15 ms·

What should you think about when using Facebook?

363 points by vkb 10y ago

vgy7ujm 10y ago
Start using other apps with better privacy for communication. Get a real website or blog for your PR needs.
- sp332 10y ago
  That said, WhatsApp is a pretty good secure messaging app even though they got bought by Facebook.
  - vgy7ujm 10y ago
    Can you trust anything by FB? Signal seems ok. Haven't looked too closely at it though.
    - sp332 10y ago
      Whatsapp adopted Signal's security mechanism last year. https://whispersystems.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/ https://whispersystems.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/
      - vgy7ujm 10y ago
        That's good. But FB ownership is black clouds in the sky...
        sp332 10y ago
        Well I don't see why FB would put so much work into this and then go back on it later. But if they ever do you can be sure it will be big news.
- johnchristopher 10y ago
  Right now I am working as some kind of developer/marketing/communication 5 legged unicorn and Facebook-based PR is the go-to strategy for everything and anything. I also hear some organisations thinking out loud about completely ditching their websites in favour of Facebook/Twitter presence. (tourism sector)
  - vgy7ujm 10y ago
    It's madness. And only works because the train is already rolling and most people are blind of what FB is doing behind the curtains. Twitter is actually OK in my opinion as it is obviously a more PR like channel by design. (Also Instagram for showcasing new products etc.) I think that FB sites are a poor substitute for well designed unique websites with depth and relevant information. The question is how to get viewers or subscribers. But since FB started out as a "personal/friends" service I think that ads and PR will soon be perceived as spam. When people start waking up that is.
    - johnchristopher 10y ago
      > It's madness. And only works because the train is already rolling and most people are blind of what FB is doing behind the curtains. I basically gave up explaining that because I have to explain how to use FB as a promotion tool and I can't undermine it at the same time because I would lose credibility and leave people more confused than when they came. > Twitter is actually OK in my opinion as it is obviously a more PR like channel by design. (Also Instagram for showcasing new products etc.) No, unfortunately it really depends on the niche/market you are following or trying to get into. > I think that FB sites are a poor substitute for well designed unique websites with depth and relevant information. > The question is how to get viewers or subscribers. But since FB started out as a "personal/friends" service I think that ads and PR will soon be perceived as spam. When people start waking up that is. Ditto. With websites we have full control of our statistics and data. I sometimes think that messenger/bot will be the demise of social networks. If somehow marketers can get people to subscribe to bots (with a common API that would abstract whether you are using whatsapp, telegram, etc.) then social networks leash would loosen a bit. That would mean we would be back to something looking a lot like e-mail but whatev'. I am not tailored for marketing anyway so I am pretty sure I am talking bs.
- jasode 10y ago
  >Get a real website or blog for your PR needs. Btw if you weren't already aware... a lot of small businesses (e.g. mom & pop restaurants, handymen contractors, yoga studios, etc) actually did have a real website but they abandoned them and only maintained their Facebook pages. The behavior pattern is the same: the "real website" whether it was a CMS built on PHP-Drupal or a Wordpress blog was too complicated for owners to mess with. (e.g. "uh, what's this domain renewal email I just got from Godaddy have to do with my website?!?") The real website then suffers "digital rot" or they expire. Facebook pages are easier. Therefore, advising them to maintain real websites isn't going to convince them. They've already "been there done that" and saw no value in it. As far as privacy and data collection, businesses don't care -- it's their public storefront.
  - vgy7ujm 10y ago
    The original post was more directed at the individual human FB member. One problem with FB sites for businesses is loss if identity since the platform looks the same. I get that small physical shops that don't want to pay for a webmaster etc may have problems updating their sites. But I do miss seeing their original sites. Twitter and Instagram are ok channels. The problem with FB is the privacy of its individual real person members and their families and friends. When did we sign up to get directed ads etc? Zuckerberg probably had that idea early on, but the FB members had to accept new terms several times to continue using the platform.
  - at-fates-hands 10y ago
    >> businesses don't care -- it's their public storefront. Until they land in the news for something and then people can go back and start digging up and doxxing people at the company and any other nefarious information they can get their hands on. ANY information on a business FB page is like a gold mine for social engineers. Everybody on FB eventually "over shares" information they think is safe, but its really not.
Kiro 10y ago
I treat everything I do on Facebook as public and permanent information. With that mindset the experience is rather pleasant.
- bigbugbag 10y ago
  Not public, privately own by facebook (and partners and clients) and aggregated with everything that is actually public and every other privately own data they could gather. Then used to target you in every possible ways.
  - owlninja 10y ago
    I get most of the personal data concerns, but what exactly is the issue with targeted ads?
    - antocv 10y ago
      Changing your behaviour. Ads are a hostile action.
andy_ppp 10y ago
I think about it as a simple Message and Event's calendar that my friends have access to me once per week when I look at it. Also occasionally use it as a login systems for sites I don't want to sign up to. What else does it do? I unfollowed everyone/thing from my wall ... which seems to improve it somewhat!
- neogodless 10y ago
  I still use Messenger, but my Facebook account is deactivated. I finally gave up after clicking "Hide all from..." for the 10,000th time. It seemed like an increasingly losing battle. The more I unfollowed, the more it showed me things I didn't want to see, and more ads! My entire interaction had devolved into scrolling slowing and clicking "Hide all..." So tell me how you got your feed to stop being full of bad things? :)
  - mattnewton 10y ago
    There are extensions that will eradicate the feed for you.
  - andy_ppp 10y ago
    I just did about 25 per day for what seemed like forever but I wasn't about to let it win!
nnd 10y ago
Even though Facebook by itself doesn't seem to provide much value anymore, it's incredible how much of a platform lock-in the have. For example, Facebook login becoming essentially a universal identity provider. The worst thing is even when you create a new account under a different name they still manage to track you down, and start suggesting adding friends from the old account. I wonder how they do this, by tracking cookies and fingerprinting your browser?
- spraak 10y ago
  I've wondered this too. I have friend suggestions for my work colleagues, even though my Facebook email is my own private address and I've never emailed them from that address. It's amazing and bothersome
  - sdiepend 10y ago
    Have you used it on mobile and shared your contacts? Might they have had access to your location(GPS or maybe to which wifi you're connected). Interesting article: http://fusion.net/story/339018/facebook-psychiatrist-privacy-problems/ http://fusion.net/story/339018/facebook-psychiatrist-privacy...
    - funkyy 10y ago
      Or they just suggest people based on common locations that you and they visit and where they spend their time.
    - spraak 10y ago
      The mobile app's contacts seems very likely. I didn't realize it would spy on those, but not surprising.
  - renaudg 10y ago
    You've probably shared an IP address (work).
    - 10y ago
nefreat 10y ago
Many people in the tech industry don't realize the tradeoffs they are making by participating on FB. This is to say nothing of the nontechnical crowd who make up the overwhelming majority of the site. My wish is that mainstream news media would cover these issues. It'd be great if most of FB's users thought about the troves of personal info that they are providing not just about themselves but their friends as well.
- xherberta 10y ago
  UK press has been covering this, and the EU has frequently shown itself ready to push back: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/10/whatsapp-facebook-google-privacy-rules-ec-european-directive https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/10/whatsapp-...
jgrahamc 10y ago
A related question is "Should you sign up for Facebook today?". Five years ago I killed my Facebook account (and LinkedIn and G+) and it hasn't bothered me, but... am I missing out on something?
- hashkb 10y ago
  I log into Facebook once a year or so. Twitter, never. HN and Reddit I enjoy. Am 30. Don't feel bad.
  - jgrahamc 10y ago
    I don't feel bad, I'm just curious what I'm missing out on by not taking part in something that's very popular. I love Twitter.
- anondon 10y ago
  You are not missing out on much. The only productive use of Facebook is to keep in touch with people. If you do this using alternative methods (Whatsapp, email or direct phone calls) then you save yourself from the continuous stream of garbage that is the news feed.
- bluGill 10y ago
  Facebook it the only way I see my second cousin's kid's piano recital. It is a valuable way for me to know something like that happened (they live more than a thousand miles away). It lets me keep up some of the people who I went to high school with - we were not really friends but we had a connection. Facebook is the easiest way to ensure my parents (300 miles away) see pictures of their grandkids doing cute things. Unfortunately it sucks me into political fake news and lots of other bad things. Blocking all games helped greatly. On balance the real purpose of Facebook: keeping up with distance family and friends; is a very useful part of life. Thus it is worth it.
  - Broken_Hippo 10y ago
    This is me - only I'm on the other side of the Atlantic from family. In fact, this was the only reason I signed up for facebook 3 or so years ago. It is also the reason I have some loyalty: The main drawback of other social networks is the lack of cross communication between chats and some people's pages.
Swenrekcah 10y ago
Related: Now Facebook has been pushing the Moments app to share photos. I don't want to use it but a lot of people around me do. Can anyone recommend an alternative photo sharing app?
