7 ms·

Reasons You Should Quit Facebook

132 points by rwolf 16y ago

thmz 16y ago
Why are people so seriously angry about stuff like this? If you don't like Facebook, just quit and get a drink with your friends.
- techiferous 16y ago
  He may be trying to educate others who are assuming facebook has a stricter privacy policy than they actually do.
tptacek 16y ago
I didn't sign up with Facebook expecting them to be good at any of these things. I don't care about Facebook privacy: I didn't give them any private data. I don't care if applications can see my private data: my data isn't private and, more importantly, I don't sign up for applications. I don't plan on going into business with Facebook. I don't care how they treat their developer partners. None of this stuff matters to me. Why am I pointing this out? Because I think my attitude represents a huge chunk of Facebook's users, and I think most of what's left over after you subtract that chunk consists of people who don't care about privacy period. I use LinkedIn for business. I use Twitter for geeky stuff. I use Facebook for non-geeky stuff and to post pictures of my kids in their halloween costumes. It all seems to be working out OK for me.
- rwolf 16y ago
  The thing getting in the way of understanding each other here is what the average use case is for Facebook. If it's not tricking people into sharing more than they intend to (as seems to the be case for you), then what are we complaining about, right? I post and upvote links to these kinds of stories because I believe my family and friends do not use Facebook like you do, and are being tricked into sharing more than they mean to.
- steveklabnik 16y ago
  Exactly. See my recent 50+ point comment [1] that says basically the same thing. I really think that the vast majority of Facebook's users just don't care. Remember the Beacon debacle? That big group had what, 300k people or something? A tiny part of the userbase. I could be remembering these details wrong, though. 1: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1311406 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1311406 edit: I bring up the score because there's obviously a lot of "OMG FACEBOOK SUCKS" posts going around. But obviously there's a lot of people that also disagree. It's not all just Facebook hate, or my comment wouldn't have gotten voted up in the first place.
- codexon 16y ago
  Because I think my attitude represents a huge chunk of Facebook's users A common mistake people make here is to think they represent the majority. Hacker news is a very small community.
  - lisp123 16y ago
    It always astounds me that 30-year-olds or older think they represent the average Facebook user. I have never seen anyone older than 30 write anything intelligent about Facebook. You people are not real users. Please understand this. How you "use" Facebook is so completely different from how people in college and recent grads use Facebook. For you, most of your pictures were what you actually posted yourself. For real Facebook power users, the vast, vast majority of photos come from other people. It's becoming clear that understanding of Facebook is the clearest dividing line between those in their late twenties and beyond and those younger. You pretend users really sound like old men shouting at kids to stay off your lawn. Why don't you at least try to educate yourselves about how Facebook actually works?
    - vickrum 16y ago
      I started university when I was 18, and at the same time I joined Facebook. I'm now 22, close to graduating, and Facebook chronicles my last 4 years of misadventure. Yet I have to agree with tptacek, it's not a big deal. It's not hard to untag yourself from dodgy photos, leave silly groups, clean up your profile and put professional contacts in a restricted list. Most importantly though, I've come to the conclusion most people expect you to have dirt on Facebook. If your boss wants to be your friend on Facebook and doesn't get why you won't actually share any personal info with them... well, good luck to you, but my professional contacts all seem to understand (and often reciprocate for the same reasons). That photo you untagged yourself from but your friend is in so mutual friends can still see it - I'll agree that's a problem, but not worth throwing a hissy about. We "lost our privacy" the day the camera was invented.
    - dmoney 16y ago
      Why don't you at least try to educate yourselves about how Facebook actually works? Why don't you tell us how we would go about doing that?
- RK 16y ago
  There's a difference between not caring about privacy and not understanding privacy issues. I would imagine most users are in the latter category.
  - ewjordan 16y ago
    Most users of most websites probably fall into both - they neither understand nor care about the privacy implications, nor would they even if they were explained to them, as long as the site keeps them "in touch" with a lot of their friends.
