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It's too late to join the Leaving Facebook party. If you were a regular user since 2005 and leave now, it does not make any difference anymore. The collected da

by grx 9y ago

It's too late to join the Leaving Facebook party. If you were a regular user since 2005 and leave now, it does not make any difference anymore. The collected data about you is enough to interpolate your profile for the next decades. Of course, decentralization is a valid point and it's really important to get people who are kinda "new" to social media on distributed platforms. Twitter is centralized as well and also tracks with buttons and scripts. We need critical masses for e.g. XMPP and OStatus platforms like Mastodon. This of course also applies to mobile clients like WhatsApp.

adrianN 9y ago
> The collected data about you is enough to interpolate your profile for the next decades. Did Facebook recently hire Hari Seldon?
- grx 9y ago
  Heh, nice reference. Of course I am exaggerating. But IMO people vastly underestimate how similar their own behaviour is to other people. Meaning, if Facebook "knows" me since 12 years (!) it can very precisely categorize me into a group of people. And those other people do not leave Facebook but feed it more information.
  - markatkinson 9y ago
    Agreed to a degree, they can probably quite accurately fill in the missing puzzle pieces of your life according to the category you are in. It almost makes me jealous of all the data they have.
  - tvanantwerp 9y ago
    Funny how Facebook can have all of this information about me, my preferences, my social groups, etc., and has not once served me a remotely relevant advertisement.
    - yequalsx 9y ago
      I think it most likely has but you currently aren't consciously aware of it. Partly this is due to your desire to make a point. Partly due to our inability to off the top of our heads to recall any but a few specific adverts. We see thousands of them. It is very unlikely that none of them have been relevant to you. There are also the adverts that subconsciously manipulate you. The stuff that you aren't aware of.
      - WorldMaker 9y ago
        There's a bias at work too. The ads in the news feed are slip-streamed, if you aren't constantly on the look out for that gray, barely there "Sponsored" they look like "normal" news feed items and scroll past/through them only really noticing the bad ones. Even worse are the socially slip-streamed ones that started as a Sponsored post in a friend's news feed that they found funny/interesting/whatever and re-shared. Once reshared it loses even that gray, barely there "Sponsored" tag and has "grown up into a real boy" in the news feed. A lot of the mind games in the last election cycle happened because of that (target ads to people susceptible to reshare them and watch them go viral for relatively cheap). Facebook has said they may try to crack down on that sort of thing, but slip-streaming ads is where they make their most money and they don't have enough financial incentive to really fix that.
    - brookside 9y ago
      You want a mail order foam mattress - you must just not know it.
- markatkinson 9y ago
  Hahaha haven't heard that name for a long time!
gambiting 9y ago
I haven't left because I was concerned about the data they were collecting, I left because I realised that I couldn't stop going on facebook, any time my hands were free I would open up my phone and check the feed, scroll through the endless stream of garbage and crap I didn't care about in the slightest. That, and the fact that I was getting really depressed by all the news surrounding brexit, then I would go and read comments and be completely negative about everything, and facebook was just amplifying the negativity tenfold. I just cut the cord and I am now a lot happier without it, facebook is literally a drug,
- rikkus 9y ago
  I shifted to Twitter for a while and eventually kicked that too. I get the HN daily digest email and generally only visit the links from that, though there are exceptions when I'm looking for something interesting over morning coffee (hence replying to this post at this time). I stopped paying attention to the news media years ago. I think I'm pretty much free of the 'need' to look at what's 'new' now. You might think this means I have loads more free time to do more important things. I'm still waiting for that to happen.
  - Theodores 9y ago
    I am at your stage of disconnect and I am thinking of going further. The next step is to wget the things I read on a cron job, piping to dev null.
sasvari 9y ago
If you were a regular user since 2005 and leave now, it does not make any difference anymore. The collected data about you is enough to interpolate your profile for the next decades. Does it really matter if you have been on facebook at all? Even if you never joined, people upload their addressbooks with all of their contacts, they upload pictures of people never been on facebook and tag them (and share other information about everyone, which facebook probably is able to use as well). So essentially facebook builds your social graph no matter if you have ever been a member or not. It does make a difference. Just not to care and to give up is no solution either.
- taftster 9y ago
  Right exactly. I don't have (and have never had) a Facebook account. But I know that they have much more information about me than I would want them to. They most certainly have some sort of "shadow" account sitting there associating whatever they can to it; friends' address books, photo tagging, etc. And if you throw in the Instagram wildcard, it gets worse. I signed up for an Instagram account before Facebook purchasing them. I never posted a photo, but I'm sure this still adds to the reach of their shadow profile. People who actively use both Facebook and Instagram, I feel sorry for them. I do use twitter and google extensively though, so I guess I can't complain or say anything about my social profile. Twitter luckily has a smaller budget, so they can't quite crunch data as hard as Facebook can. But Google owns me, I'm afraid. I'm not (too) scared about NSA. At least, NSA has some sort of government bureaucracy that slows down their ability and interest in my data; they aren't trying to use me for-profit. I think we should be more scared about what Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, et al. can do, especially because they are generally bound to whatever their current (and fungible) terms of service and privacy policy stipulates. [edit] i.e. policies written for the sole benefit of the share-holders.
- ENTP 9y ago
  I read somewhere that Facebook actually buys more personal data than collects. Now that's a scary thought.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
booleandilemma 9y ago
It's never too late. The day you quit FB is the day you reclaim a lot of time you spend on FB. I haven't updated my FB account since I graduated college and it feels great. If FB wants to obsessively and endlessly analyze the profile and posts of my college-self, it's free to do so.
- amelius 9y ago
  Is there a good browser extension that measures how much time one actively spends on various sites?
  - zimpenfish 9y ago
    I use RescueTime (primarily because it integrates with a bunch of other services I use for life-logging) in Firefox - can monitor all sites or just a whitelist. Also supports Chrome, I believe. https://www.rescuetime.com/ https://www.rescuetime.com/
    - exclusiv 9y ago
      What if Facebook (or anyone else) buys data from RescueTime?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
palerdot 9y ago
It is not entirely true that 10 years of past data is enough for fb to draw conclusions on a person. In fact fb is trying more to make people share. You can also try 'tools that fudge info' to confuse fb. If done cleverly, this is a major tool to put fb off the scent. Also, Quitting fb for mental sanity is a worthwhile reason if not privacy
dixonge-2 9y ago
Yes - Mastodon! I've been there a couple of months now and I never go on Twitter any more. Find an instance you like, hang with like-minded people, or dip your toe into the Fediverse stream for a firehose of toots. Yes, toots. You know, like a Mastodon would toot....oh nvm. Any way, it's pretty engaging. Check it out. http://joinmastodon.org http://joinmastodon.org

