whiz just trying to understand this new landscape and provide a suggestion or two...
- chancho 17y agoSomeone else (in some other similar thread that I've forgotten) pointed out the similarity to "the olden days" when everybody knew everybody else's business. To which the reply was: Yeah, but you knew exactly _who_ knew your business. This new brand of everybody-knows-everybody's-business is entirely different because it's asymmetrical: everybody knows everything about me but I don't know shit about "them", who they are, where they are, how many of them there are, etc...
- arihant 17y agoShutting down FB account might be a solution to privacy issues, which can be easily solved by starting to use FB from something like TweetDeck. That's not big of a deal. But, the mere fact that people are feeling "friction" from shutting accounts leads to a more profound problem here - portability of personal data on the cloud. For a 'social' web to happen in reality and for 'everything to move on cloud' to happen anywhere out of Web 2.0 conferences, this feature is required. You can't shift 'everything on cloud' when 'everything' is tied to one privately held entity. This goes for every 'social' services provider out there. If I can change my cellphone provider, why not my social network provider?
- stcredzero 17y agoThinking about it. I think Facebook has peaked. It's bloated, ripe, and everything that can be extracted from it is being extracted. (I may be wrong, and this is only a local maxima. That's also a disturbing thought.)
- sandipc 17y agoas much as I wish that were true, it seems like fb is still growing at a ridiculous rate (at least from what zuckerberg mentioned at f8)
- ben1040 17y agoI put my account in the delete queue a few days ago. I shouldn't have to keep an eye on HN and Valley blogs to find out that they've tweaked privacy settings again and more of my information is "public." Getting out is a whole lot easier than I thought. I had as friends on Facebook a lot of former high school and university classmates, as well as coworkers from prior jobs. Part of me was worried I'd lose touch with them, but then it dawned on me that the extent of our interactions was mashing "like" buttons on each other's posts -- for example, if one of them were in town, I probably wouldn't bother to catch up with them for a beer. The people I actually care about, well, I can email, call them, or even tap them on the shoulder and say "Hey." Having to do that also makes me think twice about what I'm sending, and to only share with people the things that actually matter. Facebook's "news feed" makes it way too easy to share things that probably should be left unsaid. And man, my productivity has skyrocketed since I don't feel compelled every hour to check my Facebook feed. The last couple days I've gotten lots more work done thanks to cutting out this huge distraction.
- DarwinLann 17y agoI quit Facebook late last year. I have no patience for the games they are playing. Sadly, this seems to be the way of Web 2.0 sites: build an audience and ruin it by trying to make money with it. I've seen it with Myspace, Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, and Facebook. I really like Tumblr but I would bet that the same thing happening with them at some point in the future.
- kimfuh 17y agoIt wasn't a privacy concern for me. It was boredom. FB slowly became boring. I joined around the time when the poke was invented and FB was something new. Every time i logged in, i'd find something interesting to do. Doesn't feel like that anymore. It feels stale. There's no app for that.