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#deletefacebook

• gizmogwai 9y ago
  Oh, and don't forget to share our article using the little facebook widget at the bottom...
  • JKCalhoun 9y ago
    (Actually makes sense tho.)
  • kerkeslager 9y ago
    John Biggs can use TechCrunch's platform to deliver his message without necessarily agreeing with everything TechCrunch does (such as advertising for Facebook via those buttons). Additionally, if you're encouraging people to delete Facebook, your target audience is people on Facebook, so...
  • gcatalfamo 9y ago
    How would you tell people on Facebook without sharing on Facebook? :)
    • Slansitartop 9y ago
      That's not a bad idea. From Facebook's perspective, dissatisfied users who delete their accounts are a sort of immune system response. The spread of contagious memes like "Facebook is a pointless, addictive time suck" are contained because those "infected" with them take themselves out of the population. Rather than just deleting your Facebook account, if you spend some time using it to push articles and posts out onto your feed describing your position, then the memetic contagion can spread over Facebook. If enough people do that, it could hasten their collapse (unless they actually manage a heroic effort to successfully address the critics, not just a PR band-aid).
      • bob_theslob646 9y ago
        Most logical comment in the entire thread. Thank you =)
  • Slansitartop 9y ago
    > Oh, and don't forget to share our article using the little facebook widget at the bottom... These kind of comments add no value and rest on incorrect belief that either: 1) authors control the marketing tech stack on the major sites they write for or 2) they can afford to sacrifice audience for their messages, etc. in order to be hyper-picky in order to forestall internet heckles. The truth is that neither of those things are true. Writers will write, activists will get their messages out, and that's their job. Sometimes they will criticize something so ubiquitous that even they can't avoid it totally, but that doesn't make them hypocrites. In fact, criticizing bad things that literally everyone does is the first step towards fixing those things. If stupid insinuations of hypocrisy like yours had any value, it would be impossible to make progress on many fronts.
    • oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
      I generally agree with this point, in the same way that I think that people are far too ready to call "hypocrisy" when the deed that is 'hypocritical' is just a small subset of the original 'evil'. Having said that, I also think it's worthy to highlight the impact of the facebook sharing button, which isn't dealt with in the original article. The point is that it's not enough to say to individuals "don't use facebook"; you're still 'at risk' if you visit a site that uses the sharer widget, even if you don't have a facebook account. As an aside to the aside, techcrunch has to be the first site I've encountered that redirects you when you scroll beyond a certain point of the article, or when you try to search in-page (unless that's a bug, of course).
• thrownaway954 9y ago
  how about #deleteSolcialMedia? it's not just facebook doing this. twitter, pinterest, reddit and countless others do the same. heck... there is even a story today about google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16610088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16610088 and yes, i know some people will say... but that google story is about law enforcement using warrants... which i will counter with, doesn't matter, it shows that these companies don't care about your privacy and will fold in "defending" it when challenged. if you care about your privacy, don't give _any_ company, _any_ information about you, in _any_ way.
  • fibers 9y ago
    what about github lol
    • thrownaway954 9y ago
      i know you meant for that to be funny, but you are correct in a scary way. github has become _the_ place for sharing code and they (as you already have seen multiple times) have no problem in deleting or locking out repos when the first hit of a DCMA gets into their hands (without any verification to the legitimacy of the DCMA mind you).
  • aluhut 9y ago
    The top comment on that story about google points out the main problem: > 2. On multiple recent occasions, police in North Carolina have quietly been successful in obtaining search warrants that force Google to turn over these records. Rather than "standard" search warrants asking for the location of a particular suspect in a crime, these "reverse" or "area based" warrants ask for time and location data for all users who have entered a geographical area during a time of interest. The records returned are initially anonymous account numbers, and the police then make followup requests for identifying information of the subset of accounts that they think are of interest to the case. Sure you can delete your account on reddit. They'll still track you as if you have one just like the facebook buttons or all those creative new tracking shit we regularly read about here. In the end, you don't have to be an extremist. Just don't post everything and keep in mind that you are being tracked. This is the internet for you today.
• JKCalhoun 9y ago
  Worth noting. Some users have found they are unable to delete their Facebook account because, when they are asked to enter their password on the final screen, FB says the password is incorrect. Seems FB has a bug where you must enter your password in all lower case on the final screen. Imagine, big company like FB, having still not caught that bug....
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • inetknght 9y ago
    Actually, that's intended behavior. https://security.stackexchange.com/a/68014/47800 https://security.stackexchange.com/a/68014/47800
    • oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
      That's fascinating. Couldn't they just detect the caps lock being on and warn the user instead?
      • inetknght 9y ago
        That certainly makes more sense for desktop users. But remember the UX dark pattern for mobile touch screen devices: default is to capitalize the first letter of every sentence. On particularly old devices even in password fields have this. No caps-lock key on many of those keyboards. And, no warning that the shift key has been single-key or perma-pressed.
    • thisacctforreal 9y ago
      They can accomplish that feature using 3 separate hashes for various common mistakes, and it will still accept the normal case, but what GP is describing is that only a lowercase version of the password will work for account deletion.
• replicatorblog 9y ago
  I must be part of an A/B test where I only see baby pictures from friends and family, updates from local businesses, and videos of cool construction equipment from TechInsider. Facebook, Twitter, and other social channels could improve on the margin, but realistically, the problem with social is us. Ask friends and family to go back to sharing their unhinged political views in the form of badly punctuated emails, as God intended. If they continue to share, unfollow. Social media can be as polarizing or as pleasant as you make it. Foisting blame on Facebook might feel good, but it won't solve the problem.
  • creep 9y ago
    This is true. The psychological effects of anything are due to how one uses it. It doesn't matter how addictive something is made to be because a good deal of the addiction is psychological. Opioids are very addictive, but most hospital patients don't use outside of the hospital after their pain has been treated. It's because their pain is not psychological. People can become addicted to Facebook, and yes it was designed to be this way, but I can use Facebook for the purpose I intend if only I am self-aware and know my limits and can stay within those limits. It's really like anything you can do-- anything. The threshold is defined by the person. The absolutist claim that anything is 100% bad is dangerous and false. The tools we make and use are defined by us individually. The "mob" is the collection of people in certain echo chambers, and I'm sorry but if those people don't realize they're in an echo chamber, it's not the fault of the tools. We can't be going around limiting everything because the majority don't know how to use it. The majority will always be that way-- though I will note that I think this "mob" majority are better-equipped psychologically with each passing generation.
