9 ms·

1 in 10 Americans in survey say they deleted their Facebook account over privacy

143 points by spking 9y ago

derimagia 9y ago
Said they deleted
prepend 9y ago
In a survey of people I know, 0 out of infinity kept their Facebook accounts deleted. But lots of people told me they did. Probably 30% of people I know. Some actually deleted. Some said they did and didn’t (really weird since you can see their account). Some thought they did, but screwed it up. Some said they did but switched to Messenger, or WhatsApp or some other part of Facebook. Over the past 5 years, not a single friend has stayed off Facebook. Although it would be cool to install an app that actually tracked this to see people who stay off. I was hoping that this article would talk about how they did the survey through Facebook :)
- mr_spothawk 9y ago
  I kept my facebook, but deleted my social graph.
  - thunfischbrot 9y ago
    What does that mean? Honestly curious, does it mean unfriending everyone?
    - joejerryronnie 9y ago
      I'm pretty sure the OP is satire. What good is social media without the social?
      - city41 9y ago
        I've done this in the past and am considering doing it again. Facebook is a good way to get updates on companies, products, organizations, etc that you are interested in. Kind of like Twitter but IMO much better. I deleted my Facebook account 2 years ago and haven't been back since, so not sure if the above is still true.
    - mr_spothawk 9y ago
      yeah, deleted all my friends but kept the account. left a public message for folks who discover me. also... not satire. though, that feedback is appreciated.
  - djsumdog 9y ago
    How did you do that?
- thunfischbrot 9y ago
  In a survey of people I know, there are many who claim that they "only use it very rarely", most who say they "should use it less", several who quit (incl. me many ca. 2012) and three who never had an account. Those three also never had whatsapp. Those who do not have fb accounts agree that it did not have a noticeable impact on our social lives. We use mail and calls to keep in touch, and we have more to talk about when we see each other, as we have not seen and read about most of each others' experiences already before we meet. The one thing I missed in the beginning was the simplicity of organizing events with people in common networks who I was not close with, e.g. study groups, student parties, study trips, I hear now for parents this also includes kindergarden activities etc.
- rdiddly 9y ago
  No but they mention #deletefacebook "trending" (i.e. on Twitter, without even mentioning Twitter and apparently without seeing the irony). You might know a lot of people who want social cred for deleting their accounts, without actually deleting them. But it's also possible that Facebook is keeping those accounts active on purpose so others will continue interacting with them, which is a tool of temptation they can use to get those users to come back. 100% of the people I am deleted their Facebook account long ago, based on a fairly dispassionate assessment of the user experience and the loss of productivity when saddled with it.
- bowlich 9y ago
  I don't understand why go through the hassle of actually deleting (particularly since it is so onerous). It changes nothing. There's probably still a shadow account of the data you gave them. Deleting the account doesn't put everything back in pandora's box. You can just post that you're abandoning the account with where to reach you online, log out, delete the cookies, and block their domain (what I did) and have the same effect with the bonus that friends can still reach you if they wonder where you went.
  - ModernMech 9y ago
    > There's probably still a shadow account of the data you gave them. Let's hope not, for Zuck's sake, because he just testified in front of Congress that when you delete your account it's gone from Facebook's servers for good.
    - Phenomenit 9y ago
      So do they delete your account in all of their backups as well?
      - sdhgaiojfsa 9y ago
        Unlikely, although they do probably keep a listing of accounts not to restore. And of course you'll age out of their backups over time as well.
        Phenomenit 9y ago
        Yeah but if they wanted to they could just restore the whole thing and ignore the list. I mean as long as you can't see them deleting everything from everywhere you can't be a 100%
        misterhtmlcss 9y ago
        Legally (I believe) they can't delete an account, they can only hide it or deactivate it. There are rules around the data that go beyond Facebook. Think about it. Someone's told the cops I've been using threats using my Facebook account and I hear that and request the service be deleted. Poof it's all gone. Somehow I don't think that's allowed or does anyone think I'm not making a valid and likely assumption here? Then sure they delete YOUR data, but all the inferencial data such as which sites you clicked like on, which sites you signed into with Facebook, the type of commentary or information you share you made/shared isn't yours and the knowledge gained also isn't the users it's Facebook's so that'll all be there. So sure they won't have your face or name, but they'll know everything else about you that makes you you. Anyway most people don't even know that Facebook owns Instagram or WhatsApp, so no matter what they say unless they are tech savvy they have up at most an account on Facebook, but not it's subsidiaries (I believe).