    - jshen 16y ago
      I think it would be more accurate to say that they don't care about privacy "at that moment". In my experience many will later care about it, and regret the convenience trade off they made at that time.
- ElbertF 16y ago
  I think you share more private data then you realize. Now that everybody is embedding iframes with Like buttons Facebook can keep a record of all the sites you visit. Are you ready to share this information with the world? What about the videos you watch? Sites like Pandora already know who you are when you arrive at their site, do you trust them as much as Facebook?
- saikat 16y ago
  I agree - I never post private data to Facebook. But now it doesn't matter if I post private data to Facebook or not. They can start hoarding data from my visits to yelp or pandora or whatever else in the future if I merely forgot to log out of Facebook before going to yelp. And yes, I can change my privacy settings to make them not, but today, I missed the tiny blue banner in Yelp that gave me the option to opt-out, and then it was kind of a pain to figure out how to opt out of whatever I just accidentally opted into. It's turning into a real hassle for me to keep facebook from creeping into the non-facebook parts of my internet experience.
- bootload 16y ago
  "... I didn't give them any private data. ..." Maybe, but your interactions are still inferable. If you have friends their interactions with you are also inferable. Anyone or any group you associate with in Fb has the same problem. In some ways what Fb can infer is just as much a problem. So the question remains, "how useful is inference of data to Fb really going to be?"
  - gaius 16y ago
    This was the problem of Livejournal, altho' you could set your journal to be friends-only, your profile page was not. So who you were friends with, what your interests were, what communities you were a member of were completely public. Your only privacy option was hoping that no-one you didn't want to knew your username. Interests you could skip, obv, but because of the way the security model works, the world knew who had permission to read your journal and whose journals you read. So you were only ever as secure as the least-discreet person you knew. And I have some very indiscreet friends...
- retube 16y ago
  wow, you're really comfortable posting pictures of your children for anyone to see?? Anyway, as I, and many others have said here before, it's not just about what you post, it's about what _others_ post about you.
- volida 16y ago
  "I didn't give them any private data. I don't care if applications can see my private data: my data isn't private and, more importantly, I don't sign up for applications. I don't plan on going into business with Facebook. I don't care how they treat their developer partners. None of this stuff matters to me." I am sure that this is not the average user experience!
- jshen 16y ago
  "I didn't give them any private data" Do you consider the websites you browse to be private?
- pnelly 16y ago
  I guess my main worry is that the porn i looked up last week will somehow inadvertently show up on my facebook profile or elsewhere relating back to me... seriously though, there is a danger in making the web too "open"...
ihodes 16y ago
I did sign up expecting these things: and I was assured of them in their privacy policy at the time, so I was obviously meant to expect them. Check out (linked to in the posted article_ http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline/ http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline/ to see what others expected. I have plenty of non-geeky friends and acquaintances who expected the same thing. This isn't something that only us (some of us, I should say) HNers care about: this is a gross violation of trust. Excellent compendium of reasons to quit: thanks for the article!
ams6110 16y ago
Facebook is a fad. It will be gone or irrelevant in 5 years. Just my opinion.
- codexon 16y ago
  If history is any indication, Facebook will fade out very slowly like Myspace, if there is a new competitor.
  - Niten 16y ago
    If history is any indication, history isn't any indication. (E.g., Apple is always the niche player, right?) Just because the previous top social network eventually faded away doesn't mean we should expect the current one to do the same in any similar manner or time frame. There's quite a lot that differentiates today's Facebook and the MySpace of old. For one thing, how many third parties ever built on MySpace as an application platform, to the extent that they are today with Farmville and Microsoft Docs and the like?
    - GeneralMaximus 16y ago
      > If history is any indication, history isn't any indication. (E.g., Apple is always the niche player, right?) I agree with your comment in general, but that statement isn't true. Apple are still a niche player, except maybe in America.