  • cryptoz 9y ago
    > the problem with social is us. No. Facebook proudly does specific psychological experiments on its users. Facebook intentionally decides that it will make some users sad or depressed, just to see if it can. And it can. And it is proud of it. Facebook is proud that it knows how to make you depressed, so much so that they published a paper describing how they made hundreds of thousands of their users fall into a depression. Facebook is a fucking poison. The problem is not with us. The problem is with large scale propaganda networks and centrally-controlled social networks with misaligned incentives. The problem is Facebook and the core problem is the structure and incentives of corporations in our current not-well-enough-regulated capitalism.
• soared 9y ago
  > None of that will happen Why not? My grandparents love looking through old photo albums. I don't see why I couldn't do the same with Facebook. > It’s an advertiser’s dream and it is wildly expensive in terms of privacy lost and cash spent to steal that privacy. A few problems with this. Op dates users freely gave away their data, but now advertisers are stealing it? The same sentence can be said about the internet as a whole - but most people believe the benefits are worth it and op hasn't proved we don't get benefits from Facebook. Lastly.. the article assumes allowing advertisers to use your data is inherently evil. I'm not arguing either way, but it's never explained. Lots of people believe that to be true, but I don't think you can just call advertisers "the devil" without an explanation. Why is op harmed by data collection (outside of nonsensical hypthotheticals, like getting his house robbed when he posts that he's on vacation?)
  • aluhut 9y ago
    > I don't see why I couldn't do the same with Facebook. Because it very likely won't be there anymore. Your grandparents had full control over their photo albums. You have nothing. > Op dates users freely gave away their data, but now advertisers are stealing it? The same sentence can be said about the internet as a whole - but most people believe the benefits are worth it Most people don't grasp the _extend_ of what they give to the advertisers. Not even in the slightest way. They still think that as long as they don't fill out a questionnaire, "they" won't know. Or what I give to Facebook, stays with Facebook and so on. > Lots of people believe that to be true, but I don't think you can just call advertisers "the devil" without an explanation. Their sneaky methods, lack of information and the whole attention stealing industry it is, is bad. Just the basic normal ad on the street is already exploiting us. The digital versions are even able to infect our tools. It's an uncontrolled mess. An anarchy of people who don't give a damn because they can. We'll never know the full extend of misuse happening with our data on daily bases. I don't see a reason to trust them. Do you?
    • soared 9y ago
      Yeah Facebook might not be around, but I'm sure there is an app that will archive everything so you could store it locally. I don't understand your view though - you believe billboards are an exploiting everyone who sees them? That would mean all advertising should be stopped. I think many people, you included, misunderstand the economic benefit of advertising. It enables commerce that wouldn't take place if it was gone. If a Spotify competitor started out today with zero advertising it would never make it - how would you hear about it? How would anyone learn about it? I work in digital advetising and see no reason to distrust the industry. Nobody is abusing data about you.. you are tossed into groups that contains millions of people similar to you. No advertisers cares who you are, about any of your data, any of your Facebook posts. They care that you just bought a razor and might want to try their new shaving cream. I'm not sure what you mean by sneaky methods, but it's as simple as you visited a website or talked online about shaving, so now they know you're interested in shaving. Basic text analysis is most of it. Edit - very true that most people don't understand it. But then again most people don't understand anything they use daily (the internet, any app, etc).
• sysbell 9y ago
  That's one diddle that can't be undone. Does the author really think deleting his old posts is going to somehow cover all the cached copies of his data? Not to mention all the little picadillos in the metadata Axiom has on him that they gleaned from said data? Articles like this make me fear for tech journalism.
  • bunderbunder 9y ago
    It can't necessarily be undone, but if you're among the people who is skeeved out by surveillance capitalism, you can at least try to reduce future level of exposure going forward. Also, if you're worried about the long-term psychological impact of social media, with all its dark patterns designed to get you to spend more and more time distracted by their sites and apps, then all you really have to do there is switch the distractions off. Deleting one's Facebook account isn't the only way to do that, but it's certainly an effective option.
• athenot 9y ago
  > Facebook simply replaced the tools we once used to tell the world of our joys and sorrows and it replaced them with cheap knock-offs that make us less connected, not more. This resonnates with what I've been observing. Instead of birthday card, a call or even a text message, we now simply write a note on someone's wall, between two out-of-context thoughts. It's the path of least resistance. Like fast food, it takes a bit of effort to fight, until the brain hijack starts to fade and new purposeful habits are formed (or reinstated). Working on it but not there yet... :(
• eptakilo 9y ago
  30 years from now, candidates for president of the United States will have their old social media posts under a microscope. Whatever dumb thing they posted in their teens will be brought to light. It's probably going to raise a lot of discussions about what constitutes normal human behavior. We might finally stop pretending they are perfect humans. After realizing that everyone, even future politicians post stupid things, We probably will stop caring about online privacy. It might also be a bad thing because society would expect oversharing as the norm and would consider anyone who doesn't put their private lives on display, to be hiding something. Either way social media is here to stay. But it will change, this is version 1.
  • pat_space 9y ago
    I have no passcode on my phone. I don't expect privacy anymore.
  • martin-adams 9y ago
    I see it like a credit report. Have a bad credit report, it makes you look bad. Have no credit report, it means you're a risk because there is no data on your behaviour. As the world leans in to using social as a form of credit check, we will have to learn the right way to use it for a very different purpose than it was designed for.
    • acobster 9y ago
      I also see it like a credit report, but for a different reason: some companies make money by recording your activity and selling your data. They use their profits to corner the market and create an oligopoly so powerful that people just accept it as a fact of life. Finally, when people realize the power they've given these companies and the danger they're in (see: Equifax), they are outraged, but the companies are basically an institution at this point.
    • VLM 9y ago
      Legacy TV during non-prime time is full of commercials about credit cleaning services and similar; perhaps that's the future of social media. I would be willing to pay a modest sum of money to a startup willing to provide bland and inoffensive social media "filler" content. This is already the norm for celebrities, but at some point it can be automated for the masses. Give me a giant list of checkboxes to select the message I'd like to provide to corporate data miners, then I never have to be bothered with facebook again...
• andypi 9y ago
  I deleted my Facebook account in 2012. Haven't missed it. Let's hope this poor soul can finally be brave enough to find the close account button. Might not even need to write a script to do that.
  • staplers 9y ago
    When I deactivated my account about 4 years ago, I thought it would impact my life more than it did. I have actually strengthened my friendships and moved quickly up in my career as a result of deleting most social media. Social media is like the dessert of the internet. Use it sparingly.
    • logfromblammo 9y ago
      I log on to Facebook twice a year, to let people know that I'm still alive, and to delete older posts and tags. My concern is that if I shut down my account completely, someone else--possibly Facebook itself--could credibly impersonate me on the platform and thus use the idea of me as a means to target my friends and acquaintances that use it more frequently.