by grx 9y ago

adrianN 9y ago

> The collected data about you is enough to interpolate your profile for the next decades. Did Facebook recently hire Hari Seldon?

grx 9y ago
Heh, nice reference. Of course I am exaggerating. But IMO people vastly underestimate how similar their own behaviour is to other people. Meaning, if Facebook "knows" me since 12 years (!) it can very precisely categorize me into a group of people. And those other people do not leave Facebook but feed it more information.
- markatkinson 9y ago
  Agreed to a degree, they can probably quite accurately fill in the missing puzzle pieces of your life according to the category you are in. It almost makes me jealous of all the data they have.
- tvanantwerp 9y ago
  Funny how Facebook can have all of this information about me, my preferences, my social groups, etc., and has not once served me a remotely relevant advertisement.
  - yequalsx 9y ago
    I think it most likely has but you currently aren't consciously aware of it. Partly this is due to your desire to make a point. Partly due to our inability to off the top of our heads to recall any but a few specific adverts. We see thousands of them. It is very unlikely that none of them have been relevant to you. There are also the adverts that subconsciously manipulate you. The stuff that you aren't aware of.
    - WorldMaker 9y ago
      There's a bias at work too. The ads in the news feed are slip-streamed, if you aren't constantly on the look out for that gray, barely there "Sponsored" they look like "normal" news feed items and scroll past/through them only really noticing the bad ones. Even worse are the socially slip-streamed ones that started as a Sponsored post in a friend's news feed that they found funny/interesting/whatever and re-shared. Once reshared it loses even that gray, barely there "Sponsored" tag and has "grown up into a real boy" in the news feed. A lot of the mind games in the last election cycle happened because of that (target ads to people susceptible to reshare them and watch them go viral for relatively cheap). Facebook has said they may try to crack down on that sort of thing, but slip-streaming ads is where they make their most money and they don't have enough financial incentive to really fix that.
  - brookside 9y ago
    You want a mail order foam mattress - you must just not know it.
markatkinson 9y ago
Hahaha haven't heard that name for a long time!