- renaudg 10y ago
  Instagram ? :)
- bgrohman 10y ago
  Google Photos works well.
  - Swenrekcah 10y ago
    That's true, I'm currently using them. But of course Google comes with their own set of privacy concerns as well.
    - bgrohman 10y ago
      That's true. I've been considering the idea of building my own personal replacement for several Google services - Keep, Drive, and Photos mainly. Haven't decided it's worth the effort yet.
      - brokenmachine 10y ago
        I would love a self-hosted Google docs clone, that I can access from an Android App and the web. That would also replace Evernote.
        bgrohman 10y ago
        I've been tempted to look into things like ownCloud (https://owncloud.org/features/ https://owncloud.org/features/), but I just haven't been excited by what I've seen so far. What I'm thinking of is more of a single user web app that I build myself so that a) it does exactly what I want and nothing more, b) I know exactly how it works and what it does with my data, and c) there are no other users to support.
cygned 10y ago
I left Facebook three years ago or so. It did not offer any value for me - and I couldn't stand the quality of "information" on that platform. To much crazy stuff in my stream, things I am not interested in, stupid games, ads, click bait, and so on. I also left twitter months ago. The people seem to be better there, but I have the image of twitter being a bad company. And the time spent there didn't provide enough value to me. It was too easy to get disrupted at work. And after keeping apps closed, the service became useless for me. Most of the people I have contact with are developers, and like 99% don't have a Facebook account either.
daemonk 10y ago
Can someone make a browser plugin that will send fake data to facebook? Instead of hiding your own behavior, might as well poison their database.
- 0xcafecafe 10y ago
  A few of us were joking about poisoning the location tracking database of site along a similar vein. Have an app masking your location to some place in the pacific ocean to any app running in the background asking for location (without the user's intent of using it).
  - bduerst 10y ago
    Why stop there? Create a service that will spoof GPS coordinates, check you in, and post generic photos of fun places to be, so you can outsource your social bragging through automation.
  - nnd 10y ago
    You can certainly do that with a jailbreak.
  - netsharc 10y ago
    On Android, Xprivacy uses hooks provided by Xposed to "MitM" a lot of functiom calls. Don't want an app to know your phone's serial number? That function call returns a spoofed one. Same with GPS location.
    - e40 10y ago
      I love Xposed. I just wish using it didn't mean I couldn't get regular Android updates (I have a 5x).
- siegecraft 10y ago
  I like this idea (a sort of adnauseum for facebook) but I wonder how trivial it would be for facebook to filter out obviously random/fake/noisy data given the mammoth set of real data they already have. Maybe introduce some more subtle off-by-one errors into their data or just make it a tiny bit fuzzier? Hopefully one wouldn't need a detailed knowledge of their data structures to do something impactful, although the action itself might be a useful symbolic gesture even if it doesn't have an actual impact on their data collection.
okidwiyulianto 10y ago
I think it is very simple. We should think positive update status. If we won't tracked as a 'blacklist' we should have decorum or ethical.
yeukhon 10y ago
My take. I have been using FB since 2007 I was a sophomore in high school. A couple years ago I didn't use FB as often as I did, but just this past year I started to use FB more frequently. The change has to do with the people I actually network with on FB. I always have friends, real life friends on my FB, but most of them aren't very active on Facebook. This past year I met a bunch of new friends and they are the social bunch. I started to post more of my social life on Facebook. It's been fun to actually see what's happening in everyone's life. With the recent political shit storm in America, FB is becoming more active. I also started to follow a bunch of pages ranging from food to inspiration quotes to news page. They have been helpful to get me through my day, learning new perspectives and finding more interesting things. I've used other products such as quora, flipboard, etc but they don't provide the same conveniences as FB does. I have family members actively on FB (my father and my sister in particular), and I enjoy sharing my moments with them. I know there's a lot of privacy concerns with using FB but I simply try to accommodate it. I believe in controlling my privacy but I also enjoy using the product. As far as I am concerned, if I am not leaking my social security number or talking shit about my work on FB, I am not too concerned. But in the future when I become a parent, I would certainly be concerned of the safety and the privacy more and more, specifically how it is easy for someone to look at another person's profile for as long as the profile is shared with friends and friends. Fake news and the left/right war on Facebook are also quite problematic.
okidwiyulianto 10y ago
I should think, can I beat Facebook? If no. So give up. If yes, make something interesting than Facebook.
Wazzymandias 10y ago
What I think about when I use Facebook: don't use Facebook.
astanway 10y ago
"A similarly-sized company of 15,000 might have 5 data scientists" - this is so far off the mark I don't even have a response.
- robattila128 10y ago
  The definition of data scientist is really skewed. It's a buzz word every hot shot identifies themselves with.
mydpy 10y ago
I think it's interesting that despite deep and widely-publicized privacy concerns, Facebook's users have mostly been loyal to the platform. Myself included. Data collections seems necessary to monetize the platform. Are there any alternatives, or do we just need smaller more close-knit social networks?
anondon 10y ago
Genuine question : do you think a privacy oriented social network where users pay a small annual fee (around $5) would work? Think Whatsapp (use phone number as an id, no native discovery, only connect through phone contacts, encrypted user data only to prevent database leaks from causing damage) + Facebook (feed like feature, share photos, videos, direct messaging, group messaging). No user tracking, no ads, just a no bullshit social network where the average Joe would feel right at home and also one which the HN crowd would use, assuming social networks have a place in their lives.
- caminante 10y ago
  I don't think you can get such a service for "average joes." Though...Bloomberg Chat meets your criteria (ex-fee). It consists of ~300K financial users who pay ~$25K/year/terminal. Many argue this is the killer feature of Bloomberg. I agree. It's like an exclusive, digital country club.
  - grenoire 10y ago
    The paywall is not the only entry requirement though. You can't click 'Pay' and enter. It's more in line with academia discussion boards that require university mails.
    - caminante 10y ago
      Are you drawing a distinction beyond self-checkout v. calling a sales rep to setup an account? I'm not following.
      - brokenmachine 10y ago
        I think he means that even if you have the money, you need to be a member of a financial institution to be allowed access.
  - bonaldi 10y ago
    ... Though the privacy is more from non-Bloomberg users than from Bloomberg itself. Eg: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/may/10/bloomberg-goldman-sachs-spying-terminals https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/may/10/bloomberg-gold...
afandian 10y ago
This is an excellent blog post, though it made me sick reading it. I recently made the switch. I went from trying to limit how much I log in (to once or twice a week), to actually not logging in. I've been cold-turkey for two months (except for a couple of times when I had a very specific reason to check something). I thought it would be difficult. Turns out it's not so hard, and it's the fear of reduced social contact (or dopamine withdrawal more likely) that was stopping me. If you have a plan to replace the social interactions with other forms, you realise that the rest is just dross. If I really want to know what my friends had for breakfast I can phone them up and ask. On balance, I'd rather not. I'm not at the point of deleting the account yet. Small steps. Here were my reasons FWIW: http://blog.afandian.com/2017/01/why-i-am-giving-up-on-facebook/ http://blog.afandian.com/2017/01/why-i-am-giving-up-on-faceb... If you're reading and considering whether or not you can withdraw from Facebook, you can do it!
- macintux 10y ago
  I found it interesting for the opposite reason: I've avoided Facebook up to now, but there are enough inconveniences that my resistance is wearing down.
  - afandian 10y ago
    They might be clunky, but I'm sure there are adequate means of doing everything you'd want to do. The problem many people have is convenience. For example if you are forced to use Facebook in order to log into a Hotel Wifi (as I recently was) then you have to say "I don't want the Wifi more than I want to log in with Facebook". It's not an essential. Or, it might be more difficult to spend the effort keeping in touch with people on a personal level, but it's not impossible. It just doesn't have the convenience that Facebook gives. But it also doesn't have the costs. I'm not trying to convince anyone. But I do find it increasingly interesting (as I pay more attention to it) how many people confuse 'convenient' for 'essential'.
    - zeroer 10y ago
      I keep a dummy Facebook account for precisely this purpose.
phatbyte 10y ago
Last week I permanently deleted my FaceBook account. All my data since 2007 (10 years) and friends gone. Well...apparently my data is still somewhere to be used as metadata... Still, I must say, this was a liberating experience. I don't go there anymore to see another cat/new born/fake news posts. I don't get get angry with dumb comments. I don't have to see at my friends are eating, selfies, etc.. My closest friends and family are reachable one whatsapp/imessage/phone call away. The other hundreds "friends" I had on FB, I don't even remember their names anymore...
- anondon 10y ago
  Facebook provides an option to download an archive of your data, you should have downloaded it before deleting your account. Apart from having all your data, it would have been the final nail in your Facebook coffin. To say the least, the data scared the f*ck out of me : they knew me better than any of my family or friends. The ad tracking data was...bang on target, they had facial recognition data, all the locations I signed in from. I sometimes joke that Fb knows more about people than the Government of the user. It's true!