- DenisM 9y ago
  I have unfollowed everyone, except for a few pages that post interesting events. This way I stay abreast of what's happening, yet suffer little consequence of attention-poisoning effects of FB.
- cfadvan 9y ago
  A good friend of mine, his wife, his parents and their extended family all decided to (and did) delete their Facebook as a result of this furor. I deleted mine after a few months of first making it, and I’d say all told I know more than a dozen other people who either never had them, or deleted them. They’re not using Messenger or WhatsApp. Some use email chains, others are using Signal, and only two reverted to Facebook. I guess we know different people? It’s probably one of the challenges when talking in terms of anecdotes.
  - bertil 9y ago
    What worries me is that email chains (and WhatsApp in many cases) are significantly worst at keeping disinformation at bay: - Hardly anyone writes back the recipients, often copied in the different layers of the email, so disinformation spreads without being corrected; but - Spammers gladly collect the emails through those anyway.
    - tedunangst 9y ago
      Maybe after the next election we can have content regulations for gmail too.
- musage 9y ago
  I got asked by FB to identify myself with my passport after 9 years of being on it with like 150+ RL friends and classmates etc. and I just thought "fuck that, show me the passport of the random strangers who didn't like my political posts", and haven't look back since. And by political I mean quotes by Noam Chomsky and Hannah Arendt and whatnot, not racist rants or whatever people primed with the notion of FB having some sort of liberal bias might dream up. So I took it as a compliment. FB had precious little to give me, and precious little use for what I had to offer. No worries, like reading a poem to a dog and only then realizing it's a dog. Still a good poem, but the dog wouldn't know. Now if only HN required email addresses for accounts, then I could be real productive. Merely being shadowbanned is actually kinda neat, I can still speak my mind however I want and don't have to check for replies on a site that has zero notifications anyway.
- djsumdog 9y ago
  Ironically, being able to keep track of who deletes their accounts disappeared when they closed that hole in their API that was used to extract friends lists (it broke this app I wrote years ago): https://penguindreams.org/blog/discoverying-friend-list-changes-on-facebook-with-python/ https://penguindreams.org/blog/discoverying-friend-list-chan... Because I've lived in so many places and different countries, there are a lot of people who I can only communicate with over Messenger. I usually use the purple-facebook and purple-hangouts plugins. I never read status updates. I only update my status to promote my other blogs/websites. I guess I could switch to sending international texts or ask people for their e-mails (which also means asking them to remove my e-mail from spam since I run my own e-mail server and Google/Microsoft don't really use DMARC/DKIM/SPF and always mark my stuff as spam), but messenger is just easier. I think we'll only see people get rid of Facebook when there are better alternatives to connect on. Even then it's dumb to delete a Facebook account; just stop using it like people did with MySpace.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- textmode 9y ago
  "I was hoping that this article would talk about how they did the survey through Facebook :)" There is one type of "revolution" that arguably cannot be started on Facebook. The revolution to reclaim privacy from Facebook, to free ourselves from Facebook surveillance. Whenever this "conflict of interest" comes up, there is an unforgettable 1970 song I recall hearing as a youth. Hint 1: It was written before "rap" existed but many rappers and other artists attribute this man's work as a precursor to hip-hop. Hint 2: It has a repeating chorus that expresses a similar "conflict of interest", involving a different "revolution" and a different medium. Can any HN reader guess the song?
  - asaph 9y ago
    The Revolution Will Not Be Televised by Gil Scott-Heron. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Revolution_Will_Not_Be_Televised https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Revolution_Will_Not_Be_T...
  - Terretta 9y ago
    Paul Simon’s “50 ways to leave your lover”. ;-)
    - textmode 9y ago
      Not 1970.
  - cinquemb 9y ago
    Gil Scott-Heron had a great many songs and poems where I sometimes think what modern analogues would take the form of, esp when it comes to people's behaviors with internet connected applications, though reading through them today still gets the message home.
    - textmode 9y ago
      Not only do I agree with you here, but I agree with you strongly on this as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16686723 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16686723 This is why I prefer clients and browsers small enough that I can edit and recompile quickly even on a computer with low resources.
spullara 9y ago
Liars.
ajeet_dhaliwal 9y ago
We can all be ignorant. I would never have thought so many people would consider this a new concern and felt the time to act was now, in April 2018. Although I don't personally use Facebook I think most people who like it should just continue using it but just think more carefully about the information they share. Deleting now isn't going to bring back the data that has already been shared.
