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Even with all the outrage, and a few million profiles deleted, I feel this will be like a speeding ticket for FB in the long run. That's how it has always happ
by sidcool 9y ago
Even with all the outrage, and a few million profiles deleted, I feel this will be like a speeding ticket for FB in the long run. That's how it has always happened. Pardon my pessimism.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago> a few million profiles deleted Unrelated to Cambridge Analytica, I started de-escalating my Facebook usage a few months ago. First, I turned off notifications on my phone for Facebook and Facebook Messenger. (I've had e-mail notifications off for years.) Next, I deleted the Facebook app from my phone. Then, I deleted the Facebook Messenger app from my phone. Finally, I force myself to log out of Facebook on my laptop every time I visit. This combination strikes a better balance, for me, between the connecting benefits of Facebook and its addictive time- and emotion-sucking downsides.
- jonathanstrange 9y agoFacebook will analyse this to get a better psychological profile of you and serve you more tech-related and privacy-centered ads. /s
- yojex 9y agoI'm not so sure that /s is necessary here.
- Tephlon 9y agoSame. When they changed the algorithm to show things other than my most recent friends updates, I removed the FB app from my phone. I still use FB because I have a lot of international friends, but removing the FB app and replacing it with the site. I only use Messenger for about 3 people right now, so that's going soon too.
- mnsc 9y agoI'm aboard this train as well. Removed both the app and messenger from my phone. Should I need to access messenger on foot I can use mbasic.facebook.com (sneaky, because the regular website disables messenger to push for app adoption, which is another button trigger for me)
- mbel 9y ago> Finally, I force myself to log out of Facebook on my laptop every time I visit. There are browser plugins which automatically delete cookies when a tab is closed. They work wonderfully as automatic log out by default.
- Slansitartop 9y agoI use a separate Chrome profile specifically for Facebook, to keep its cookies quarantined.
- ioulian 9y agoMaybe a bit off topic: I'm not using facebook a lot as of late. I just scroll through my feed and close the app when I'm bored. I don't click, share, write posts anymore... I could delete facebook, but what's stopping me from doing it, is sharing of my vacation photo's with my friends and different groups that our friends use to discuss different plans (as where we can go in the weekend or organise a vacation together...) Is there a good alternative for these 2 things: - Online album for photo's? The same goes to: where can I see pics of my friends? - Site/app to organise things (whatsapp is enough to organise small things (evening events, dinners, ...), but no trips...)
- jogjayr 9y agoYou could upload the photos to S3 and share links to the friends that are interested (i.e. those who text/call and ask "How was your vacation?"). There's not really a need to post the photos for any of your FB friends to see - most of them don't care. For discussing plans, you have the following options: 1. Group email thread 2. Group text (either SMS or even a chat app with E2E encryption) 3. Conference call 4. Slack group 5. Group IM (Hangouts, Jabber-based thingy) 6. Private Trello board (can you use Asana for the same thing?)
- stinky613 9y agoI know I won't reliably remember to log out of Facebook, so I just limit my fb use to whatever my backup browser is.
- moistoreos 9y agoYou need to just remove it from your phone. I promise you won't miss it. I did this a few years ago. It's freed up so much more time to Reddit.
- 411mrc 9y agoI never facebooked. You need to do much more than that to remove their tracking, since many pages have a Facebook like button, which tells Facebook what you are browsing based on your ip, which they undoubtedly already know is you. They track you whether you join or not.
- 52-6F-62 9y agoI actually got my girlfriend on to Signal because of all of this. Her last use case was FB Messenger to talk to friends out west on the cheap. I got her to install Signal and she discovered a bunch of people on her contact list were already using it, including her boss. As soon as she tried it and found out there were video and audio chat as well, she was really excited. There's often an alternative. Myself, I left FB behind a few years back and subsequently lost contact with a lot of people. I didn't try hard to find alternatives, though. Just the same, I've been far more happy and present without it.