- grenoire 10y ago
  To my knowledge, your account is never actually gone but instead deactivated. Not sure if there is a grace period to that, but as anondon said you can get an archive of all your data (which is what I did before deleting my account).
  - debt 10y ago
    Facebook provides a real delete option. It's hidden but it's there. https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account
    - yellow_viper 10y ago
      Does this delete your data too? I spent about 2 days the other day running a script to delete all my data way back to 2010.
siegecraft 10y ago
Does anyone have suggestions or best practices for using facebook securely (ie to maintain an account but not let it be linked w/ all of your other browsing activities)? I was thinking something like hosting a hardened/non-fingerprintable browser from a VPS/cloud provider somewhere and only using that to interact with the site.
- mixmastamyk 10y ago
  Noscript can block js from Facebook, except when you're on Facebook.com.
  - kedean 10y ago
    How do we know facebook doesn't serve up tracking scripts from other domains?
- netsharc 10y ago
  Ghostery (they may be evil, it seems they've mutated into a company selling "insight" about 3rd party tracker blocking, insight they gather from their users usage of their browser extension!) blocks close to a thousand 3rd party trackers. Yes there are that many. Even without an FB account, it's interesting how Fb probably has a profile of you from your friends. If you have 5 friends who use FB and they upload party pics of you 6, FB can probably nake a profile of that "ghost" through your friends' characters. E.g. All 5 like metal, all 5 checked-in to a metal concert/the FB app places them there, and there's a pre-concert photo of you 6, the machine can conclude the ghost (you) probably like metal too. And it already has your face in its face recognition database...
OliverJones 10y ago
Another comment has mentioned poisoning the FB database with fake clickstreams, etc. It looks like skillful black hat marketers have already succeeded at poisoning FB's content. Read this Vice story, then delete your FB account and delete the cookies from your browser. Friends don't let friends use FB. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/big-data-cambridge-analytica-brexit-trump https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/big-data-cambridg...
- olkid 10y ago
  Fascinating read! I am enlightened.
- glitchdout 10y ago
  The video referenced in that article is truly amazing/disturbing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8Dd5aVXLCc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8Dd5aVXLCc
frebord 10y ago
Permanently Delete it here: https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account If you are considering getting off of it for any of these reasons then why haven't you already done it? You feel you might somehow need it, just like a heroin addict has trouble imagining a life without drugs. It is horrible for your privacy. They collect EVERYTHING about you! It is in their best interest to manipulate your attention, which to me is terrifying. It is horrible for your relationships, cut the acquaintance you met 5 years ago that YOU WILL NEVER SPEAK WITH and force yourself to make more intimate connections with the people that actually matter. It is horrible for your mind, you have a constant bombardment of instant gratification and self reinforcing ideas.
- netsharc 10y ago
  Gotta love the fact that when you're not logged in to FB, clicking on that url shows you the FB login page with a parameter where to redirect you next, which is normal enough, but it also has the referer URL (this HN comments page) as another parameter. They want to know who's linking to their delete page! (OK they probably have that in every login page redirect, and the cleverer way would be to silently record the HTTP header...)
- robattila128 10y ago
  I de-activate and re-activate every few months, probably for emotional reasons since I read a lot about online privacy. I didn't know we can permanently delete it, glad to see fighters out there forcing them to make this option cause we all know they wouldn't give the option otherwise. Thanks for sharing the link.
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deathaccount 10y ago
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bjourne 10y ago
I've always had the wrong birth date on Facebook because I'm not comfortable with sharing too much personal information with that company. So people have been congratulating me on the wrong date. Which doesn't bother me at all because keeping track of peoples birthday is impossible. But I've gotten the impression from some that I've broken a taboo and that they think it is deceptive of me to have the wrong birth date displayed.
ar15saveslives 10y ago
Bit unrelated, but there's a working way to get rid of FB addiction. Just start unfollowing everything that you see in your "news feed". It's not visible to anyone, and you will gradually (a couple of weeks in my case) phase out of FB, just because there's nothing to see there. But the very first step, for sure, is to admit that you have the addiction.
- jacamat 10y ago
  I did this maybe a year or two ago. I un-followed all of my Facebook friends. No more Facebook updates, no changes to any of my relationships (e.g., nobody gets "unfriended",) more time to focus on my own stuff. And you can re-follow people any time if things get quiet.
throwxwy 10y ago
I keep my social media accounts locked down and off search engines, so I was surprised to see my name, photo and a link to my profile appearing in a Facebook list of people with my name when I self-Googled. The problem seems to apply to localized versions of FB (it-it, en-gb) so it is probably a bug. Google Plus had a similar problem, but for much longer. Even though my account was locked down, the people who had me in their circles were showing up in Google search results for my name, so I deleted my Google Plus profile, and advised my friends and family to do the same. I nuked my Pinterest profile after it was scraped despite being locked down. FB also did something rather disturbing the other day that reminded me why vigilance is critical. It generated a (private) music video about my friends, but freakily, the person who it started up with was a secret crush -the attraction was mutual but never went anywhere-from 15 years ago (we became FB friends a few years later). The two of us don't interact much on FB, so it must have inferred this based on her ongoing views of my profile, or vice-versa. My wife has no idea about this crush, and is friends with the other person. Our circle of mutual friends does know about it, but has kept it secret for years. Having it appear on my FB timeline would have been awkward, to say the least.
francamps 10y ago
There is a solution that can help you get here, and it worked for me: unfollow everyone and everything. By unfollowing everyone except a handful of boring sites that barely ever publish anything, my newsfeed has become very boring and I rarely feel the pull towards it or any of its addictive power. The end result is that when I do log in, I only see notifications for a couple of groups full of my friends or interests that are truly relevant and I don’t waste any time scrolling. At this point in my life, Messenger (not from the main site, but from its own site) and Groups are quite convenient, and both are a bit necessary for me at the moment, so I can’t quite disable Fb, but I’m very happily giving up on the feed for good. I might eventually quit altogether, but this method has worked for me quite well for the last few months.
- grenoire 10y ago
  This works well for any follow or subscription based network. Taking the instant gratification and new-content-every-five-minutes aspects out, just leaves you with something that does not incentivise you to keep returning so often (and therefore waste your time). I have several friends who would benefit a lot if they stopped following hundreds of accounts, keeping their feeds and brains busy with "nothing."
- rolodato 10y ago
  For anyone thinking of doing this, you actually have to manually unfollow everyone. There is no Facebook API method to unfollow friends or pages. I ended up deleting my account anyway.
cJ0th 10y ago
The funny thing is, these are exactly the things I think about while on facebook. By being online for almost two decades I've developed a 6th sense for sketchy services and the whole UI of Facebook screams "SCAM!". The periodically reoccurring messages harassing you into uploading a picture of yourself, the prompt to denounce people who you believe are using a fake name or the vaguely described privacy settings don't help either. I only log in when I get an e-mail notification for a message I've received. Some time ago you could simply reply to that e-mail but that doesn't work anymore. Furthermore, you can't say: I just want a notification in case of a message. You have to accept some other stuff as well. I've told my spam filter to delete every e-mail from facebook that doesn't include "message" its the subject.
- cygned 10y ago
  It's interesting how annoying Facebook becomes when you don't come back for a while; push notifications on your phone, if you have the app installed, and emails about what you missed.
- greggman 10y ago
  Just making sure you know you can read your messages at messenger.com and avoid the rest.
  - cJ0th 10y ago
    yeah, it's better. Still, I want to minimize the contact I have with FB. People who know me know that I don't like FB. If someone sends me a somewhat personal message on FB I've no qualms to to reply to this person via e-mail (when that person has a gmail address it's a tough decision, though ;) )
- ljk 10y ago
  > the prompt to denounce people who you believe are using a fake name They actually do this? That's pretty scary
  - scholia 10y ago
3rdkind 10y ago
Zuck: "Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the US or any other government direct access to our servers." Oh, well, but they seem to be hooked in there anyway: http://web.archive.org/web/20150826205104/https://bosnadev.com/2015/04/14/facebook-chats-are-being-scanned-by-a-cia-funded-company/ http://web.archive.org/web/20150826205104/https://bosnadev.c...
- afandian 10y ago
  You argue either way over whether or not something "is", or "has been". It's the "will be" that you should be wary of.
- brokenmachine 10y ago
  The US government definitely has at least "indirect" access to Facebook servers. What does "direct access" mean exactly? Does having to enter a password constitute indirect access?
cygned 10y ago
The linked "Blue Feed, Red Feed" from WSJ is impressive and scary. http://graphics.wsj.com/blue-feed-red-feed/ http://graphics.wsj.com/blue-feed-red-feed/
saycheese 10y ago