  • smpetrey 9y ago
    Agreed. I deleted my account 2 weeks ago and haven't looked back either. Instagram on the other hand is still one of my favorite ways to share photos with my friends. I think the facebook(.com) product has some serious soul-searching to do and if they continue to ignore their monumental problem -- it will not end well for them, nor their stockholders.
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
    I deleted mine around the same time, but it was easy for me because a) I was pressured into having one in the first place by work colleagues, and 2) I don't actually have much of a social network. The few months I spent with FB was like most human social interaction is to me: vapid, meaningless, and utterly tedious. My understanding, though, is that others don't have this same experience with real life social interaction, so might not as easily notice how much FB amplifies it.
• jdbiggs 9y ago
  Hey folks, John Biggs here. I wrote this as a reaction to reason news and it comes at the end of a slow boil. I think we can make better tools than this one and I believe Facebook - and other social media - were originally quite useful and have now devolved due to market pressure. I'm definitely a hypocrite, as well. I still use most things to _broadcast_ not communicate and that's primarily because I've spent 20 years journalizing and am used to the constant, one-sided flow of information. That said I deleted all social apps except for Twitter and, for some masochistic reason, LinkedIn and am ready to tear it all out of my life step by step. It's a poison.
  • edibleEnergy 9y ago
    Hi John, just an FYI: if you have Facebook Messenger installed on your phone, you are probably giving Facebook a lot more data than you think.
    • rybosome 9y ago
      Can you provide any additional detail about that? I can’t tell if you’re referring to FB mining the contents of the messages, or the app doing unscrupulous things in the background.
      • netsharc 9y ago
        The NSA says they only monitor communication metadata. But that's already a lot of information. Let's imagine a scenario where FB can't read your messages, so it doesn't know what you talk about. But if you talk to people who are mostly Trump critics according to their Facebook activity, Facebook can probably categorize you as a liberal. If you added a new friend of the appropriate gender for dating, and your communication intensifies, Facebook can probably guess what's going on. If it intensified and goes quiet some evenings (predominantly weekend evenings), well, guess who's seeing each other (each guess come with probability percentages).
      • wongmjane 9y ago
        Facebook Messenger on Android can read call log
• debaserab2 9y ago
  Does anyone know if deleting posts and likes actually removes the post from Facebook? Even if it does, what’s the likelihood it hasn’t already been sold and a shadow profile of ourselves exists with facebooks marketing partners in a place where we can’t reach the delete button?
  • intopieces 9y ago
    I think the best thing it's for is sending a message to Facebook. They surely have statistics on post deletion. It's one thing to just stop using Facebook or delete your account using their (hard to find) mechanism. It's another to systematically delete, post-by-post, your contribution.
  • notthemessiah 9y ago
    Not really. In some countries, you can submit a request to download everything facebook knows about you, and for deleted posts, it just toggles a flag that removes it from public view instead of removing it from the database. https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/10/20/law-student-triggers-22-legal-complaints-and-likely-audit-of-facebook/ https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/10/20/law-student-trig...
• ixtli 9y ago
  "Until we find them, however, it’s probably better for us to delete the ones we use today." This is a really dangerous, reactionary notion. If there's something inherent in our social formations that are translating themselves into our public spaces and we are unhappy with, let's work to change them together. This is a thoughtful piece and I think there are great reasons to delete your posts from long ago because, well, people change! Other commenters here have made good supporting arguments for this. But we must be very, very careful not to demonize tools where their users need to be taken into consideration: unless there is something specific about facebook, unique among other social networks, that is toxic (this may be the case!) then we need to be wary of these arguments because they are very easy to apply to all social media which, imo, is a copout.
  • kimdcmason 9y ago
    Why is it a dangerous notion? For the sake of argument, if everyone went completely over the top and deleted all their social media accounts, the world would go back to looking like it did around 2006. A few corporations would go broke. A few other corporations values would increase. Mass psy-ops would become more difficult and expensive. Doesn't sound dangerous at all to me.
    • ixtli 9y ago
      So in the extreme case that you're talking about it's not dangerous in any way I can think of at the moment. One of the big reasons I called it dangerous was that the effect only a portion of the users leaving the platform is dangerous and more subtle. To my eye, it's a social critique which leads to people who agree with it voluntarily removing themselves from the 21st century version of the "public square." I worry that this leads to disenfranchisement on their part as I've seen such isolation result in those feelings. I guess the spirit of my claim is that the shape of group conversation will always come to resemble the cultural context of that conversation, regardless of the medium. While the medium can and should be critiqued, calling for total abstention from the medium is effectively self-censorship and I don't think that'll lead to the desired result.
• rambossa 9y ago
  Where do I share photo albums and keep up with friends?
  • 908087 9y ago
    You can create these things called websites, and use the incredible telephone or messaging apps like Signal (or even, gasp, meet in person).
• ishanjain28 9y ago
  I would like to share my experience here because I think it was creepy on their part. I only had <50 friends after 2015 on my facebook account. So, I would get notifications 1-2 times every week, "X is new to facebook, Since he is new to facebook, You should introduce him to more friends", Problem is, 1. I have no clue who X is! Sometimes I found that X lived in the same city that I lived in, Sometimes there was no visible co-relation. 2. X was automatically added to my friends list without my permission! On several occassions, There were some people who were added as my friend but I couldn't find them on my friends list. The only way I figured they were my friends was when I received a notification and then visited their profile. On 5-10 occassions every month, facebook will randomly send friend requests to people I don't even know and then some day I am just browsing and I get a notification that "Y has accepted your friend request" and I just couldn't recall sending friend request to that person. So, Yeah, They were literally forcing me to be friends with people I don't even know, presumably, because I never clicked on ads and if I have less friends, That just means there is little activity in my circle and there is little information they can collect about me, IDK. Whenever this happened, I usually took a screenshot, It probably doesn't do a solid job of proving my claim but it's something. And before someone here starts running down a list of possible things that might have happened, Like someone hacked into my account, apps that had access to my account etc. I just want to say, I was a member of official 2600 magzine group, I posted all of this multiple times there and they did helped me a lot to prevent me from a lot of ways that someone might be accessing my account. I followed everything and it 6 months later it still didn't stop.
  • jgh 9y ago
    I've definitely seen some weirdness happen with FB.. like I was following a favorite band of mine for a number of years, but suddenly they were gone from my list of follows and some photographer that had taken pictures for them somehow replaced them. Very weird.
  • beagle3 9y ago
    If you are the only person seeing this behaviour, it is likely a bug in their system. Many ages ago, on one of the most popular mail and news systems of the day, it turned out that myself and another person both managed to register the same username, each with a different password, but were assigned to the same account. After a couple of weeks in which each of us would log in, see the changes the other did, undo them, change our own password, and mail the abuse team (which kept replying "no, we see that you did it yourself on xxxx"), we both realized what had happened, and started talking by emailing ourselves. Eventually, the other guy left the account to me (I had it for 2 years when he managed to register it). It could just be a bug, rather than malice.