  - dcurtis 16y ago
    If history is any indication, Google will fade out slowly like AltaVista, if there's a new competitor. (Making the assumption that Facebook will be replaced this way is kind of stupid; Facebook is competent, MySpace wasn't.)
    - pavel_lishin 16y ago
      It's not a binary thing. Facebook is more competent than MySpace; doesn't mean that someone can't be more competent than Facebook.
henrikschroder 16y ago
The only thing that will get the enormous bulk of Facebook users to quit is if some other product starts filling the same need that Facebook does. The ten points listed in this blog are of absolutely no concern to the average Facebook user.
FlemishBeeCycle 16y ago
So last week, complain about the iPad? This week, complain about Facebook?
- megablast 16y ago
  I know, it is almost as if we are trying to express out opinions on different things. Weird, isn't it.
  - FlemishBeeCycle 16y ago
    I was more alluding to the deluge of very-similar opinions on a single topic in a finite period. While the iPad is a new thing, Facebook has been around and been engaging in the same behavior that gave rise of these complaints for some time now.
saikat 16y ago
And speaking of which - I just tried to opt out of their instant personalization "feature" for Yelp. I missed the blue banner initially, so now I'm trying to change things the very hard way. I get the message on top of yelp that says "Yelp is using Facebook to personalize your experience." I click on Options next to it and then go to "How to turn this off". There, I click the big red button that says "Disconnect Yelp and Facebook". This button tells me I have to do more at my privacy page at facebook and links me to http://www.facebook.com/sitetour/connect.php http://www.facebook.com/sitetour/connect.php . At this page, I hunt for the link to the actual Privacy settings. I click on this link and then click "Edit Setting next to "Instant Personalization Pilot Program." I then uncheck "Allow select partners to instantly personalize their features with my public information when I first arrive on their websites." I go back to Yelp and I see "Yelp is using Facebook to personalize your experience" still at the top of Yelp. Why was this so hard to do, and how come after all that, I can't even opt out?
- Raphael 16y ago
  Clear your cookies for both sites?
jbrun 16y ago
Great post, I pretty much have the same reasoning and though I used to be hyper-active facebook user, I quit over 3 months ago and it feels great. my post is here, slacktivism and why i quit facebook: http://www.jonathanbrun.com/2010/04/slacktivism-and-why-i-quit-facebook.html http://www.jonathanbrun.com/2010/04/slacktivism-and-why-i-qu... glad to hear the mouvement is growing.
greenlblue 16y ago
The whole facebook thing is just fundamentally wrong. Facebook doesn't have users, it has statistics. Any company that treats its users as just numbers does not have my support.
pkghost 16y ago
His first point (10) is flatly contradicted by Facebook's TOS, which was revised 4 days before his blog post. You do own your data, you just grant Facebook the mother of all licenses to it. The license is revoked when you delete your account, except in the case of data you've shared with your friends, which is probably almost everything.
- Raphael 16y ago
  > which was revised 4 days before Kind of hard to keep track. I wouldn't have expected this document to be such a fast-moving target.
  - pkghost 16y ago
    I took a look at it again today and it had been seriously reworked (no more outline layout, revised copy), but the last-revised date hadn't changed. Color me annoyed, but not surprised.
jrockway 16y ago
So yesterday I said, "who cares" about these articles. But today, I deleted my account. The main reason is that I don't use it, and people that friend me might feel bad because I never reply. Now that won't be a problem -- I won't even exist there. Follow me on Twitter instead.
houseabsolute 16y ago
Why this article is crap. >> 10. Facebook's Terms Of Service are completely one-sided No they aren't. In return for accepting them, you get to use the site. See? Two-sided. >> 9. Facebook's CEO has a documented history of unethical behavior Then he proceeds to list one unproven allegation, and one lawsuit settlement. We sometimes settle lawsuits where the negative outcome, although unjust, is likely enough that the settlement is probably cheaper. These points so laughably fail the "documented" standard that I should just stop reading now, but I can't. >> 8. Facebook has flat out declared war on privacy They are responding to their users' preferences. If anything, users have declared war on privacy. The site is designed to shared information about yourself. If signing up for that site is not an invitation to privacy invasion, what is? And is it surprising that someone who believes most people want to share information about themselves, as the CEO