Never used Facebook, though I'm postive they have a lot of data on me, for which I never agreed to share with them, cannot see, have no way to opt-out of, etc.
- __jal 10y ago
  You can "opt out" of a lot of the data collection by editing your hosts file. 127.0.0.1 facebook.com 127.0.0.1 fbcdn.com etc. Multiple people maintain lists of Facebook and other surveillancecorp domains.
malz 10y ago
>As you are crafting your message, Facebook collects your keystrokes. Does anyone have evidence of this? Not surprising or difficult, of course, but while watching ajax traffic and typing into a status box I don't see obvious posts with either the text I'm typing or obscured blobs. On the other hand, there's plenty of ajax traffic polling for updates and sending other analytics.
- netsharc 10y ago
  I recently got the option to save post drafts, so I could type something, it would save it automatically, and I could continue that post in another browser if I wanted (similar to Gmail's compose window). But the option was very visible. I can't recall if I dismissed it forever or it disappeared by itself. If they're malicious they could wait a few minutes before reporting what you were thinking of posting.. or they're using websockets, which you may have missed.
neltnerb 10y ago
I wonder if the edge case has been tested wherein someone turning 18 retroactively withdraws consent their parents gave when uploading information about them while they were minors. Taking photos of other people and data mining them, especially minors, seems like something that is very probably illegal in at least a few states. Would be very curious if on someone's 18th birthday they can actually force Facebook to delete everything they have about them.
xj9 10y ago
I usually think, why am I on Facebook? I just want messenger to open already.
ben_jones 10y ago
Damn you, Tinder.
germinalphrase 10y ago
Not long ago I was sitting with some long time friends I hadn't seen in a few years. It was one of those really great visits in which you remember exactly why someone is an important person in your life. One of the things we ended up talking about was physical photographs and how our families had developed a natural curation and annotation system. "Keepers" get sorted and labeled on the back with names, dates, brief notes, etc. and placed in albums. There were a bore when we were younger, but now we appreciate having some long-lasting artifacts of our families' lives and history. This is a nice thing and differs in importance to my every day interaction with personal media. If I had the talent, I would make a small journaling tool for myself. All I would ask it to do is remind me once a week to select a favorite photograph and make a brief note about who's in it and why it's important. Really, just 30 second a week. Then, one a year a nice, archivally printed photo album would show up on my doorstep with all of these photographs arranged and discretely tagged with names, dates, and notes. That's it.
- alanfalcon 10y ago
  I like it. My wife subscribes to a service that will automatically print and mail her a small printed photo book for every X photos she favorites on her phone. It doesn't have the nice tagging and dates and notes, but it creates a chronological hard copy series of photo books that are great to have around, without requiring much forethought.
  - rak00n 10y ago
    What's the service?
    - alanfalcon 10y ago
      Chatbooks[1] - they're not glossy or high quality, but then a lot of the time the photos aren't either beyond the associated memories. And they're cheap so you don't have to stress over whether to hit the favorite button. [1] https://chatbooks.com/favorite-photo-books/ https://chatbooks.com/favorite-photo-books/
iamdave 10y ago
I experienced first hand the drug like quality of Facebook when I made the decision to finally quit..I started asking friends if I had an up to date contact number for them as I was planning to leave the site. Every single one of them, EVERY one of them made it a mission of sorts to keep me from leaving the site. "Just unfollow people, spend less time on the site" Well by spending NO time on the site I AM spending less time on the site so hey we both get what we want right? One friend went armchair psychologist on me about the affair. It was an interesting week between emails,phone calls and text messages asking me where I had gone and why. "was it something I posted?" For my part three months later...I've been reading a lot more and my grades in pre-law are improving, and that's all the feedback I needed to know I was on the right track to removing unnecessary cruft from the life.
- sova 10y ago
  Yes, it's really bizarre, even the application/website itself has a whole guilt-trip gauntlet when you choose to deactivate your account. Not to mention that you cannot actually ever even _delete_ your data, you can only put your account into a suspended state of stasis. The only people I know of who have success in their facebookian encounters are: + activists + artists (who connect under pseudonyms) + businesspeople (who connect under the umbrella of their company)
  - emidln 10y ago
    Data created on someone else's computer cannot ever be owned by you. Data created by someone else's proprietary software on your locked computer is probably never exclusively yours either.
    - sova 10y ago
      Yes! Software "ownership" is a fascinatingly blurry ground. Still though, just because I upload a picture to [f], it is no longer information regarding me? Perhaps it is a greater question of associability of information. Why is not the great battle of the 21st century the right to privacy? Brand valuability and Information Collection are becoming synonymous.
tdaltonc 10y ago
If you're looking to use Facebook less (but can't bring yourself to quit) I just launched a tool for that! http://youjustneedspace.com http://youjustneedspace.com The iOS version is a web app because Apple rejected our native app. They said any app that encourages you to use your phone less is not appropriate for the app store.
- H4CK3RM4N 10y ago
  Did you bring up the number of apps which either block a tone of sites with a simulated con or notify you until you reopen the app to keep you off you're phone?
  - tdaltonc 10y ago
    We're going through the appeal process right now. We've gathered lists of web content block apps, workflow style apps, and icon skinning apps. I'm not familiar with that last category of apps (notify you until you reopen the app to keep you off you're phone). Can you give me an example?
PunchTornado 10y ago
Facebook is good for one thing only: organizing political protests.
jeffrey-sean 10y ago
Whether you realize it or not, your posts are being analyzed by everyone. Use a free service like Rep'nUp to identify all unprofessional posts, images, and tags. You can then link back to each post and curate if needed. https://www.repnup.com/ https://www.repnup.com/
- mmagin 10y ago
  Please clearly disclose if you have an affiliation with this service.
owly 10y ago
Deleted FB years ago and haven't missed it one bit. Get out while you can and block all FB domains via hosts or on your router.
TIMALAUS 10y ago
Nice Post! Learned a lot. Thank you! I've removed my Facebook account 3 years ago and never looked back. Everyone who should be in touch with me have my e-mail address and mobile phone number, other's who actually want to take a sniff into my life try to trick me creating one, but hey - I've been there, f*ck off. Nonetheless I relocated to the US, Boston, 7 months ago and haven't acquired any meaningful friendship with anyone, I still don't care. I better off read Literature and Philosophy rather than infinite stream of non-sense. GJ
james_niro 10y ago
Going on two years without Facebook. At first I thought it will be hard to stay in touch with friend but it is the opposite, I get to hangout more often with my friends, our conversations are more intimate, we genuinely want to know what happened since we last saw each other. As far as news goes I subscribed to news paper, have dozen email subscriptions which delivers it to my inbox every morning. I started making photo albums again and putting my pictures in there whenever friends come over I get to show it to them. As far as cat videos goes I get to watch them on YouTube To be honest it has been the most productive time of my life since I deactivated Facebook and my friendship has become stronger Moral of the story yes you an live without Facebook
omilu 10y ago
With respect to tracking you throughout the interwebs, Amazon is as bad. It pisses me off when I look at a pair of shoes then start seeing amazon ads on every site I go to for months, hey remember the shoes you looked at?
toothbrush 10y ago
A long while back (2012?) i deleted my Facebook account without really thinking it through, and i lost contact with a bunch of people i'd met during an overseas period. I still find that a bit of a pity, but ultimately (as cynical as it sounds) life goes on, and i've found more compatible people whom i care more about in the meantime. However, a few years ago i recreated a Facebook profile (this time a pseudonym with initially 0 friends) because some of the events i'm interested in (local music/art galleries for example) only publish their events on Facebook, it seems. No mailing list available, invariably. This is a pity, because i don't have friends to rely on to drag me to the good gigs (i like to keep up-to-date with local experimental music, for example, which my friends don't care for). And, the problem too, is that inevitably, i've made one or two friends with that account, partly with my previous FB experience in mind, and partly because they seemed belligerently anti-email (and texting isn't practical when you're in another country). So now i'm far from being back to square one, and i only look at Facebook about once every month, but i still would love to just get rid of it, except i don't really know how to handle musicians and artists who only publish their upcoming events on Facebook. But aside from that, the comments are spot on. If people can't be arsed to email me if i prefer email (and i, too, believe that i am easily google'able), they're probably not really worth chasing. Does that exist? Like-on-Facebook-and-relay-via-email-as-a-Service?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
Wajid_Ali 10y ago
I think facebook is the most dangerous spy of the world. let me tell you a story, once I was setting with my friend and he was using his facebook app in android phone, and suddenly I saw, "Invite your friends to facebook" and the number and name down this statement was personal contact, and she don't even know what facebook is? you would wonder how I came to know about that number so quickly, becuase my nameing convention for contacts is very different i.e. like I write "C" before every classmate contact and "F" before every friend things like that. and then I stopped using facebook in my phone.