• singularity2001 9y ago
  recently on HN: #deleteUber had no lasting effect
• zerostar07 9y ago
  People don't just delete stuff, they replace them. Give them something new.
• VikingCoder 9y ago
  Is there a reasonable, open-source, distributed Facebook alternative? I presume built on top of RSS / Atom / something feeds that are available only on authentication (so I can share with limited sets of people.) I presume I have to keep running a server to host content. Maybe I can host encrypted content for my friends, too? So, federated. Maybe it even makes it easy for me to bill them, if the costs are prohibitive? I'm pretty sure I'd want an Android App to talk to it. The Android app would talk to all of the servers that host my friends' contents. It doesn't let me share with "Friends of Friends" directly. My friends would have to Reshare, I guess. And then I guess I can't interact with them. Not sure how I want conversations to work. It'd be hard for me to offer a server to my friends, without me having access to their social data. Maybe everyone needs their own server?
  • geogra4 9y ago
    Diaspora?
  • zaarn 9y ago
    I don't think everyone needs their own facebook server (or diaspora in this case). I'm more in favor of the federated approach where a couple people run servers for their community (I run a server for a fandom community I participate in regularly). People that use my server play by my house rules, if they don't like that they can pick another server or run their own.
  • NoGravitas 9y ago
    Diaspora[0] and Hubzilla[1] exist, but never really caught on for various reasons, possibly nothing more than that they came out too soon. There is a project to build a Facebook replacement that federates with ActivityPub[2], which would make it to Facebook what Mastodon[3] is to Twitter. However, I don't want to link it because it's in too early a stage to face HN levels of scrutiny. There is also Patchwork[4], a peer-to-peer social application built on top of the Secure Scuttlebutt Protocol. It doesn't have all the features you'd want yet, but ticks off the boxes some people care about. [0]: https://diasporafoundation.org/ https://diasporafoundation.org/ [1]: https://project.hubzilla.org/page/hubzilla/hubzilla-project https://project.hubzilla.org/page/hubzilla/hubzilla-project [2]: https://activitypub.rocks/ https://activitypub.rocks/ [3]: https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/ [4]: https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork
• jordache 9y ago
  the author assumes deleting his data via facebook api actually deletes it?
• zaarn 9y ago
  I'm without facebook account for almost a decade by now, I deleted it very early on. I never really missed it. (Faceboook still sends me stalker/spam mails)
• breakpointalpha 9y ago
  I've been Social Sober for 20 days now. I didn't delete any content from FB, since I had been using a fake name on there for 5 years. I just deactivated the account and haven't logged back in since. I honestly haven't noticed much of a difference in my life. I still work all day, come home and watch Netflix or play my Switch. It's ok to not "know" what's happening. Just do it!
  • jgh 9y ago
    I did the same with my facebook account last fall. I haven't missed it either. I admit I still use instagram and messenger though. I think most people on my facebook list had pretty much stopped using it regularly anyway, it was basically all ads by the time I left. Twitter I never really used to start with, its primary use-case for me is I'm walking around somewhere and something's going on and i search Twitter to see if someone who knows more about it than me has mentioned anything. Although even that use-case has gotten pretty hit-or-miss recently.
• adam12 9y ago
  > Facebook is using us. It's funny how people are just now realizing this.
• julienchastang 9y ago
  So far this thread has not mentioned the Cambridge Analytica scandal. I recommend watching this clip from the PBS NewsHour: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-a-data-analytics-firm-allegedly-weaponized-facebook-to-swing-votes-in-2016 https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-a-data-analytics-firm-.... To quote from the clip "Cambridge Analytica went to Facebook and said we’re conducting academic research with this app. Facebook apparently said O.K. and didn’t do a lot of diligence and through that, because they were able to get sort of the direct access from the people who installed the quiz app and then gather all the information from the friends of the people that had installed the app and that includes likes, you know their various posts, the pages that they subscribe to, just a ton of information. They were able to gather really detailed profile information on 50 million Americans." The quiz was only a ruse to obtain much more valuable information. Sure FB recently ended their relationship with Cambridge Analytica, but they have probably known about this for months. There's a lot of anger at FB these days and deservedly so.
• jcsnv 9y ago
  How can you delete Facebook if you've become so reliant on its Oauth for login? I'm just dreading migrating all of those logins
  • barce 9y ago
    If you go here https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications you can see all your logins. You can migrate each login, one by one, using an app like 1Password to generate new passwords that you don't have to remember.
  • gregknicholson 9y ago
    > I like that Facebook is now a glorified version of OAuth I don't. One company should not have the power to decide whether I should be recognised as a legitimate individual or not, and they should not act as a gatekeeper between me and my online identity. I don't care how benevolent that one company genuinely is. If an intermediary is necessary (like an email provider for mere mortals), I should be able to choose a service provider.
  • julioneander 9y ago
    Some services/apps may be able to transfer stuff to a new account. When I deactivated my Facebook account, I had Spotify linked to it. I created a new Spotify account with an email and contacted their support to transfer everything to the new account and deactivate the old one, it was quick and worked flawlessly.
• swlkr 9y ago
  I haven’t had a Facebook account for years, sometimes the grass really is greener on the other side
• alkonaut 9y ago
  I think it's too useful a tool for managing my social network to delete. Event planning, group chats etc are actually pretty HARD to organize without something like it. The impressive bit is the reach. Even my non technical friends and relatives know it. I try to suggest people just stop giving facebook their information. Don't share anything, don't like anything, absolutely never install "apps" or click ads. Avoid facebook as a sign on provider to other sites. Use good privacy tools in your browser and never hit fb "like" buttons on another site. Avoid linking your accounts to facebook from other applications (instagram, spotify, ...). I'd love to see a browser plugin that did all this that I could recommend to friends and relatives. A plugin that simply made a visit to facebook completely useless to facebook.
  • wheresvic1 9y ago
    Try ghostery
    • Pingk 9y ago
      I would recommend Privacy Badger over Ghostery - It's made by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (non-profit) and is open source. Ghostery is proprietary and still collects & sells your data.
  • dade_ 9y ago
    I got rid of Facebook years ago. Finding a useful app for planning an event is very difficult, but just using email works fine. I just use calendar invites and I follow up with chat / SMS if needed. I can't think of any reason FB is better for chat than any other platform, but SMS group chat is available as a last resort.