of Facebook surely must, does not care about privacy as much as the author, who is obviously all about it? >> 7. Facebook is pulling a classic bait-and-switch Members, by and large, don't care. It's not Facebook's responsibility to constantly nag people about the privacy implications of setting their privacy settings to "off". It would make the site more difficult and annoying to use, and would likely have immeasurably small impact. >> 6. Facebook is a bully Wait, are we complaining about how Facebook fails to protect user privacy, or how Facebook is overzealous in protecting user privacy? It's flat out false that Facebook sued this guy. They did force him to cease and desist by threatening to sue him. Maybe they should update their robots.txt, but that's hardly a reason to stop using them. >> 5. Even your private data is shared with applications [that you install] Oh, just like my regular computer. Should I stop using that too? Most Facebook applications rely on some set of private data to make interesting features work. Installing these applications would be a usability nightmare for people who have their privacy shields turned up, which ironically would probably decrease the number of people using those settings. This is because most of Facebook's users, even the ones with privacy settings turned up, only care about privacy when it doesn't get in their way, and when having to choose between privacy and easy functionality, they will take the latter. >> 4. Facebook is not technically competent enough to be trusted They are dealing with an enormous attack surface and highly motivated attackers. I think what you mean to say is, "Facebook's engineers cannot perfectly cover all possible vulnerabilities that their business requirements expose them to." They are normally quick with responses and fixes, so that's a problem, but not one that any other company doing this would avoid. But the whole "technically competent" thing is BS. They are obviously technically competent based on the various open source projects they have released and which are seeing wide adoption. >> 3. Facebook makes it incredibly difficult to truly delete your account If my friends are any indication, many people who delete their accounts eventually want them back. Keeping those people from making a mistake they will later regret is probably a feature. As far as making no promises about deleting your data, I can say that especially in a NoSQL environment it's very difficult to track down every little piece of data that belongs to a user. Sometimes this data is in formats that are not mutable on an individual-record basis. At my workplace we sometimes aggregate data in SSTables (see the Bigtable paper for details) that, did they contain user data, would not be immediately modifiable for each user that wanted to delete their account. >> 2. Facebook doesn't (really) support the Open Web This is not an issue for most normal people. But if it is an issue for you and you want to make a moral statement by closing your Facebook account, by all means, do. Facebook's incentives for maintaining their walled garden to some extent probably outweigh the loss of every user account for every person that even cares an iota about this issue. >> 1. The Facebook application itself sucks Seems like a lot of people like it and derive some use out of it. Sorry you don't. This article is idiotic. Most of the points are flat out false, and the rest are taste issues where the author is out of touch with the zeitgeist.
hkuo 16y ago
Do you want to go through life scared of everything, hiding in a hole, or do you want to be out there, prone to danger, but in the mix of daily life? This is just a classic balance between security and openness. The more secure you try to make things, the less usable things become, and the more you worry about things you don't need to worry about. The more open you make things, the easier and more efficient things become, and life is more enjoyable. You might get bruised and cut every once in a while, but it's the price you pay for a more open, fun, and social life. I'm in agreement with Zuckerberg on this. Openness is the future, whether we like it or not, and you can either fight it and become a hippie 2.0, or just go with the flow and enjoy the advantages that come with.
RyanMcGreal 16y ago
Like any company, Facebook sells a product to its customers. The product is user data, and the customers are those willing to pay for access to that data. As a result, Facebook is under constant economic pressure to maximize its ability to sell that data to its customers. Zuckerberg has a huge incentive to promote the idea that privacy is passe or somehow doesn't matter, because the more he can convince his users to accept having their data made public, the more value he can deliver to his customers.
- joe24pack 16y ago
  So the Zuckster is mining his users for gold. There's gold in them 'thar hills of users ...

