>But nope. These same people deleting their facebook accounts are still using gmail, still using Apple's app store, and switching to using Discord or Slack or t

>But nope. These same people deleting their facebook accounts are still using gmail, still using Apple's app store, and switching to using Discord or Slack or the like to talk and organize. I get what you're saying: Google still reads everything sent/received through gmail, Apple still provides very little transparency over the appstore etc That all said, I still use these services because they actually provide usefulness to me. Gmail has been my persistent email provider for a decade now. If I didn't want a free email service, I could get a domain name that looks professional enough and set up my own email server, but I can't be bothered to maintain it when I don't use email that much. I could stop using the Play Store, unlock my bootloader, get a custom ROM with privacy built in, compile FOSS apps and all but it's far too convenient for me to search for an app's name and hit download. I've weighed up the tradeoffs between privacy, security and convenience and with the services you've mentioned, convenience outweighs the negatives. However with Facebook I just don't see the point anymore. To begin with I was fine with the lack of privacy. I knew that anything I post would be analysed by a FB server and a profile built up on me for targeted ads, which was a valid tradeoff for a free service that gave a lot of functionality: pages were great for seeing what bands were doing, private groups were great for shit-talking with people, events were and still are one of the best features FB introduced, and I could see an unfiltered stream of posts from friends which was essentially uncensored. Now there's better services for all of those features (except for events). Facebook is a cluttered mess of spaghetti code which slows down any device it touches and has features nobody uses than features they do. Messenger is completely useless to me since not only is the app a mess, but the privacy implications of having all my messages read by Facebook are too severe. I never check my news feed anymore since FB started filtering what people see. In the end, all I use it for nowadays is events and a couple of private groups. And then of course there's the increased the level of snooping they do on your private life, to the point where severe world changing incidents like Cambridge Analytica are inevitable. I spent a few days of last week writing a script to purge everything I've liked, commented, and posted on Facebook. I would have left it at that if I only had issues with Facebook's lack of privacy of its users, but since I just have no use for the service anymore I'm going to be deleting my account also. It's a shame, because Facebook could have been an incredibly useful and reasonable service if they didn't expand as rapidly as they did. But it is no longer useful to me at all, and a lot of people I've spoken to about this say the same: it's no longer a website with any novel purpose, but one they keep using because everyone else is on it and there's nowhere else to go.