  • Zelphyr 9y ago
    Maybe you're in a different situation than me but I can easily round up all of my friends with a few phone calls. "Hey Tony. I'm planning a party on the first at 6:00pm. Would you mind letting Sue and Mark know they're invited?" That also easily works by email and text if I insist on using technology. Humans have been organizing into social groups and gatherings for tens of thousands of years without the aid of technology. Why is it all of a sudden people feel like they're incapable of socializing in any form without the likes of Facebook? I apologize if my candor is overly blunt, but your comment is an excuse to continue your addiction. Nothing more.
• wybiral 9y ago
  Turns out that deleting your account doesn't stop them from tracking you on every website you visit that uses their code.
  • bradleyankrom 9y ago
    Privacy Badger, Ghostery plugins are wonderful for curtailing this.
• a_imho 9y ago
  Consider obfuscating the profile before deleting the account. Whatever delete means in facebook terms.
• LinuxBender 9y ago
  I was talked into creating a FB account by some friends a long time ago. I found that I was losing respect for my friends, as it brought out the parts of them I did not want to know about. I also noticed a disturbing pattern straight away. FB was pushing these little games at me. The questions in each of the little games were nearly identical to the questions in psych and personality tests I was required to take in the military. To the best of my knowledge FB does not have the clearance for this data, so I deleted my FB account and blocked their domains. AFAIK, I have not really missed out on anything important by not being a member of that system.
• MBCook 9y ago
  Another good thing to look at is Josh Constine’s article: https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/18/move-fast-and-fake-things/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/18/move-fast-and-fake-things/
• ibdf 9y ago
  Clickbait much? The writer is struggling to delete his facebook account? "Will you delete Facebook? Probably not. Will I? I’m working on it." So much drama. I can help: How to delete fb account: https://www.facebook.com/help/250563911970368?helpref=hc_global_nav https://www.facebook.com/help/250563911970368?helpref=hc_glo... You can also download your data before deleting it: https://www.facebook.com/help/1701730696756992/?helpref=hc_fnav https://www.facebook.com/help/1701730696756992/?helpref=hc_f... I will delete mine when you delete yours: https://www.facebook.com/johnbiggs https://www.facebook.com/johnbiggs
  • barce 9y ago
    So this doesn't really work. You think you deleted it, but when you "re-activate" your account, there are backups that bring back most of the data from the starting date of your account to just before you deleted it - plus or minus a day.
    • bradleyankrom 9y ago
      Also, a) they never really, truly delete your profile (mine, which I deleted in 2013, is still present in some form) and b) one or more shadow profiles will probably pop up, at least giving the impression that you are still on FB.
  • adtac 9y ago
    Pretty sure Facebook's "delete" is just a Boolean toggle called isDeleted with everything else unchanged. But I guess this is the best we have.
    • jm1234567890 9y ago
      Will GDPR change this?
      • politician 9y ago
        It will absolutely change how Facebook treats EU citizens; otherwise, they risk extremely large financial penalties. May 25th is GDPR Day. The day when you can withdraw consent to be tracked, stored, or processed by businesses with dealings in Europe. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/nightmare-letter-subject-access-request-under-gdpr-karbaliotis/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/nightmare-letter-subject-acce... EDIT: To clarify, GDPR applies to citizens of EU member states globally.
• throwaway84742 9y ago
  Whoever organized this coordinated hatchet job, thank you guys for the opportunity to buy FB at a discount. Keep up the good job.
• ashelmire 9y ago
  I deleted my facebook a few months ago. It's been great. I've spent a lot more time studying new things since I did. I feel cut off from the most toxic people I know and toxicity in general, which is also great. I still use instagram, which has become a more negative experience lately as ads have increased. Hoping an alternative to that pops up sometime soon - I use it now because I have a performance hobby where it's heavily used by my friends in the community. Never really got into any other social media. Have a LinkedIn where I get annoyed by recruiters but don't post or do anything useful, don't use twitter.
• hokus 9y ago
  start by deleting all applications that have access to your information. https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications You thought setting things to private kept them private?
• carlosvega 9y ago
  Is there any way to batch delete posts in FB?
• niwde 9y ago
  Stop using Facebook. Your future self will thank you for it.
  • 908087 9y ago
    I'm scared for the children who were born into families that started selling them out to Facebook the day they were born. They've permanently had the ability to choose whether or not they want Facebook to have a permanent record of their life taken from them.
• aembleton 9y ago
  How do you know that `Social Book Post Manager` isn't scraping all of your data and sending it to some third party server?
• temp-dude-87844 9y ago
  Your adversaries can always do more harm with information than friends can do good. This is because information "warfare" is fundamentally asymmetric: one incident, presented a particular way and targeted to a particular group can do great harm: someone somewhere will take offense to what you did or what you said, if a certain actor facilitates the travel of information to paint you in a bad light. Look no further than Twitter, whose functionality is effectively tailor-made for this behavior. Facebook's original purpose stems from a time of naïveté: put all your interests and factoids about you here, where you can be yourself. As if anyone would use any of this to market you products, target you political ads, toy with your emotions by running A/B tests on your feed, or dox you to grief you in real life -- right? So you pare down your friend list, you put your best face forward on Insta, keep your silly stuff on Snap, move your chats to WhatsApp, at which point your Facebook is nothing more than meme reposts, a rolodex of your acquaintances, and that one relative who always picks a fight with your friends on your political reblogs, yet you can't delete them because you have to see them at Thanksgiving. Your feed is 60% ads, but you don't care, because all posts are out of order, so you can scroll down until stuff looks vaguely familiar, then x out and return in a few hours when you're bored. The author's points ring true, but Facebook is already past its prime, infested by overcommercialization, and no more harmful to the average person than the fifty thousand Google cookies they carry with them from their Android to their browsing with Chrome, or Amazon's uncanny ability to show ads for the exact thing you looked up from a different device yesterday. People deride the filter bubble, but what's the alternative; your private space full of people's stuff you can't stand?
• 3chelon 9y ago
  > In fact, I would wager I use Facebook more to broadcast my ego than interact with real humans You don't say?