- 908087 9y ago
  The problem is that "the information they share" and "the information Facebook collects" are two very different things. During the recent hearings, Zuckerberg kept stressing the fact that users "choose what they share", while conveniently dodging addressing the fact that Facebook collects much more than that.
acconrad 9y ago
Would you be concerned if less than 2% of your userbase left?
- codingdave 9y ago
  Yes. Having worked at a company with a 99.8% retention rate, I'd absolutely be concerned if that jumped 10x. Because that is the real metric... not how many people left, but how does it compare to the retention rate prior to the recent events?
  - InterestBazinga 9y ago
    I agree. But, I feel it is not as serious as in other areas because there are no true competitors to Facebook?
everdev 9y ago
I did this years ago to claims even here on HN that people think when you say "I deleted FB" or "I haven't used FB in years" are bragging. I think it's important to spread the message that life goes on outside of FB. If you delete, you'll be in good company. In a less extreme version, try not using it for 10 days and notice how you feel. There will be withdrawal, but if you can't pause a behavior for 10 days, you're probably addicted. Maintaining relationships outside of FB is like riding a bike and it'll feel awkward not to be involved in the "Did you see on FB" conversations at first, but you'll be past it in no time and back to more present conversations.
- nightski 9y ago
  For the most part I really dislike FB, and have no meaningful relationships on it. But unfortunately many local restaurants, breweries, and biking/activity clubs post activities on FB which I would likely completely miss out on. Until there is a competitor which is able to provide this I'm stuck on FB for the foreseeable future. However my profile is pretty minimal, I haven't shared anything for several years, and I run an adblocker. I don't think this is much more of a privacy concern than not having one as you are still tracked.
- return1 9y ago
  > that life goes on outside of FB. If you delete, you'll be in good company. That's interesting. I think a lot of people would say they are in worse company. And that it takes a lot of effort to find that good company offline.
sho 9y ago
These kinds of surveys are notoriously unreliable. There is no way for the interviewer to verify, no penalty for the participant lying, and you're talking to a complete stranger over the phone, further reducing the barrier for lying. There's also possibly a motivation to "send a message" to FB such that they improve their policy without the interviewee personally having to pay a price. Would be amazed if even half the "yes" responders actually did. Wouldn't be surprised if literally none of them had. Probably the best way for most people to "resist" would be to block FB tracking, and anyone who sells it to them, at the browser level. If enough people did, that swing the "materially hurt FB" vs "keep my personal utility of the platform" balance into the positive. edit: to clarify I meant the respondees lying.
evo_9 9y ago
So if you have never had a FB account, is there a way to delete your shadow profile and/or even check if they have one on you?
- 908087 9y ago
  If any number of people have your phone number in their contact list, and any number of those use Facebook/WhatsApp/etc, then at the very least it's highly likely that Facebook has a shadow profile containing a portion of your social connections.
- lancefisher 9y ago
  Move to Europe, and file a right to be forgotten request after May 25th, when the GDPR goes into effect.
  - ajmurmann 9y ago
    Do I have to live there or can I just be a citizen?
- jwilk 9y ago
  Good news: Facebook has UI for getting your personal data if you don't have an account. Bad news: Apparently it only works if you have an account. Go figure... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16821437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16821437
coldtea 9y ago
>1 in 10 Americans in survey say they deleted their Facebook account over privacy So, we might not have gained more hope on privacy issues, but at least we now know that a lot more people will outright lie and BS when polled on the matter, than we previously thought....
propman 9y ago
Go on your friends list and look at all the deleted profiles. Facebook no longer deletes the profile from your friendlist. If you have 900 friends and 50 delete, it still shows 900 and the names of deactivated profiles are still in friend list, but with no avatar. I went to my Facebook and found 8% of my friend list deactivated. I would be surprised if this entire hoopla resulted in more than 1% deletion but even 1% in NA is 1.8M accounts. That is around $200M a year loss for fb. Not a big deal, but their valuation is based on forward growth, so not tiny either
- jghn 9y ago
  Interesting, I didn't know that. Roughly 1.5% of my friends list was deleted. Probably closer to 1 as I think some of them deleted a long while back.
- sdhgaiojfsa 9y ago
  Note that they'll also have no avatar if they never set an avatar, and further if they deleted their account in the past, before the latest hoopla. So this way of estimating the number of people who have deactivated lately necessarily provides only an upper bound on the total number of deactivations.
poletopole 9y ago
I deleted my facebook account with all my content eight years ago after I was told some eastern European accessed my account, which made me realize what a liability facebook is, not to mention your page is the first thing an employer looks at when hiring.
Thaxll 9y ago
This kind of survey are bs, why do people even talk about them. No one care about the privacy issue and people will keep using Facebook.