132 points by rwolf 16y ago

thmz 16y ago

Why are people so seriously angry about stuff like this? If you don't like Facebook, just quit and get a drink with your friends.

techiferous 16y ago
He may be trying to educate others who are assuming facebook has a stricter privacy policy than they actually do.

tptacek 16y ago

I didn't sign up with Facebook expecting them to be good at any of these things. I don't care about Facebook privacy: I didn't give them any private data. I don't care if applications can see my private data: my data isn't private and, more importantly, I don't sign up for applications. I don't plan on going into business with Facebook. I don't care how they treat their developer partners. None of this stuff matters to me. Why am I pointing this out? Because I think my attitude represents a huge chunk of Facebook's users, and I think most of what's left over after you subtract that chunk consists of people who don't care about privacy period. I use LinkedIn for business. I use Twitter for geeky stuff. I use Facebook for non-geeky stuff and to post pictures of my kids in their halloween costumes. It all seems to be working out OK for me.

rwolf 16y ago
The thing getting in the way of understanding each other here is what the average use case is for Facebook. If it's not tricking people into sharing more than they intend to (as seems to the be case for you), then what are we complaining about, right? I post and upvote links to these kinds of stories because I believe my family and friends do not use Facebook like you do, and are being tricked into sharing more than they mean to.
steveklabnik 16y ago
Exactly. See my recent 50+ point comment [1] that says basically the same thing. I really think that the vast majority of Facebook's users just don't care. Remember the Beacon debacle? That big group had what, 300k people or something? A tiny part of the userbase. I could be remembering these details wrong, though. 1: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1311406 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1311406 edit: I bring up the score because there's obviously a lot of "OMG FACEBOOK SUCKS" posts going around. But obviously there's a lot of people that also disagree. It's not all just Facebook hate, or my comment wouldn't have gotten voted up in the first place.
codexon 16y ago
Because I think my attitude represents a huge chunk of Facebook's users A common mistake people make here is to think they represent the majority. Hacker news is a very small community.
- lisp123 16y ago
  It always astounds me that 30-year-olds or older think they represent the average Facebook user. I have never seen anyone older than 30 write anything intelligent about Facebook. You people are not real users. Please understand this. How you "use" Facebook is so completely different from how people in college and recent grads use Facebook. For you, most of your pictures were what you actually posted yourself. For real Facebook power users, the vast, vast majority of photos come from other people. It's becoming clear that understanding of Facebook is the clearest dividing line between those in their late twenties and beyond and those younger. You pretend users really sound like old men shouting at kids to stay off your lawn. Why don't you at least try to educate yourselves about how Facebook actually works?
  - vickrum 16y ago
    I started university when I was 18, and at the same time I joined Facebook. I'm now 22, close to graduating, and Facebook chronicles my last 4 years of misadventure. Yet I have to agree with tptacek, it's not a big deal. It's not hard to untag yourself from dodgy photos, leave silly groups, clean up your profile and put professional contacts in a restricted list. Most importantly though, I've come to the conclusion most people expect you to have dirt on Facebook. If your boss wants to be your friend on Facebook and doesn't get why you won't actually share any personal info with them... well, good luck to you, but my professional contacts all seem to understand (and often reciprocate for the same reasons). That photo you untagged yourself from but your friend is in so mutual friends can still see it - I'll agree that's a problem, but not worth throwing a hissy about. We "lost our privacy" the day the camera was invented.
  - dmoney 16y ago
    Why don't you at least try to educate yourselves about how Facebook actually works? Why don't you tell us how we would go about doing that?
RK 16y ago
There's a difference between not caring about privacy and not understanding privacy issues. I would imagine most users are in the latter category.
- ewjordan 16y ago
  Most users of most websites probably fall into both - they neither understand nor care about the privacy implications, nor would they even if they were explained to them, as long as the site keeps them "in touch" with a lot of their friends.
  - jshen 16y ago
    I think it would be more accurate to say that they don't care about privacy "at that moment". In my experience many will later care about it, and regret the convenience trade off they made at that time.
ElbertF 16y ago
I think you share more private data then you realize. Now that everybody is embedding iframes with Like buttons Facebook can keep a record of all the sites you visit. Are you ready to share this information with the world? What about the videos you watch? Sites like Pandora already know who you are when you arrive at their site, do you trust them as much as Facebook?
saikat 16y ago
I agree - I never post private data to Facebook. But now it doesn't matter if I post private data to Facebook or not. They can start hoarding data from my visits to yelp or pandora or whatever else in the future if I merely forgot to log out of Facebook before going to yelp. And yes, I can change my privacy settings to make them not, but today, I missed the tiny blue banner in Yelp that gave me the option to opt-out, and then it was kind of a pain to figure out how to opt out of whatever I just accidentally opted into. It's turning into a real hassle for me to keep facebook from creeping into the non-facebook parts of my internet experience.
bootload 16y ago
"... I didn't give them any private data. ..." Maybe, but your interactions are still inferable. If you have friends their interactions with you are also inferable. Anyone or any group you associate with in Fb has the same problem. In some ways what Fb can infer is just as much a problem. So the question remains, "how useful is inference of data to Fb really going to be?"
- gaius 16y ago
  This was the problem of Livejournal, altho' you could set your journal to be friends-only, your profile page was not. So who you were friends with, what your interests were, what communities you were a member of were completely public. Your only privacy option was hoping that no-one you didn't want to knew your username. Interests you could skip, obv, but because of the way the security model works, the world knew who had permission to read your journal and whose journals you read. So you were only ever as secure as the least-discreet person you knew. And I have some very indiscreet friends...
retube 16y ago
wow, you're really comfortable posting pictures of your children for anyone to see?? Anyway, as I, and many others have said here before, it's not just about what you post, it's about what _others_ post about you.
volida 16y ago
"I didn't give them any private data. I don't care if applications can see my private data: my data isn't private and, more importantly, I don't sign up for applications. I don't plan on going into business with Facebook. I don't care how they treat their developer partners. None of this stuff matters to me." I am sure that this is not the average user experience!
jshen 16y ago
"I didn't give them any private data" Do you consider the websites you browse to be private?
pnelly 16y ago
I guess my main worry is that the porn i looked up last week will somehow inadvertently show up on my facebook profile or elsewhere relating back to me... seriously though, there is a danger in making the web too "open"...