• medyadaily 9y ago
  I have a personal story from inside facebook to share. 5 years ago Facebook recruiter reached out to me and invited me to the W hotel in Chicago. I was very excited -not for the job- but for the opportunity to meet with senior Facebook managers and tell them about an evil thing Facebook does. Here is the background story: I am Kurdish from Iran. And Iran has many provinces. one of them is called Kurdistan. In Facebook profile section for Hometown you could pick all of the Iranian provinces except Kurdistan. And at first I thought it was a bug. For years and years we submitted bug reports and collected petitions for Facebook they never responded why the Kurdistan province cannot be picked while other provinces could be picked. Till one day, An internal document -guidance- leaked out of Facebook. That explained it all ! One of the pages was talking about Kurdistan. In which they had explained any reference to Kurdistan is considered terrorism. That was on the request of Turkish government. In "Turkey", the word Kurdistan is forbidden. and many people in Turkey been prisoned for speaking Kurdish. however in "Iran" we officially have a province called "Kurdistan Province). and Iranian government recognizes the name Kurdistan for my homeland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provinces_of_Iran https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provinces_of_Iran But Facebook decided to enforce the Turkish government racist rule on other countries that have Kurdistan (Iran, Iraq, Syria...) Also in that leaked guidance memo. Kurdistan flag was considered illegal. And hundreds of Kurdish pages and accounts got banned for having Kurdistan flag. While Kurdish flag is illegal in Turkey. Kurdish flag is officially recognized in the Constitution of Iraq for Kurdistan regional government. So when they invited me to W Hotel to recruit me. I was like yes finally I can meet the people in person. Because as a Kurd I have no importance and they will never respond to me but a software engineer I am pretty attractive on the market. So I asked the question from one of the managers. And told them my story this for years and years I send them emails and nobody got back to me and we made petitions about this so-called bug. He said these things are decided by higher management. I told him how often do you show this disagreement to higher managers or Mark Zuckerburg's policies if you have a different opinion. He responded if I disagree with them I wouldn't work there. I left the W Hotel in Chicago 5 years ago refusing to proceed with a job on FB. I knew Facebook is on the wrong path. And today I see that prediction coming true. Even today when Turkey committed a massacre in Kurdish city of Afrin, Facebook blocked many voices inside the city who were showing massacres by Turkish government. 10 years ago FB came after kurds and you said not my problem. Today they are coming after all of us
• socratesone 9y ago
  Does anyone have a script or app that can go in and delete every post I've ever made? Google turns up a few Chrome plugins that all look dubious. Be great to have an authoritative guide to deleting everything without fully deactivating Facebook (since there is still a lot of utility in it w/r/t rolodex, event planning)
  • hellofunk 9y ago
    If you read the article, the actual tools to do what you say are linked from within it.
  • StavrosK 9y ago
    I saw the one in the post, but it's a Chrome extension. I think this will be very useful for me, so I'm going to write a very simple one (basically you just log in with FB/Twitter/whatever) and it deletes every post older than what you specify. It's going to live at https://forgetme.stavros.io/ https://forgetme.stavros.io/, if you want to take a look later on to see how far I've gotten. Hopefully, deleting posts will be doable from the APIs, and the app will be feasible. I expect I'll have a useful app up in a day or two.
    • socratesone 9y ago
      Excellent - would love to test out when you are done
      • StavrosK 9y ago
        Bah, it looks like most platforms won't let you delete stuff through the API (of course). I'm going to look for some alternative method.
        • steindavidb 9y ago
          I did this by running a sikuliX script. Took about 5 minutes a day for a week to iron out all corner cases it got stuck on.
• carrja99 9y ago
  Facebook and twitter are trash.
• amingilani 9y ago
  Off topic, has anyone noticed the really cool thing that happens when you scroll too far below this article? You end up at techcrunch.com, as in the homepage. I made a gif if you missed this or are on another type of device.[1] I'm curious about how they did this. [1]: https://cl.ly/qFLY https://cl.ly/qFLY
  • 282883392 9y ago
    Not exactly the same, but here's a javascript plugin that can add more content to the bottom of the page as you scroll down. https://infinite-scroll.com/ https://infinite-scroll.com/
• yoodenvranx 9y ago
  Has anyone ever done an analysis which compares the "social media" in the book "Ender's Game" to our current social media? I haven't read the book in a few years but if I remember correctly there was some sort of global discussion forum / social media which was used to steer political and social discussion. Ender and his siblings wrote tons of articles under pseudonyms and became quite influential. 15-20 years ago this might have sounded like a viable way to do global communications but looking at the current click-baity social media with all its Fake News it looks like we are very far away from a viable system.
  • teddyh 9y ago
    If I recall correctly, Ender’s Game basically assumed that the future would be like Usenet Netnews.
• optimusrex 9y ago
  The idea that posts made by future politicians when they were young will come back to haunt them is a valid one. The example that because Trump was able to escape using the "locker room talk" excuse will work for other I believe is a falsity. The pendulum in politics will shift back towards more reasonable candidates who will need to explain for any skeletons dug up from their social media or Facebook thumbprint. As an early adopter of Facebook, I knew from the beginning not to post anything too outrageous as it could all be made public at some point despite any privacy conditions. I would expect any future hopeful politicians would have the same common sense. Facebook will live on.
• IanDrake 9y ago
  > It is creating an echo chamber It’s more likely the author created his own echo chamber. My Facebook friends span the political spectrum 70% liberal and the rest some degree of conservative. I would venture to say, 99% of political post come from my liberal friends. Some of which I will comment on, most of the time I get responses that aren’t logical and mostly insinuate I’m not a good person because I disagree. For those people, I usually just remove from my feed. Not because I don’t care for their politics, but because they only want a one way conversation. That is how an echo chamber is created and it’s their own doing, not Facebooks.
• Myrmornis 9y ago
  I’m very down on Facebook nowadays. But because of the way it’s algorithms interfere in my communication with friends: I don’t know who will be shown what message. So they aren’t messages, they are “contributing content”. So it’s not commmunication. But I don’t get all this obsession with privacy. I’m just not interesting enough for that to be a concern.
• kbuchanan 9y ago
  Ten years ago when Facebook was gaining momentum, I chose to stay away, and remain so today. In recent years a new mantra has emerged: "I wish we could live without Facebook, but that's not practical anymore." Not true. It is practical, and infinitely more desirable. Social media was never a meaningful way to present ourselves to the public or interact with others.
• teilo 9y ago
  I did this to all my social media accounts and all personally identifiable information on them. No pictures, no dates, locations, etc.. They now exist for messaging and group participation, and nothing else.
• Froyoh 9y ago
  For some reason nothing on my FB feed it's from my friends anymore. Just news articles.
• fiatjaf 9y ago
  Even if Facebook was perfect and did everything everyone is expecting from it, would it be worth losing, say, 2 hours everyday on chat and discussions with friends? With 2 hours every day you could become a master in any art or technique.