- ilovecars2 9y ago
  Having spoken to a number of friends and people I haven’t met on the Facebook groups I was in (theme was all car enthusiasts) - not one of them cared. Their arguments were that Facebook knows everything about them anyway. My flatmate also gave he same opinion when I asked her. I can only assume that the general public just don’t care or feel that they have bigger things to worry about.
  - musage 9y ago
    Then stop asking, and start telling maybe? By that I mean state your opinion, not tell people what to do; and then organize with those you can organize with. How many people did it take to end segregation? Certainly it didn't just "happen when most people said, when asked, that it should end". I think there's a reason there is so little positive social change these days, it seems like everybody (I don't exclude myself, far from it) expects some else to make it so they can just buy it, vote for it, sign up for an account or run a local copy. We, each of us, need to actually make our society together. Not just talk about what "happens" to it endlessly. It's hard. It's also worth it.
- greggarious 9y ago
  Do you have any specific criticism's of the methodology, or are you advocating that all survey results are meaningless?
jiveturkey 9y ago
I doubt that. It’d be bigger news than Syria (sadly) if FB lost 10% of its US users.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
nodesocket 9y ago
Either this survey is biased, or Zuckerberg and FB are outright lying when they say they have not seen a noticeable increase in deletions. My money is on the survey and media who push these headlines being BS.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  Why?
KasianFranks 9y ago
You can't delete 'Search', a lesson for 'Social' and why it will always lose to Search. Just ask AOL, Geocities, friendster and MySpace. Doing something that's easy to duplicate makes it easy to exploit and rarely pays off in the long term.
erikb 9y ago
Did they also delete their Whatsapp and their Instagram, their browser cache and their current mobile phone number? Otherwise it probably doesn't matter much.
adrianlmm 9y ago
>a survey right
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Kiro 9y ago
I really want to know the demographics here. I don't know a single one out of my hundreds of friends.
amelius 9y ago
I would quit Facebook if there was an alternative for keeping track of events and inviting people, which my friends would actually use.
amelius 9y ago
By the way, Facebook still leaks information. Proof: On Facebook, create a targeted ad, targeting people who have secret property "X"; the ad should be about a product "Y" not involving X. Wait for people to click the ad, visiting your website, and buying the product Y. Now you know the identities of these people coupled to the fact that they have property X. This also works for Google.
titzer 9y ago
Crazy idea: introduce a tax, per byte, on personal information, even if anonymized.
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
Deletion is too extreme for most people. Facebook is a monopoly for users and in an oligopoly for advertisers. This is a market failure [1]. More reasonable: escalating partial dis-engagement. Here's what I did, sequentially, over the years: 1. Turn off notifications for the Facebook app on your phone; 2. Turn off notifications for the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps on your phone; 3. Delete the Facebook app from your phone; 4. Delete the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps from your phone; and finally 5. Log out of Facebook on your desktop. It took me 2 years to go through from step 1 to step 5. It has made me happier and more productive. I still have a Facebook account. But the friction of grabbing my laptop and logging in forces me to consider "is this what I want to do? Or am I thoughtlessly reaching for the crack pipe?" [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure
- ummonUncommon 9y ago
  Knowledge that one need not use heroin this day has never saved those who are its servants, nor those servants' prey.
  - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
    > Knowledge that one need not use heroin this day has never saved those who are its servants Recovery rates for heroin addicts "ranges from 35-65%" [1]. And Facebook isn't as addictive as heroin. [1] http://crehab.org/2017/08/14/heroin-addiction-why-the-recovery-rate-is-better-than-you-think/ http://crehab.org/2017/08/14/heroin-addiction-why-the-recove...
    - whiddershins 9y ago
      I am a little unsure whether Facebook truly isn't as addictive as heroin, or that it couldn't ultimately be as the algorithms improve. I find it as pernicious as alcohol, for my personal, subjective, experience.