363 points by vkb 10y ago

vgy7ujm 10y ago

Start using other apps with better privacy for communication. Get a real website or blog for your PR needs.

sp332 10y ago
That said, WhatsApp is a pretty good secure messaging app even though they got bought by Facebook.
- vgy7ujm 10y ago
  Can you trust anything by FB? Signal seems ok. Haven't looked too closely at it though.
  - sp332 10y ago
    Whatsapp adopted Signal's security mechanism last year. https://whispersystems.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/ https://whispersystems.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/
    - vgy7ujm 10y ago
      That's good. But FB ownership is black clouds in the sky...
      - sp332 10y ago
        Well I don't see why FB would put so much work into this and then go back on it later. But if they ever do you can be sure it will be big news.
johnchristopher 10y ago
Right now I am working as some kind of developer/marketing/communication 5 legged unicorn and Facebook-based PR is the go-to strategy for everything and anything. I also hear some organisations thinking out loud about completely ditching their websites in favour of Facebook/Twitter presence. (tourism sector)
- vgy7ujm 10y ago
  It's madness. And only works because the train is already rolling and most people are blind of what FB is doing behind the curtains. Twitter is actually OK in my opinion as it is obviously a more PR like channel by design. (Also Instagram for showcasing new products etc.) I think that FB sites are a poor substitute for well designed unique websites with depth and relevant information. The question is how to get viewers or subscribers. But since FB started out as a "personal/friends" service I think that ads and PR will soon be perceived as spam. When people start waking up that is.
  - johnchristopher 10y ago
    > It's madness. And only works because the train is already rolling and most people are blind of what FB is doing behind the curtains. I basically gave up explaining that because I have to explain how to use FB as a promotion tool and I can't undermine it at the same time because I would lose credibility and leave people more confused than when they came. > Twitter is actually OK in my opinion as it is obviously a more PR like channel by design. (Also Instagram for showcasing new products etc.) No, unfortunately it really depends on the niche/market you are following or trying to get into. > I think that FB sites are a poor substitute for well designed unique websites with depth and relevant information. > The question is how to get viewers or subscribers. But since FB started out as a "personal/friends" service I think that ads and PR will soon be perceived as spam. When people start waking up that is. Ditto. With websites we have full control of our statistics and data. I sometimes think that messenger/bot will be the demise of social networks. If somehow marketers can get people to subscribe to bots (with a common API that would abstract whether you are using whatsapp, telegram, etc.) then social networks leash would loosen a bit. That would mean we would be back to something looking a lot like e-mail but whatev'. I am not tailored for marketing anyway so I am pretty sure I am talking bs.
jasode 10y ago
>Get a real website or blog for your PR needs. Btw if you weren't already aware... a lot of small businesses (e.g. mom & pop restaurants, handymen contractors, yoga studios, etc) actually did have a real website but they abandoned them and only maintained their Facebook pages. The behavior pattern is the same: the "real website" whether it was a CMS built on PHP-Drupal or a Wordpress blog was too complicated for owners to mess with. (e.g. "uh, what's this domain renewal email I just got from Godaddy have to do with my website?!?") The real website then suffers "digital rot" or they expire. Facebook pages are easier. Therefore, advising them to maintain real websites isn't going to convince them. They've already "been there done that" and saw no value in it. As far as privacy and data collection, businesses don't care -- it's their public storefront.
- vgy7ujm 10y ago
  The original post was more directed at the individual human FB member. One problem with FB sites for businesses is loss if identity since the platform looks the same. I get that small physical shops that don't want to pay for a webmaster etc may have problems updating their sites. But I do miss seeing their original sites. Twitter and Instagram are ok channels. The problem with FB is the privacy of its individual real person members and their families and friends. When did we sign up to get directed ads etc? Zuckerberg probably had that idea early on, but the FB members had to accept new terms several times to continue using the platform.
- at-fates-hands 10y ago
  >> businesses don't care -- it's their public storefront. Until they land in the news for something and then people can go back and start digging up and doxxing people at the company and any other nefarious information they can get their hands on. ANY information on a business FB page is like a gold mine for social engineers. Everybody on FB eventually "over shares" information they think is safe, but its really not.

Kiro 10y ago

I treat everything I do on Facebook as public and permanent information. With that mindset the experience is rather pleasant.

bigbugbag 10y ago
Not public, privately own by facebook (and partners and clients) and aggregated with everything that is actually public and every other privately own data they could gather. Then used to target you in every possible ways.
- owlninja 10y ago
  I get most of the personal data concerns, but what exactly is the issue with targeted ads?
  - antocv 10y ago
    Changing your behaviour. Ads are a hostile action.

andy_ppp 10y ago

I think about it as a simple Message and Event's calendar that my friends have access to me once per week when I look at it. Also occasionally use it as a login systems for sites I don't want to sign up to. What else does it do? I unfollowed everyone/thing from my wall ... which seems to improve it somewhat!

neogodless 10y ago
I still use Messenger, but my Facebook account is deactivated. I finally gave up after clicking "Hide all from..." for the 10,000th time. It seemed like an increasingly losing battle. The more I unfollowed, the more it showed me things I didn't want to see, and more ads! My entire interaction had devolved into scrolling slowing and clicking "Hide all..." So tell me how you got your feed to stop being full of bad things? :)
- mattnewton 10y ago
  There are extensions that will eradicate the feed for you.
- andy_ppp 10y ago
  I just did about 25 per day for what seemed like forever but I wasn't about to let it win!

nnd 10y ago

Even though Facebook by itself doesn't seem to provide much value anymore, it's incredible how much of a platform lock-in the have. For example, Facebook login becoming essentially a universal identity provider. The worst thing is even when you create a new account under a different name they still manage to track you down, and start suggesting adding friends from the old account. I wonder how they do this, by tracking cookies and fingerprinting your browser?

spraak 10y ago
I've wondered this too. I have friend suggestions for my work colleagues, even though my Facebook email is my own private address and I've never emailed them from that address. It's amazing and bothersome
- sdiepend 10y ago
  Have you used it on mobile and shared your contacts? Might they have had access to your location(GPS or maybe to which wifi you're connected). Interesting article: http://fusion.net/story/339018/facebook-psychiatrist-privacy-problems/ http://fusion.net/story/339018/facebook-psychiatrist-privacy...
  - funkyy 10y ago
    Or they just suggest people based on common locations that you and they visit and where they spend their time.
  - spraak 10y ago
    The mobile app's contacts seems very likely. I didn't realize it would spy on those, but not surprising.
- renaudg 10y ago
  You've probably shared an IP address (work).
  - 10y ago

nefreat 10y ago

Many people in the tech industry don't realize the tradeoffs they are making by participating on FB. This is to say nothing of the nontechnical crowd who make up the overwhelming majority of the site. My wish is that mainstream news media would cover these issues. It'd be great if most of FB's users thought about the troves of personal info that they are providing not just about themselves but their friends as well.

xherberta 10y ago
UK press has been covering this, and the EU has frequently shown itself ready to push back: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/10/whatsapp-facebook-google-privacy-rules-ec-european-directive https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/10/whatsapp-...

jgrahamc 10y ago

A related question is "Should you sign up for Facebook today?". Five years ago I killed my Facebook account (and LinkedIn and G+) and it hasn't bothered me, but... am I missing out on something?

hashkb 10y ago
I log into Facebook once a year or so. Twitter, never. HN and Reddit I enjoy. Am 30. Don't feel bad.
- jgrahamc 10y ago
  I don't feel bad, I'm just curious what I'm missing out on by not taking part in something that's very popular. I love Twitter.
anondon 10y ago
You are not missing out on much. The only productive use of Facebook is to keep in touch with people. If you do this using alternative methods (Whatsapp, email or direct phone calls) then you save yourself from the continuous stream of garbage that is the news feed.
bluGill 10y ago
Facebook it the only way I see my second cousin's kid's piano recital. It is a valuable way for me to know something like that happened (they live more than a thousand miles away). It lets me keep up some of the people who I went to high school with - we were not really friends but we had a connection. Facebook is the easiest way to ensure my parents (300 miles away) see pictures of their grandkids doing cute things. Unfortunately it sucks me into political fake news and lots of other bad things. Blocking all games helped greatly. On balance the real purpose of Facebook: keeping up with distance family and friends; is a very useful part of life. Thus it is worth it.
- Broken_Hippo 10y ago
  This is me - only I'm on the other side of the Atlantic from family. In fact, this was the only reason I signed up for facebook 3 or so years ago. It is also the reason I have some loyalty: The main drawback of other social networks is the lack of cross communication between chats and some people's pages.