- jogjayr 9y agoTo further improve your FB experience you should delete the account itself. Source: Deleted my FB account 8 years ago
- d3ckard 9y agoI'm much more optimistic. I suspect increase in social network investments and viable replacement coming out ~year from now. It's not very hard to copy main FB features, but baking privacy in will take some effort. To be honest, I don't see FB coming out of this. Their image is ruined, now they need a push and will start slowly collapsing. I'm betting on Yahoo-style slow decay.
- jobigoud 9y agoPlease recall that the vast majority of Facebook users are not from the US. I'm not sure the scandal has been that much publicized or that their global image has changed much to be honest.
- Harvey-Specter 9y agoMy partner was born in Germany and most of her family still lives there so she keeps up with German news. She is under the impression that the scandal is getting more publicity and generating more outrage in Germany than it is here in Canada.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago> the vast majority of Facebook users are not from the US 49% of Facebook's 2017 worldwide revenues came from the U.S. and Canada [1]. [1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680118000009/fb-12312017x10k.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680118... page 37
- jobigoud 9y agoYes but Facebook is driven by the network effect, and only 230M users are from the US, compared to the 2.2B global.
- stephengillie 9y agoAmericans are subsidising Facebook for the rest of the world? It seems like we should get more for our money.
- harryf 9y agoSo long as the news-story "Putin elected Trump" exists, this isn't going away. Only once we're sure that it's only "our guys" can use Facebook to manipulate public opinion will this go away. That probably means the end game will be something like "certified advertisers" for political campaigns and similar e.g. only registered political parties are allowed to make political ads, so can in effect be held accountable. That could potentially mean less revenue for Facebook in the US, although they'll probably make it up again by dealing in other nations e.g. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/revealed-the-powerful-facebook-data-matching-tool-the-liberal-party-rejected-over-legal-fears-20180322-p4z5rh.html https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/revealed-the-powerfu...
- simion314 9y agoDo you think if the situation was reversed like Hillary was elected because Chinese hackers used FB, fake news etc the situation would be different? If yes why is that? I am not from US so I do not understand why that would be true since the 2 camps are very balanced. How big is the group of US citizens that dislike both Trump and Hilary and would have been similarly outraged regardless of who would have used this tactics.
- harryf 9y agoI'm also not from the US but from following US politics the two competing sides seem to react to different types of outrage. With Obama in power and the GOP "in opposition" you have this "low brow" story around Obama's US citizenship. With Bill Clinton you had a "low brow" scandal around sex and Monica Lewinsky. These seem to provoke the GOP base on nationalistic and religious levels. Meanwhile, with Trump in power and Dems in opposition, you have a "high brow" story around fake news and Russian-manipulated elections, despite Hillary also have a "Russian scandal" in the closet https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/06/561587174/the-alternative-russia-scandal https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/06/561587174.... Seems this story appeals well to the Dem base. So I'd expect if Hillary had one, a Chinese hacker story would be too "high brow" to create outrage with the GOP base. You'd probably have some other low brow story being echoed by Fox News e.g. Pizzagate.
- pavs 9y agoI really hope this is not the case. Apart from all the privacy problem, increasingly more people (outside the YC/Reddit eco-chamber) people relate FB as the "Internet", more so in developing world and kids in developed and developing world. It's in Facebook's interest to keep things this way and they have done a lot of things (like partnering with ISPs) to make sure it stays this way. This is a problem. If you think AOL's portal was scary, they pioneered the idea of capturing used in their walled garden. Facebook's influence in doing this is effective by many orders and with a group of people running the company whose ethics are questionable at best. Either Facebook needs to drastically change who they work or they need to implode with mass userbase leaving their platform. Whether this happens or not - we will see. But it needs to happen and more people highlight their wrongdoings the more chance we have to see some meaning change. The pressure needs to be there. We can't just give up and say, oh well they are too big and powerful for anyone to make any meaningful change and most people just will forget about this by the next big news cycle. While it might be true and the odds are against us, but we need to make this extremely hard to get away with this. Giving up should not be an option.
- fwdpropaganda 9y ago> a few million profiles deleted Reference please?
- sidcool 9y agoIt's a worst case estimate of what may happen as the fallout of this fiasco.
- fwdpropaganda 9y agoOk. My estimate is that your estimate is too high :-)