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Like you I stop actively using FB for about a year now. I've considered deleting the profile but thought that is giving facebook too much importance (I would al
by 627467 9y ago
Like you I stop actively using FB for about a year now. I've considered deleting the profile but thought that is giving facebook too much importance (I would also hate that my grandparents can't find my old photos anymore).
On the other hand I can see why people are treating facebook more like an utility and not a service in a competitive market: the size of its network is now huge and too many people rely on it to receive and propagate information.
The problem with facebook, in my view, is they have (understandably) developed all these tools for you to easily add things to it but make zero meaningful effort to let you (as user) erase things you have place there. After a decade of using facebook, why can't I easily unlike everything I liked? why can't I go and unfollow (massively) "friends" from 10 years ago? why doesn't facebook REALLY delete my content when I tell it to?
I am free to leave facebook or stop using it, but apparently I'm not sure to stop facebook from keep using my old content for eternity. if this was a company that could fold tomorrow, I wouldn't care about this. But its facebook. it's the power company, the water company, the government, and they have my data and does not let me trim it.
Their algorithm acts like a "sad" person who after several desperate and failed attempts at getting my attention to use the service resort to showing my ancient posts/photos to people who are likely to interact with me so that I have to login and use it. It's a sad service.
- Karrot_Kream 9y agoI think what makes me the most angry at Facebook is how impossible it is to liberate your data from Facebook. When you upload information/data to Facebook, you don't own it anymore; Facebook gives you no way to retrieve it. Sure, they offer an archive process which gives you a zip archive of your post history in HTML, but it's not in any format that's easy to parse or process. On top of that, Facebook events are impossible to get off platform because their API does not expose any way to grab them, which keeps event invites and communication completely locked into the platform. I'd be much more sympathetic to letting Facebook run amok if they had an actual story for meaningfully extracting data or interacting with your Facebook network without using their client. Then competitors to Facebook would actually stand a chance. But Facebook makes it as hard as possible to liberate your own data, which shows me that they have no intention on letting you leave once you're in.
- 627467 9y agoI agree, more tools for us to just manage "our" data would be good a sign of good will. But this is not gonna happen. As soon as they do that others will use it to migrate users away. And the quality of the archive they send us is such that it's clear they don't think of the data as "ours".
- willsr 9y agoThe EU is going in the right direction with this, re: the right to data portability in the GDPR. Only way Facebook is going to implement this functionality is when they are forced to.