gambiting 9y ago

I haven't left because I was concerned about the data they were collecting, I left because I realised that I couldn't stop going on facebook, any time my hands were free I would open up my phone and check the feed, scroll through the endless stream of garbage and crap I didn't care about in the slightest. That, and the fact that I was getting really depressed by all the news surrounding brexit, then I would go and read comments and be completely negative about everything, and facebook was just amplifying the negativity tenfold. I just cut the cord and I am now a lot happier without it, facebook is literally a drug,

rikkus 9y ago
I shifted to Twitter for a while and eventually kicked that too. I get the HN daily digest email and generally only visit the links from that, though there are exceptions when I'm looking for something interesting over morning coffee (hence replying to this post at this time). I stopped paying attention to the news media years ago. I think I'm pretty much free of the 'need' to look at what's 'new' now. You might think this means I have loads more free time to do more important things. I'm still waiting for that to happen.
- Theodores 9y ago
  I am at your stage of disconnect and I am thinking of going further. The next step is to wget the things I read on a cron job, piping to dev null.

sasvari 9y ago

If you were a regular user since 2005 and leave now, it does not make any difference anymore. The collected data about you is enough to interpolate your profile for the next decades. Does it really matter if you have been on facebook at all? Even if you never joined, people upload their addressbooks with all of their contacts, they upload pictures of people never been on facebook and tag them (and share other information about everyone, which facebook probably is able to use as well). So essentially facebook builds your social graph no matter if you have ever been a member or not. It does make a difference. Just not to care and to give up is no solution either.

taftster 9y ago
Right exactly. I don't have (and have never had) a Facebook account. But I know that they have much more information about me than I would want them to. They most certainly have some sort of "shadow" account sitting there associating whatever they can to it; friends' address books, photo tagging, etc. And if you throw in the Instagram wildcard, it gets worse. I signed up for an Instagram account before Facebook purchasing them. I never posted a photo, but I'm sure this still adds to the reach of their shadow profile. People who actively use both Facebook and Instagram, I feel sorry for them. I do use twitter and google extensively though, so I guess I can't complain or say anything about my social profile. Twitter luckily has a smaller budget, so they can't quite crunch data as hard as Facebook can. But Google owns me, I'm afraid. I'm not (too) scared about NSA. At least, NSA has some sort of government bureaucracy that slows down their ability and interest in my data; they aren't trying to use me for-profit. I think we should be more scared about what Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, et al. can do, especially because they are generally bound to whatever their current (and fungible) terms of service and privacy policy stipulates. [edit] i.e. policies written for the sole benefit of the share-holders.
ENTP 9y ago
I read somewhere that Facebook actually buys more personal data than collects. Now that's a scary thought.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

booleandilemma 9y ago

It's never too late. The day you quit FB is the day you reclaim a lot of time you spend on FB. I haven't updated my FB account since I graduated college and it feels great. If FB wants to obsessively and endlessly analyze the profile and posts of my college-self, it's free to do so.

amelius 9y ago
Is there a good browser extension that measures how much time one actively spends on various sites?
- zimpenfish 9y ago
  I use RescueTime (primarily because it integrates with a bunch of other services I use for life-logging) in Firefox - can monitor all sites or just a whitelist. Also supports Chrome, I believe. https://www.rescuetime.com/ https://www.rescuetime.com/
  - exclusiv 9y ago
    What if Facebook (or anyone else) buys data from RescueTime?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

palerdot 9y ago

It is not entirely true that 10 years of past data is enough for fb to draw conclusions on a person. In fact fb is trying more to make people share. You can also try 'tools that fudge info' to confuse fb. If done cleverly, this is a major tool to put fb off the scent. Also, Quitting fb for mental sanity is a worthwhile reason if not privacy

dixonge-2 9y ago

Yes - Mastodon! I've been there a couple of months now and I never go on Twitter any more. Find an instance you like, hang with like-minded people, or dip your toe into the Fediverse stream for a firehose of toots. Yes, toots. You know, like a Mastodon would toot....oh nvm. Any way, it's pretty engaging. Check it out. http://joinmastodon.org http://joinmastodon.org