Swenrekcah 10y ago

Related: Now Facebook has been pushing the Moments app to share photos. I don't want to use it but a lot of people around me do. Can anyone recommend an alternative photo sharing app?

renaudg 10y ago
Instagram ? :)
bgrohman 10y ago
Google Photos works well.
- Swenrekcah 10y ago
  That's true, I'm currently using them. But of course Google comes with their own set of privacy concerns as well.
  - bgrohman 10y ago
    That's true. I've been considering the idea of building my own personal replacement for several Google services - Keep, Drive, and Photos mainly. Haven't decided it's worth the effort yet.
    - brokenmachine 10y ago
      I would love a self-hosted Google docs clone, that I can access from an Android App and the web. That would also replace Evernote.
      - bgrohman 10y ago
        I've been tempted to look into things like ownCloud (https://owncloud.org/features/ https://owncloud.org/features/), but I just haven't been excited by what I've seen so far. What I'm thinking of is more of a single user web app that I build myself so that a) it does exactly what I want and nothing more, b) I know exactly how it works and what it does with my data, and c) there are no other users to support.

cygned 10y ago

I left Facebook three years ago or so. It did not offer any value for me - and I couldn't stand the quality of "information" on that platform. To much crazy stuff in my stream, things I am not interested in, stupid games, ads, click bait, and so on. I also left twitter months ago. The people seem to be better there, but I have the image of twitter being a bad company. And the time spent there didn't provide enough value to me. It was too easy to get disrupted at work. And after keeping apps closed, the service became useless for me. Most of the people I have contact with are developers, and like 99% don't have a Facebook account either.

daemonk 10y ago

Can someone make a browser plugin that will send fake data to facebook? Instead of hiding your own behavior, might as well poison their database.

0xcafecafe 10y ago
A few of us were joking about poisoning the location tracking database of site along a similar vein. Have an app masking your location to some place in the pacific ocean to any app running in the background asking for location (without the user's intent of using it).
- bduerst 10y ago
  Why stop there? Create a service that will spoof GPS coordinates, check you in, and post generic photos of fun places to be, so you can outsource your social bragging through automation.
- nnd 10y ago
  You can certainly do that with a jailbreak.
- netsharc 10y ago
  On Android, Xprivacy uses hooks provided by Xposed to "MitM" a lot of functiom calls. Don't want an app to know your phone's serial number? That function call returns a spoofed one. Same with GPS location.
  - e40 10y ago
    I love Xposed. I just wish using it didn't mean I couldn't get regular Android updates (I have a 5x).
siegecraft 10y ago
I like this idea (a sort of adnauseum for facebook) but I wonder how trivial it would be for facebook to filter out obviously random/fake/noisy data given the mammoth set of real data they already have. Maybe introduce some more subtle off-by-one errors into their data or just make it a tiny bit fuzzier? Hopefully one wouldn't need a detailed knowledge of their data structures to do something impactful, although the action itself might be a useful symbolic gesture even if it doesn't have an actual impact on their data collection.

okidwiyulianto 10y ago

I think it is very simple. We should think positive update status. If we won't tracked as a 'blacklist' we should have decorum or ethical.

yeukhon 10y ago

My take. I have been using FB since 2007 I was a sophomore in high school. A couple years ago I didn't use FB as often as I did, but just this past year I started to use FB more frequently. The change has to do with the people I actually network with on FB. I always have friends, real life friends on my FB, but most of them aren't very active on Facebook. This past year I met a bunch of new friends and they are the social bunch. I started to post more of my social life on Facebook. It's been fun to actually see what's happening in everyone's life. With the recent political shit storm in America, FB is becoming more active. I also started to follow a bunch of pages ranging from food to inspiration quotes to news page. They have been helpful to get me through my day, learning new perspectives and finding more interesting things. I've used other products such as quora, flipboard, etc but they don't provide the same conveniences as FB does. I have family members actively on FB (my father and my sister in particular), and I enjoy sharing my moments with them. I know there's a lot of privacy concerns with using FB but I simply try to accommodate it. I believe in controlling my privacy but I also enjoy using the product. As far as I am concerned, if I am not leaking my social security number or talking shit about my work on FB, I am not too concerned. But in the future when I become a parent, I would certainly be concerned of the safety and the privacy more and more, specifically how it is easy for someone to look at another person's profile for as long as the profile is shared with friends and friends. Fake news and the left/right war on Facebook are also quite problematic.

okidwiyulianto 10y ago

I should think, can I beat Facebook? If no. So give up. If yes, make something interesting than Facebook.

Wazzymandias 10y ago

What I think about when I use Facebook: don't use Facebook.

astanway 10y ago

"A similarly-sized company of 15,000 might have 5 data scientists" - this is so far off the mark I don't even have a response.

robattila128 10y ago
The definition of data scientist is really skewed. It's a buzz word every hot shot identifies themselves with.

mydpy 10y ago

I think it's interesting that despite deep and widely-publicized privacy concerns, Facebook's users have mostly been loyal to the platform. Myself included. Data collections seems necessary to monetize the platform. Are there any alternatives, or do we just need smaller more close-knit social networks?

anondon 10y ago

Genuine question : do you think a privacy oriented social network where users pay a small annual fee (around $5) would work? Think Whatsapp (use phone number as an id, no native discovery, only connect through phone contacts, encrypted user data only to prevent database leaks from causing damage) + Facebook (feed like feature, share photos, videos, direct messaging, group messaging). No user tracking, no ads, just a no bullshit social network where the average Joe would feel right at home and also one which the HN crowd would use, assuming social networks have a place in their lives.

caminante 10y ago
I don't think you can get such a service for "average joes." Though...Bloomberg Chat meets your criteria (ex-fee). It consists of ~300K financial users who pay ~$25K/year/terminal. Many argue this is the killer feature of Bloomberg. I agree. It's like an exclusive, digital country club.
- grenoire 10y ago
  The paywall is not the only entry requirement though. You can't click 'Pay' and enter. It's more in line with academia discussion boards that require university mails.
  - caminante 10y ago
    Are you drawing a distinction beyond self-checkout v. calling a sales rep to setup an account? I'm not following.
    - brokenmachine 10y ago
      I think he means that even if you have the money, you need to be a member of a financial institution to be allowed access.
- bonaldi 10y ago
  ... Though the privacy is more from non-Bloomberg users than from Bloomberg itself. Eg: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/may/10/bloomberg-goldman-sachs-spying-terminals https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/may/10/bloomberg-gold...

afandian 10y ago

This is an excellent blog post, though it made me sick reading it. I recently made the switch. I went from trying to limit how much I log in (to once or twice a week), to actually not logging in. I've been cold-turkey for two months (except for a couple of times when I had a very specific reason to check something). I thought it would be difficult. Turns out it's not so hard, and it's the fear of reduced social contact (or dopamine withdrawal more likely) that was stopping me. If you have a plan to replace the social interactions with other forms, you realise that the rest is just dross. If I really want to know what my friends had for breakfast I can phone them up and ask. On balance, I'd rather not. I'm not at the point of deleting the account yet. Small steps. Here were my reasons FWIW: http://blog.afandian.com/2017/01/why-i-am-giving-up-on-facebook/ http://blog.afandian.com/2017/01/why-i-am-giving-up-on-faceb... If you're reading and considering whether or not you can withdraw from Facebook, you can do it!

macintux 10y ago
I found it interesting for the opposite reason: I've avoided Facebook up to now, but there are enough inconveniences that my resistance is wearing down.
- afandian 10y ago
  They might be clunky, but I'm sure there are adequate means of doing everything you'd want to do. The problem many people have is convenience. For example if you are forced to use Facebook in order to log into a Hotel Wifi (as I recently was) then you have to say "I don't want the Wifi more than I want to log in with Facebook". It's not an essential. Or, it might be more difficult to spend the effort keeping in touch with people on a personal level, but it's not impossible. It just doesn't have the convenience that Facebook gives. But it also doesn't have the costs. I'm not trying to convince anyone. But I do find it increasingly interesting (as I pay more attention to it) how many people confuse 'convenient' for 'essential'.
  - zeroer 10y ago
    I keep a dummy Facebook account for precisely this purpose.

phatbyte 10y ago

Last week I permanently deleted my FaceBook account. All my data since 2007 (10 years) and friends gone. Well...apparently my data is still somewhere to be used as metadata... Still, I must say, this was a liberating experience. I don't go there anymore to see another cat/new born/fake news posts. I don't get get angry with dumb comments. I don't have to see at my friends are eating, selfies, etc.. My closest friends and family are reachable one whatsapp/imessage/phone call away. The other hundreds "friends" I had on FB, I don't even remember their names anymore...