ihodes 16y ago

I did sign up expecting these things: and I was assured of them in their privacy policy at the time, so I was obviously meant to expect them. Check out (linked to in the posted article_ http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline/ http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline/ to see what others expected. I have plenty of non-geeky friends and acquaintances who expected the same thing. This isn't something that only us (some of us, I should say) HNers care about: this is a gross violation of trust. Excellent compendium of reasons to quit: thanks for the article!

ams6110 16y ago

Facebook is a fad. It will be gone or irrelevant in 5 years. Just my opinion.

codexon 16y ago
If history is any indication, Facebook will fade out very slowly like Myspace, if there is a new competitor.
- Niten 16y ago
  If history is any indication, history isn't any indication. (E.g., Apple is always the niche player, right?) Just because the previous top social network eventually faded away doesn't mean we should expect the current one to do the same in any similar manner or time frame. There's quite a lot that differentiates today's Facebook and the MySpace of old. For one thing, how many third parties ever built on MySpace as an application platform, to the extent that they are today with Farmville and Microsoft Docs and the like?
  - GeneralMaximus 16y ago
    > If history is any indication, history isn't any indication. (E.g., Apple is always the niche player, right?) I agree with your comment in general, but that statement isn't true. Apple are still a niche player, except maybe in America.
- dcurtis 16y ago
  If history is any indication, Google will fade out slowly like AltaVista, if there's a new competitor. (Making the assumption that Facebook will be replaced this way is kind of stupid; Facebook is competent, MySpace wasn't.)
  - pavel_lishin 16y ago
    It's not a binary thing. Facebook is more competent than MySpace; doesn't mean that someone can't be more competent than Facebook.

henrikschroder 16y ago

The only thing that will get the enormous bulk of Facebook users to quit is if some other product starts filling the same need that Facebook does. The ten points listed in this blog are of absolutely no concern to the average Facebook user.