• munificent 9y ago
  There's something I never see talked about in all of these discussions around social media. There is the old refrain "If you didn't pay for it, you aren't the customer, you're the product." But I don't see people talking about that mantra as a useful tool. We all rushed to use Facebook. We put our data on their servers, we uploaded our photos and watched them get resized, stored, and served. We use a service that costs actual money to run and paid them zero dollars. Sure, they served ads, but we've all learned to completely tune those out when it comes to being persuaded to actually buy stuff, so that revenue stream isn't enough to keep the lights on. That doesn't leave Facebook and similar companies with too many other options. I'm not saying they are innocent, but it seems to me that much of this behavior — data mining users, selling ads to the rich to enable them to influence elections, etc. — is a predictable outcome from incentives we put in place by our collective behavior. If Facebook didn't do this shady stuff, they'd run out of money and get replaced by another company that did. In the cutthroat natural selection environment of the market, only businesses that make money — by any means possible — survive. I'm sure I'm naïve and missing something, but it makes me sad that the obvious solution hasn't manifested — pay for stuff. A version of Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc. that had a monthly subscription fee would have less incentive to extract value from user data because they are already extracting money directly from their users. I miss the days when Reddit just had Reddit gold. I suppose the answer to my supposition is that companies would do both. If you have the data, why not also pimp it out even if your users are already paying you. And, at that point, the goal becomes maximum users, which is gated by subscription costs, so those fees get driven to zero and here we are. But I do wish a simpler business model where people pay for things they use could be successful and properly incentivize companies to act in our interests. Given that in a capitalist market, businesses fully expand all the way up to the boundary of the letter of the law (and often past that), I suppose there's little left to do but try to get strong regulations passed and vigorously enforced. Given the fundmental network effects of social media, competition — the primary user-beneficient force in capitalism — is completely ineffective. Absent that, I think all we're left with is the law.
• master_yoda_1 9y ago
  I deleted Facebook 5 years ago. In earlier days technology used to increase productivity but now technology reduces productivity, Facebook is one of the productivity killer.
• kimdcmason 9y ago
  I never liked the reciprocal friend model of Facebook, and I liked even less that it was exposed publicly by default, allowing anyone to crawl the social graph. Even if you lock down your friend list, it doesn't matter because your friends mostly aren't locking down theirs. The Cambridge Analytica scandal clearly demonstrates why this is a dangerous thing. The clear solution is to unfriend everybody then delete (not suspend, but delete) your account. Enough people do this, and Facebook's cherished network effect will be weakened enough for better alternatives to begin appearing. Alternatives that don't vomit large amounts of data about you into the public sphere by default.
  • leadingthenet 9y ago
    And what exactly is the business model for that going to be? Unless people switch to decentralised services (they won't) or pay for a centralised one (they won't), what way could any alternatives survive? The problem isn't Facebook as much as it is the system in which it exists.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• apeace 9y ago
  Can't help but disagree a bit with the premise that these awful properties of Facebook are something new. > Facebook is using us. It is actively giving away our information. It is creating an echo chamber in the name of connection. It surfaces the divisive and destroys the real reason we began using social media in the first place – human connection. I think it has always been more about "broadcasting ego" than "human connection", as the author admits two paragraphs later. What's different today than when Facebook first launched? While I applaud the effort to delete all your old posts and eventually the account itself, I wish the tone of this were more "we should be ashamed we let this happen" rather than "the good Facebook has been replaced by the evil one". Broadcasting your ego--in fact your entire life--and selling it to random companies has always been your choice, not something Facebook recently started doing to you.
• gamblor956 9y ago
  I suppose techies don't have much need for social interaction, but for those of us outside the tech world, Facebook survives because it's useful for facilitating social interaction. I use Facebook (and occasionally Meetup) to help organize local running groups and events. Fantastically useful for coordinating with multiple groups of people across multiple computer and phone platforms, separated by hundreds or thousands of miles. Nothing else comes close. It sounds like the author primarily used Facebook to be seen rather than to connect, and so he views it as a cancer. He doesn't understand that Facebook is a tool. The problem isn't Facebook, the problem was him. He was the cancer, treating Facebook as a platform for aggrandizing himself. Good riddance.
  • quii 9y ago
    > I suppose techies don't have much need for social interaction Sure....
  • Sir_Substance 9y ago
    >but for those of us outside the tech world, Facebook survives because it's useful for facilitating social interaction. It's useful for facilitating connections with other facebook users. You're in a bubble.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • astine 9y ago
      > It's useful for facilitating connections with other facebook users. And anyone willing to join Facebook to keep up with the event invitations. You don't have to post anything at all on Facebook to do this. I definitely know a bunch of people who use Facebook that way.
  • js2 9y ago
    Groups are Facebook's best feature to me and the only one I really care about. p.s. Join us in Runners Anonymous.
  • 9y ago
• readams 9y ago
  As a meme #deletefacebook has limited virulence because of self-termination. Probably #deletefacebookafterpostingaboutitthenwaiting would be better.
• 40acres 9y ago
  It's interesting to see how many people make excuses for still using Facebook because it makes event organizing and the like easier. I'm 26 and never used Facebook. My friends organize group events all the time, I'm always kept in the loop because I text my friends and ask what they are doing this weekend and/or meet with my friends regularly enough that they let me know what's going on. It's become well known that I don't get updates through FB so my friends will text me invites if I haven't asked for an update. People act as if Facebook is the only way to keep up with friends but it's just not the case. Every phone can still receive SMS and you can gasp meet your friends personally to catch up. Now for friends who live in distant locations you need to ask yourself: Does Facebook status updates really make me feel more connected to this person? My answer would be no, and I accept the fact that I just wont see my friends who live in other locations as much as I'd like, and I simply try to make it a habit of catching up when I'm in town. There was life before Facebook and there can be life without Facebook, stop making excuses.
  • Huggernaut 9y ago
    > It's interesting to see how many people make excuses for still using Facebook because it makes event organizing and the like easier. I'm 26 and never used Facebook. If you've never used it, how do you know it does not make life easier? Similarly, it's possibly a burden (albeit small) on your friends who have to text you in addition to organising for others. > Now for friends who live in distant locations you need to ask yourself: Does Facebook status updates really make me feel more connected to this person? For you no, for me absolutely 100%. Additionally, there are many opportunities I have discovered through Facebook that I likely would not have otherwise. For example, just last weekend I happened to be flying across continents and when I checked Facebook on my phone, I discovered a cousin I haven't seen in a while also happened to be flying to the same city on the same day. There would have been no reason to share this with each other, but because it was out there publicly I was able to see and organise time for us to meet. I often see content which prompts me to get in contact with people. I have no doubt I can survive without Facebook (though perhaps some might not), so for me you're arguing a strawman. For me, there is no doubt that it _is useful_, the question is whether that offsets the myriad negative impacts. To suggest that your experience (with admission that you've never used Facebook) is reflective of everyone and they should "stop making excuses" is pretty narrow.
• jonbarker 9y ago
  Does anyone know if FB uses deleted photos in their face recognition feature? Or if there is any detail around what happens when data is deleted? I think it probably is like running chkdsk: the data still exists it's just not addressed at the user level any more.