anondon 10y ago
Facebook provides an option to download an archive of your data, you should have downloaded it before deleting your account. Apart from having all your data, it would have been the final nail in your Facebook coffin. To say the least, the data scared the f*ck out of me : they knew me better than any of my family or friends. The ad tracking data was...bang on target, they had facial recognition data, all the locations I signed in from. I sometimes joke that Fb knows more about people than the Government of the user. It's true!
grenoire 10y ago
To my knowledge, your account is never actually gone but instead deactivated. Not sure if there is a grace period to that, but as anondon said you can get an archive of all your data (which is what I did before deleting my account).
- debt 10y ago
  Facebook provides a real delete option. It's hidden but it's there. https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account
  - yellow_viper 10y ago
    Does this delete your data too? I spent about 2 days the other day running a script to delete all my data way back to 2010.

siegecraft 10y ago

Does anyone have suggestions or best practices for using facebook securely (ie to maintain an account but not let it be linked w/ all of your other browsing activities)? I was thinking something like hosting a hardened/non-fingerprintable browser from a VPS/cloud provider somewhere and only using that to interact with the site.

mixmastamyk 10y ago
Noscript can block js from Facebook, except when you're on Facebook.com.
- kedean 10y ago
  How do we know facebook doesn't serve up tracking scripts from other domains?
netsharc 10y ago
Ghostery (they may be evil, it seems they've mutated into a company selling "insight" about 3rd party tracker blocking, insight they gather from their users usage of their browser extension!) blocks close to a thousand 3rd party trackers. Yes there are that many. Even without an FB account, it's interesting how Fb probably has a profile of you from your friends. If you have 5 friends who use FB and they upload party pics of you 6, FB can probably nake a profile of that "ghost" through your friends' characters. E.g. All 5 like metal, all 5 checked-in to a metal concert/the FB app places them there, and there's a pre-concert photo of you 6, the machine can conclude the ghost (you) probably like metal too. And it already has your face in its face recognition database...

OliverJones 10y ago

Another comment has mentioned poisoning the FB database with fake clickstreams, etc. It looks like skillful black hat marketers have already succeeded at poisoning FB's content. Read this Vice story, then delete your FB account and delete the cookies from your browser. Friends don't let friends use FB. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/big-data-cambridge-analytica-brexit-trump https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/big-data-cambridg...

olkid 10y ago
Fascinating read! I am enlightened.
glitchdout 10y ago
The video referenced in that article is truly amazing/disturbing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8Dd5aVXLCc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8Dd5aVXLCc

frebord 10y ago

Permanently Delete it here: https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account If you are considering getting off of it for any of these reasons then why haven't you already done it? You feel you might somehow need it, just like a heroin addict has trouble imagining a life without drugs. It is horrible for your privacy. They collect EVERYTHING about you! It is in their best interest to manipulate your attention, which to me is terrifying. It is horrible for your relationships, cut the acquaintance you met 5 years ago that YOU WILL NEVER SPEAK WITH and force yourself to make more intimate connections with the people that actually matter. It is horrible for your mind, you have a constant bombardment of instant gratification and self reinforcing ideas.

netsharc 10y ago
Gotta love the fact that when you're not logged in to FB, clicking on that url shows you the FB login page with a parameter where to redirect you next, which is normal enough, but it also has the referer URL (this HN comments page) as another parameter. They want to know who's linking to their delete page! (OK they probably have that in every login page redirect, and the cleverer way would be to silently record the HTTP header...)
robattila128 10y ago
I de-activate and re-activate every few months, probably for emotional reasons since I read a lot about online privacy. I didn't know we can permanently delete it, glad to see fighters out there forcing them to make this option cause we all know they wouldn't give the option otherwise. Thanks for sharing the link.

deleted 10y ago

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deathaccount 10y ago

death

deleted 10y ago

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bjourne 10y ago

I've always had the wrong birth date on Facebook because I'm not comfortable with sharing too much personal information with that company. So people have been congratulating me on the wrong date. Which doesn't bother me at all because keeping track of peoples birthday is impossible. But I've gotten the impression from some that I've broken a taboo and that they think it is deceptive of me to have the wrong birth date displayed.

ar15saveslives 10y ago

Bit unrelated, but there's a working way to get rid of FB addiction. Just start unfollowing everything that you see in your "news feed". It's not visible to anyone, and you will gradually (a couple of weeks in my case) phase out of FB, just because there's nothing to see there. But the very first step, for sure, is to admit that you have the addiction.

jacamat 10y ago
I did this maybe a year or two ago. I un-followed all of my Facebook friends. No more Facebook updates, no changes to any of my relationships (e.g., nobody gets "unfriended",) more time to focus on my own stuff. And you can re-follow people any time if things get quiet.

throwxwy 10y ago

I keep my social media accounts locked down and off search engines, so I was surprised to see my name, photo and a link to my profile appearing in a Facebook list of people with my name when I self-Googled. The problem seems to apply to localized versions of FB (it-it, en-gb) so it is probably a bug. Google Plus had a similar problem, but for much longer. Even though my account was locked down, the people who had me in their circles were showing up in Google search results for my name, so I deleted my Google Plus profile, and advised my friends and family to do the same. I nuked my Pinterest profile after it was scraped despite being locked down. FB also did something rather disturbing the other day that reminded me why vigilance is critical. It generated a (private) music video about my friends, but freakily, the person who it started up with was a secret crush -the attraction was mutual but never went anywhere-from 15 years ago (we became FB friends a few years later). The two of us don't interact much on FB, so it must have inferred this based on her ongoing views of my profile, or vice-versa. My wife has no idea about this crush, and is friends with the other person. Our circle of mutual friends does know about it, but has kept it secret for years. Having it appear on my FB timeline would have been awkward, to say the least.

francamps 10y ago

There is a solution that can help you get here, and it worked for me: unfollow everyone and everything. By unfollowing everyone except a handful of boring sites that barely ever publish anything, my newsfeed has become very boring and I rarely feel the pull towards it or any of its addictive power. The end result is that when I do log in, I only see notifications for a couple of groups full of my friends or interests that are truly relevant and I don’t waste any time scrolling. At this point in my life, Messenger (not from the main site, but from its own site) and Groups are quite convenient, and both are a bit necessary for me at the moment, so I can’t quite disable Fb, but I’m very happily giving up on the feed for good. I might eventually quit altogether, but this method has worked for me quite well for the last few months.

grenoire 10y ago
This works well for any follow or subscription based network. Taking the instant gratification and new-content-every-five-minutes aspects out, just leaves you with something that does not incentivise you to keep returning so often (and therefore waste your time). I have several friends who would benefit a lot if they stopped following hundreds of accounts, keeping their feeds and brains busy with "nothing."
rolodato 10y ago
For anyone thinking of doing this, you actually have to manually unfollow everyone. There is no Facebook API method to unfollow friends or pages. I ended up deleting my account anyway.

cJ0th 10y ago

The funny thing is, these are exactly the things I think about while on facebook. By being online for almost two decades I've developed a 6th sense for sketchy services and the whole UI of Facebook screams "SCAM!". The periodically reoccurring messages harassing you into uploading a picture of yourself, the prompt to denounce people who you believe are using a fake name or the vaguely described privacy settings don't help either. I only log in when I get an e-mail notification for a message I've received. Some time ago you could simply reply to that e-mail but that doesn't work anymore. Furthermore, you can't say: I just want a notification in case of a message. You have to accept some other stuff as well. I've told my spam filter to delete every e-mail from facebook that doesn't include "message" its the subject.

cygned 10y ago
It's interesting how annoying Facebook becomes when you don't come back for a while; push notifications on your phone, if you have the app installed, and emails about what you missed.
greggman 10y ago
Just making sure you know you can read your messages at messenger.com and avoid the rest.
- cJ0th 10y ago
  yeah, it's better. Still, I want to minimize the contact I have with FB. People who know me know that I don't like FB. If someone sends me a somewhat personal message on FB I've no qualms to to reply to this person via e-mail (when that person has a gmail address it's a tough decision, though ;) )
ljk 10y ago
> the prompt to denounce people who you believe are using a fake name They actually do this? That's pretty scary
- scholia 10y ago

3rdkind 10y ago

Zuck: "Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the US or any other government direct access to our servers." Oh, well, but they seem to be hooked in there anyway: http://web.archive.org/web/20150826205104/https://bosnadev.com/2015/04/14/facebook-chats-are-being-scanned-by-a-cia-funded-company/ http://web.archive.org/web/20150826205104/https://bosnadev.c...

afandian 10y ago
You argue either way over whether or not something "is", or "has been". It's the "will be" that you should be wary of.
brokenmachine 10y ago
The US government definitely has at least "indirect" access to Facebook servers. What does "direct access" mean exactly? Does having to enter a password constitute indirect access?

cygned 10y ago

The linked "Blue Feed, Red Feed" from WSJ is impressive and scary. http://graphics.wsj.com/blue-feed-red-feed/ http://graphics.wsj.com/blue-feed-red-feed/

saycheese 10y ago

Never used Facebook, though I'm postive they have a lot of data on me, for which I never agreed to share with them, cannot see, have no way to opt-out of, etc.