FlemishBeeCycle 16y ago

So last week, complain about the iPad? This week, complain about Facebook?

megablast 16y ago
I know, it is almost as if we are trying to express out opinions on different things. Weird, isn't it.
- FlemishBeeCycle 16y ago
  I was more alluding to the deluge of very-similar opinions on a single topic in a finite period. While the iPad is a new thing, Facebook has been around and been engaging in the same behavior that gave rise of these complaints for some time now.

saikat 16y ago

And speaking of which - I just tried to opt out of their instant personalization "feature" for Yelp. I missed the blue banner initially, so now I'm trying to change things the very hard way. I get the message on top of yelp that says "Yelp is using Facebook to personalize your experience." I click on Options next to it and then go to "How to turn this off". There, I click the big red button that says "Disconnect Yelp and Facebook". This button tells me I have to do more at my privacy page at facebook and links me to http://www.facebook.com/sitetour/connect.php http://www.facebook.com/sitetour/connect.php . At this page, I hunt for the link to the actual Privacy settings. I click on this link and then click "Edit Setting next to "Instant Personalization Pilot Program." I then uncheck "Allow select partners to instantly personalize their features with my public information when I first arrive on their websites." I go back to Yelp and I see "Yelp is using Facebook to personalize your experience" still at the top of Yelp. Why was this so hard to do, and how come after all that, I can't even opt out?

Raphael 16y ago
Clear your cookies for both sites?

jbrun 16y ago

Great post, I pretty much have the same reasoning and though I used to be hyper-active facebook user, I quit over 3 months ago and it feels great. my post is here, slacktivism and why i quit facebook: http://www.jonathanbrun.com/2010/04/slacktivism-and-why-i-quit-facebook.html http://www.jonathanbrun.com/2010/04/slacktivism-and-why-i-qu... glad to hear the mouvement is growing.

greenlblue 16y ago

The whole facebook thing is just fundamentally wrong. Facebook doesn't have users, it has statistics. Any company that treats its users as just numbers does not have my support.

pkghost 16y ago

His first point (10) is flatly contradicted by Facebook's TOS, which was revised 4 days before his blog post. You do own your data, you just grant Facebook the mother of all licenses to it. The license is revoked when you delete your account, except in the case of data you've shared with your friends, which is probably almost everything.

Raphael 16y ago
> which was revised 4 days before Kind of hard to keep track. I wouldn't have expected this document to be such a fast-moving target.
- pkghost 16y ago
  I took a look at it again today and it had been seriously reworked (no more outline layout, revised copy), but the last-revised date hadn't changed. Color me annoyed, but not surprised.

jrockway 16y ago

So yesterday I said, "who cares" about these articles. But today, I deleted my account. The main reason is that I don't use it, and people that friend me might feel bad because I never reply. Now that won't be a problem -- I won't even exist there. Follow me on Twitter instead.