• ravenstine 9y ago
  I normally wouldn't defend Facebook, but did people using it really think that they weren't selling off their private information? I thought this was just something everyone accepted, as they accept Siri/Alexa/Google to listen to their every word. (yes I know they listen for only wake words) I mean, Zuck called us all "dumb fucks". You can look it up. Everyone shrugged it off because college boys be college boys. I have a Facebook profile, and never used it with the expectation that I owned the content I placed on it. I do think that we need a better alternative to Facebook, but at the same time it's not wrong for someone not to delete their profile. Sorry, but texting is not a viable replacement. Neither is email. Reactions and comment threads are fun and useful ways of interacting with shared life events. For a lot of people, including myself, being off Facebook means missing out on social interaction. The reality is that texting or emailing people sometimes simply doesn't cut it; if you don't pull the same perceived weight as everyone else in your social group, you're going to be outcast and perhaps forgotten about. That can be the perception, anyway, and it's not entirely wrong. Why hasn't a viable alternative to Facebook come up? I mean a serious one – not some piece of shit whipped up by right-wing bloggers. Perhaps it's because everyone feels that they need to compete with Facebook. Facebook has its tentacles in a lot of things, but perhaps we can just boil it down to a few things: - Posts with images, comments, and reactions. - Direct messages that are interoperable with email and SMS. - Event planning and coordination. How much else do you really need to be social? Everything else about Facebook is really about selling ads and has nothing to do with people being social. Building something that can replace the social aspect of Facebook shouldn't be that monumental. If Duck Duck Go has survived, surely a DDG of social networking shouldn't be so far away. Even better: sell it with the idea that it's algorithm-free. Everything should go back to being chronological. Outlandish? Not really. The real reason that your feed is algorithmically sorted is to bubble up more paid content and viral posts. If you unlike/unfollow all the company and group pages associated with your account, you're left with only what your friends are posting. Ooh, even better – delete people who aren't actual friends. If you only include the people you care about, you don't need some black box algorithm to tell you what you need to be seeing. You'd have enough time to see what people are up to in the order of which their posts were made. But not, I won't be deleting my Facebook. I'm fine limiting my use to mbasic.facebook.com. That is, until that better thing comes along or I have the time and will-power to just build it myself.
• OscarTheGrinch 9y ago
  My partner is still on facebook, she has a "crazy aunt" who posts all manor of sensationalist bulshit, so she blocked her. An this is the crux of the problem, the complete information warfare asymmetry, this aunt is still plaguing her little pool of friends at the push of a button several times a day. We could try and talk to the aunt, get her to stop, how difficult would that be? Probably very, and likely to cause offence. And if we extrapolate out how can we possibly get the millions of social media dopamine fiend "crazy aunts" out there to think more carefully about the bullshit they spread around the world? And so another platform is lost to the bottom feeders.
• JonasJSchreiber 9y ago
  That was such a well written article and an empassioned plea.
• throwaway39393 9y ago
  I deleted facebook when Candian Border Patrol demanded I log into my Facebook account on my phone so they can peruse it at their will.
• leoharsha2 9y ago
  “I have nothing to hide” - most of the people a pregnant teenager being outed by the store Target, after it mined her purchase data – larger handbags, headache pills, tissues – and sent her a “congratulations” message as marketing, which her unknowing father got instead. Oops! Don't confuse privacy with secrecy. I know what you do in the bathroom, but you still close the door. That’s because you want privacy, not secrecy. I found this article very interesting about FB - http://www.salimvirani.com//facebook/ http://www.salimvirani.com//facebook/
• MaxWell360 9y ago
  I don't use the Facebook mobile app. I only use messenger. Also, I use the "newsfeed eradicator" chrome addon to remove the newsfeed when I go to facebook on my PC. That way I only see notifications, where I am tagged/invited & I only go see posts from a few groups that interest me.
• 1MillMegabytes 9y ago
  Adverticing companies and Internet search engines are like a decietful friend that would rat you out in communist East Germany or in Pol Pot's Cambodia. They spew out garbage that fuels insecurity in the adolescents of our generation. It's goal is to make people feel uneasy. I deleted facebook in 2011. It's to late though. Facebook and google have ratted me out a long time ago. DDR anno 2018, wouldn't be much different than western societies. They would have evolved. Facebook and google and advertising and marketing companies are the stasi of our time. I don't even dare applying for a visa to the US. A country I would love to visit and my nr.1 travel destination. This is mainly because of a drunken rant on facebook a decade ago. Hate to be denied entrance at Newark after a 7 hour flight.
• butterbot 9y ago
  Your new hosts file https://pastebin.com/d04ah8eP https://pastebin.com/d04ah8eP
• rdiddly 9y ago
  "It is a cancer." Spoken like someone who has to spend 6 months working up the nerve to delete his account. There's no need to get all ugly and overstated about it, like an overgrown teenager yelling & saying nasty things to his mom instead of moving out. Just do it and walk away. Not that it's not a cancer. (Although it's more like obesity or type 2 diabetes, in that it's you doing it to yourself through many small bad choices.) But if it's a cancer now, then it always was one, Captain Newsflash. Just walk away. Yes it is that easy. You'll never see half those assholes again and you'll be glad not to have to try to please them anymore. The rest that you keep around, well we call those your "friends." People far away, you're not meant to "connect" with them. They're far away. Pull your head out of your butt and be where you are. If it was good enough for Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull to be completely unable to converse with somebody in New Jersey then it's good enough for me and you. AND GET OFF MY LAWN!
  • 8bitsrule 9y ago
    > But if it's a cancer now, then it always was one I wouldn't say that. It looked pretty benign back at the beginning. And then the noose started tightening, and tightening.... Frog slowly boiled.
    • rdiddly 9y ago
      Coloring my remarks is the fact that back in 2011, even I, at the time an ignoramus who didn't really understand much about "tech," could see that Facebook was a data mine and the experience was a sucky time-waster to boot. So I jumped out of the pot / slipped out of the noose / walked out of the room... etc. The longer I live the more I realize that in a shitty situation the missing ingredient to make it non-shitty is usually not technology, or information, or time or chance or money or whatever other nuance... it's leadership. Which is the loose-fitting name of the bin in which I would also put something like quitting Facebook. Decision-making goes in there. Principles. Shortening the time interval between realizing Facebook is shitty, and getting out of it.
• dmurthy 9y ago
  I quit Facebook a few months back and I've tried to coax my BH into quitting and she would have if not for one reason. Our son's school shares all updates on their Facebook page which is only accessible by members. Ironically Facebook should not be the place to share such information & content given the recent happenings. I wish schools could find another solution or platform.
• ggm 9y ago
  How does whatsapp compare to facebook messenger, for intrusiveness and access to data and call logs?
• MacroChip 9y ago
  If you delete your posts or account, Facebook is probably still using the data.