__jal 10y ago
You can "opt out" of a lot of the data collection by editing your hosts file. 127.0.0.1 facebook.com 127.0.0.1 fbcdn.com etc. Multiple people maintain lists of Facebook and other surveillancecorp domains.

malz 10y ago

>As you are crafting your message, Facebook collects your keystrokes. Does anyone have evidence of this? Not surprising or difficult, of course, but while watching ajax traffic and typing into a status box I don't see obvious posts with either the text I'm typing or obscured blobs. On the other hand, there's plenty of ajax traffic polling for updates and sending other analytics.

netsharc 10y ago
I recently got the option to save post drafts, so I could type something, it would save it automatically, and I could continue that post in another browser if I wanted (similar to Gmail's compose window). But the option was very visible. I can't recall if I dismissed it forever or it disappeared by itself. If they're malicious they could wait a few minutes before reporting what you were thinking of posting.. or they're using websockets, which you may have missed.

neltnerb 10y ago

I wonder if the edge case has been tested wherein someone turning 18 retroactively withdraws consent their parents gave when uploading information about them while they were minors. Taking photos of other people and data mining them, especially minors, seems like something that is very probably illegal in at least a few states. Would be very curious if on someone's 18th birthday they can actually force Facebook to delete everything they have about them.

xj9 10y ago

I usually think, why am I on Facebook? I just want messenger to open already.

ben_jones 10y ago

Damn you, Tinder.

germinalphrase 10y ago

Not long ago I was sitting with some long time friends I hadn't seen in a few years. It was one of those really great visits in which you remember exactly why someone is an important person in your life. One of the things we ended up talking about was physical photographs and how our families had developed a natural curation and annotation system. "Keepers" get sorted and labeled on the back with names, dates, brief notes, etc. and placed in albums. There were a bore when we were younger, but now we appreciate having some long-lasting artifacts of our families' lives and history. This is a nice thing and differs in importance to my every day interaction with personal media. If I had the talent, I would make a small journaling tool for myself. All I would ask it to do is remind me once a week to select a favorite photograph and make a brief note about who's in it and why it's important. Really, just 30 second a week. Then, one a year a nice, archivally printed photo album would show up on my doorstep with all of these photographs arranged and discretely tagged with names, dates, and notes. That's it.

alanfalcon 10y ago
I like it. My wife subscribes to a service that will automatically print and mail her a small printed photo book for every X photos she favorites on her phone. It doesn't have the nice tagging and dates and notes, but it creates a chronological hard copy series of photo books that are great to have around, without requiring much forethought.
- rak00n 10y ago
  What's the service?
  - alanfalcon 10y ago
    Chatbooks[1] - they're not glossy or high quality, but then a lot of the time the photos aren't either beyond the associated memories. And they're cheap so you don't have to stress over whether to hit the favorite button. [1] https://chatbooks.com/favorite-photo-books/ https://chatbooks.com/favorite-photo-books/

iamdave 10y ago

I experienced first hand the drug like quality of Facebook when I made the decision to finally quit..I started asking friends if I had an up to date contact number for them as I was planning to leave the site. Every single one of them, EVERY one of them made it a mission of sorts to keep me from leaving the site. "Just unfollow people, spend less time on the site" Well by spending NO time on the site I AM spending less time on the site so hey we both get what we want right? One friend went armchair psychologist on me about the affair. It was an interesting week between emails,phone calls and text messages asking me where I had gone and why. "was it something I posted?" For my part three months later...I've been reading a lot more and my grades in pre-law are improving, and that's all the feedback I needed to know I was on the right track to removing unnecessary cruft from the life.

sova 10y ago
Yes, it's really bizarre, even the application/website itself has a whole guilt-trip gauntlet when you choose to deactivate your account. Not to mention that you cannot actually ever even _delete_ your data, you can only put your account into a suspended state of stasis. The only people I know of who have success in their facebookian encounters are: + activists + artists (who connect under pseudonyms) + businesspeople (who connect under the umbrella of their company)
- emidln 10y ago
  Data created on someone else's computer cannot ever be owned by you. Data created by someone else's proprietary software on your locked computer is probably never exclusively yours either.
  - sova 10y ago
    Yes! Software "ownership" is a fascinatingly blurry ground. Still though, just because I upload a picture to [f], it is no longer information regarding me? Perhaps it is a greater question of associability of information. Why is not the great battle of the 21st century the right to privacy? Brand valuability and Information Collection are becoming synonymous.

tdaltonc 10y ago

If you're looking to use Facebook less (but can't bring yourself to quit) I just launched a tool for that! http://youjustneedspace.com http://youjustneedspace.com The iOS version is a web app because Apple rejected our native app. They said any app that encourages you to use your phone less is not appropriate for the app store.

H4CK3RM4N 10y ago
Did you bring up the number of apps which either block a tone of sites with a simulated con or notify you until you reopen the app to keep you off you're phone?
- tdaltonc 10y ago
  We're going through the appeal process right now. We've gathered lists of web content block apps, workflow style apps, and icon skinning apps. I'm not familiar with that last category of apps (notify you until you reopen the app to keep you off you're phone). Can you give me an example?

PunchTornado 10y ago

Facebook is good for one thing only: organizing political protests.

jeffrey-sean 10y ago

Whether you realize it or not, your posts are being analyzed by everyone. Use a free service like Rep'nUp to identify all unprofessional posts, images, and tags. You can then link back to each post and curate if needed. https://www.repnup.com/ https://www.repnup.com/

mmagin 10y ago
Please clearly disclose if you have an affiliation with this service.

owly 10y ago

Deleted FB years ago and haven't missed it one bit. Get out while you can and block all FB domains via hosts or on your router.

TIMALAUS 10y ago

Nice Post! Learned a lot. Thank you! I've removed my Facebook account 3 years ago and never looked back. Everyone who should be in touch with me have my e-mail address and mobile phone number, other's who actually want to take a sniff into my life try to trick me creating one, but hey - I've been there, f*ck off. Nonetheless I relocated to the US, Boston, 7 months ago and haven't acquired any meaningful friendship with anyone, I still don't care. I better off read Literature and Philosophy rather than infinite stream of non-sense. GJ

james_niro 10y ago

Going on two years without Facebook. At first I thought it will be hard to stay in touch with friend but it is the opposite, I get to hangout more often with my friends, our conversations are more intimate, we genuinely want to know what happened since we last saw each other. As far as news goes I subscribed to news paper, have dozen email subscriptions which delivers it to my inbox every morning. I started making photo albums again and putting my pictures in there whenever friends come over I get to show it to them. As far as cat videos goes I get to watch them on YouTube To be honest it has been the most productive time of my life since I deactivated Facebook and my friendship has become stronger Moral of the story yes you an live without Facebook

omilu 10y ago

With respect to tracking you throughout the interwebs, Amazon is as bad. It pisses me off when I look at a pair of shoes then start seeing amazon ads on every site I go to for months, hey remember the shoes you looked at?

toothbrush 10y ago

A long while back (2012?) i deleted my Facebook account without really thinking it through, and i lost contact with a bunch of people i'd met during an overseas period. I still find that a bit of a pity, but ultimately (as cynical as it sounds) life goes on, and i've found more compatible people whom i care more about in the meantime. However, a few years ago i recreated a Facebook profile (this time a pseudonym with initially 0 friends) because some of the events i'm interested in (local music/art galleries for example) only publish their events on Facebook, it seems. No mailing list available, invariably. This is a pity, because i don't have friends to rely on to drag me to the good gigs (i like to keep up-to-date with local experimental music, for example, which my friends don't care for). And, the problem too, is that inevitably, i've made one or two friends with that account, partly with my previous FB experience in mind, and partly because they seemed belligerently anti-email (and texting isn't practical when you're in another country). So now i'm far from being back to square one, and i only look at Facebook about once every month, but i still would love to just get rid of it, except i don't really know how to handle musicians and artists who only publish their upcoming events on Facebook. But aside from that, the comments are spot on. If people can't be arsed to email me if i prefer email (and i, too, believe that i am easily google'able), they're probably not really worth chasing. Does that exist? Like-on-Facebook-and-relay-via-email-as-a-Service?

deleted 10y ago
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Wajid_Ali 10y ago

I think facebook is the most dangerous spy of the world. let me tell you a story, once I was setting with my friend and he was using his facebook app in android phone, and suddenly I saw, "Invite your friends to facebook" and the number and name down this statement was personal contact, and she don't even know what facebook is? you would wonder how I came to know about that number so quickly, becuase my nameing convention for contacts is very different i.e. like I write "C" before every classmate contact and "F" before every friend things like that. and then I stopped using facebook in my phone.