houseabsolute 16y ago

Why this article is crap. >> 10. Facebook's Terms Of Service are completely one-sided No they aren't. In return for accepting them, you get to use the site. See? Two-sided. >> 9. Facebook's CEO has a documented history of unethical behavior Then he proceeds to list one unproven allegation, and one lawsuit settlement. We sometimes settle lawsuits where the negative outcome, although unjust, is likely enough that the settlement is probably cheaper. These points so laughably fail the "documented" standard that I should just stop reading now, but I can't. >> 8. Facebook has flat out declared war on privacy They are responding to their users' preferences. If anything, users have declared war on privacy. The site is designed to shared information about yourself. If signing up for that site is not an invitation to privacy invasion, what is? And is it surprising that someone who believes most people want to share information about themselves, as the CEO of Facebook surely must, does not care about privacy as much as the author, who is obviously all about it? >> 7. Facebook is pulling a classic bait-and-switch Members, by and large, don't care. It's not Facebook's responsibility to constantly nag people about the privacy implications of setting their privacy settings to "off". It would make the site more difficult and annoying to use, and would likely have immeasurably small impact. >> 6. Facebook is a bully Wait, are we complaining about how Facebook fails to protect user privacy, or how Facebook is overzealous in protecting user privacy? It's flat out false that Facebook sued this guy. They did force him to cease and desist by threatening to sue him. Maybe they should update their robots.txt, but that's hardly a reason to stop using them. >> 5. Even your private data is shared with applications [that you install] Oh, just like my regular computer. Should I stop using that too? Most Facebook applications rely on some set of private data to make interesting features work. Installing these applications would be a usability nightmare for people who have their privacy shields turned up, which ironically would probably decrease the number of people using those settings. This is because most of Facebook's users, even the ones with privacy settings turned up, only care about privacy when it doesn't get in their way, and when having to choose between privacy and easy functionality, they will take the latter. >> 4. Facebook is not technically competent enough to be trusted They are dealing with an enormous attack surface and highly motivated attackers. I think what you mean to say is, "Facebook's engineers cannot perfectly cover all possible vulnerabilities that their business requirements expose them to." They are normally quick with responses and fixes, so that's a problem, but not one that any other company doing this would avoid. But the whole "technically competent" thing is BS. They are obviously technically competent based on the various open source projects they have released and which are seeing wide adoption. >> 3. Facebook makes it incredibly difficult to truly delete your account If my friends are any indication, many people who delete their accounts eventually want them back. Keeping those people from making a mistake they will later regret is probably a feature. As far as making no promises about deleting your data, I can say that especially in a NoSQL environment it's very difficult to track down every little piece of data that belongs to a user. Sometimes this data is in formats that are not mutable on an individual-record basis. At my workplace we sometimes aggregate data in SSTables (see the Bigtable paper for details) that, did they contain user data, would not be immediately modifiable for each user that wanted to delete their account. >> 2. Facebook doesn't (really) support the Open Web This is not an issue for most normal people. But if it is an issue for you and you want to make a moral statement by closing your Facebook account, by all means, do. Facebook's incentives for maintaining their walled garden to some extent probably outweigh the loss of every user account for every person that even cares an iota about this issue. >> 1. The Facebook application itself sucks Seems like a lot of people like it and derive some use out of it. Sorry you don't. This article is idiotic. Most of the points are flat out false, and the rest are taste issues where the author is out of touch with the zeitgeist.

hkuo 16y ago

Do you want to go through life scared of everything, hiding in a hole, or do you want to be out there, prone to danger, but in the mix of daily life? This is just a classic balance between security and openness. The more secure you try to make things, the less usable things become, and the more you worry about things you don't need to worry about. The more open you make things, the easier and more efficient things become, and life is more enjoyable. You might get bruised and cut every once in a while, but it's the price you pay for a more open, fun, and social life. I'm in agreement with Zuckerberg on this. Openness is the future, whether we like it or not, and you can either fight it and become a hippie 2.0, or just go with the flow and enjoy the advantages that come with.

RyanMcGreal 16y ago

Like any company, Facebook sells a product to its customers. The product is user data, and the customers are those willing to pay for access to that data. As a result, Facebook is under constant economic pressure to maximize its ability to sell that data to its customers. Zuckerberg has a huge incentive to promote the idea that privacy is passe or somehow doesn't matter, because the more he can convince his users to accept having their data made public, the more value he can deliver to his customers.

joe24pack 16y ago
So the Zuckster is mining his users for gold. There's gold in them 'thar hills of users ...