  - __onetimeacc__ 9y ago
    Have you done heroin yourself? I haven't, but it's a mistake to assume that Heroin is the most addictive drug ever. Anecdotally, I'm had several friends completely had their lives ruined by benzodiazapene addiction (usually in the form of street-pressed xanax [alprazolam]), so personally I would probably rather be addicted to heroin than benzos (not that I would want to be addicted to either)
ummonUncommon 9y ago
MySpace was a thing my friends and I resisted, but Facebook entered my life around age 15, when an attractive classmate invited me. I could be criticized for a lack of willpower when I joined the tool at that age, though I think that'd be unfair. Shortly thereafter, the service atomized every in-person form of social interaction I had once held dear, into a set of in-person interactions which were the footnote to an online logbook. I'm not sure how to qualify the negative impact the "social internet" had on myself and my peers, but I think it's probably immeasurable and not dissimilar from epidemic narcotic use. This continued through my young adulthood, during which time the traditional media was covering the suicide of Tyler Clementi and later Aaron Schwarz. I noticed the tool routinely used for cyberbullying, outing classmates of alternate sexualities, contact with strangers and subsequent dysfunctional communication, race hate, other forms of anomic and disinhibited communication, abusive surveillance of individuals within human courtships, and the routine use of aliases. Violence associated with online "socialization" continues to escalate in countless communities. Later, the implementation of Facebook Live would popularize its worldwide use for live video broadcast of interpersonal physical violence. Knowing the marketing effects of most other media, the deployment of that particular functionality was probably a given after the Clementi suicide. The effects of the tool upon partly-or-entirely political processes such as election, incarceration, hiring, policing, etc., are still for-profit and poorly-characterized. With a user count in the billions, billions in value, contracts with data mining firms, use as a media outlet by municipalities in lieu of traditional public media, its probably safe to say they are sizable and wholly-undemocratic. It is comedic that the idea of "democratization" is used in conjunction with a technology whose aim is to recontextualize friendship as an interaction which occurs at an extreme distance and with intensive record-keeping, as opposed to the chance in-person encounter of individuals with their spoken narratives in an agora, square, etc. The sort of behavior for which Facebook exists and continues to exist is the exact behavior legislated against upon the now-decommissioned ARPANet. The internet was never open or free. To say now, "The internet should neither be commercial nor political, but can be free" is too late, a lie, and unfair. The Kindle is a great device. Text messaging may be a small improvement to the human condition, like the lightbulb, or motor cartage. Remarks on Facebook are likely confined to the realm of observation. Media is not inherently social. For it to be social, its purpose has to be removed from a dominant narrative and subsequent revenues upon this narrative, which is necessarily impossible. Community farming, in spite of its tremendous cost, is social. Healthcare, in spite of its tremendous cost, is social. I post these remarks only to document my experiences for posterity. I cannot undo the damage these tools and their attached profit motives have done to my life, but I can note them publicly.
beizhia 9y ago
I actually deleted my facebook account because I felt like it was negatively affecting me mentally. I've never been the most social person (although I'm working to change that), and I would spend a lot of time alone reading my facebook feed, thinking about how I don't do as much cool stuff as all the people I'm friends with. I realized that I would only really post things to seek affirmation. Initially I just changed my password to something long that I couldnt remember, to keep me from logging in, knowing that I could reset the password if I needed to login. I never did though for the next 6 months. I also deleted the instagram app from my phone, and blocked reddit on all my PCs. Hackernews might be next I'm afraid - I just don't see that it's a good use of my time anymore. I've even been considering getting a non-smartphone next time I need a new phone. Maybe it's just a reaction to everything going on online, but I'm enjoying being free from social media.
beenBoutIT 9y ago
According to FB, it takes 90 days for an account to actually be deleted. If you 'delete' your account and then login before the 90 day period has passed your account is just reinstated. I'd love to see what percentage of these users stay off of FB long enough for their accounts to actually get removed.
MarkMc 9y ago
9% seems rather high to me. No mention of how the survey was conducted. Was it a telephone survey? How were the respondents chosen? It will be interesting to compare this 9% figure with the change in users that Facebook reports at their next earnings release.
MR4D 9y ago
I posted this article [1] Earlier today, but am linking here because I thought it showed how futile deleting an account actually is. In short, your data doesn’t hardly matter. Facebook is capable of generating tons of meta-data that you have no control over. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16845031 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16845031

143 points by spking 9y ago

Said they deleted

In a survey of people I know, 0 out of infinity kept their Facebook accounts deleted. But lots of people told me they did. Probably 30% of people I know. Some actually deleted. Some said they did and didn’t (really weird since you can see their account). Some thought they did, but screwed it up. Some said they did but switched to Messenger, or WhatsApp or some other part of Facebook. Over the past 5 years, not a single friend has stayed off Facebook. Although it would be cool to install an app that actually tracked this to see people who stay off. I was hoping that this article would talk about how they did the survey through Facebook :)

mr_spothawk 9y ago
I kept my facebook, but deleted my social graph.
- thunfischbrot 9y ago
  What does that mean? Honestly curious, does it mean unfriending everyone?
  - joejerryronnie 9y ago
    I'm pretty sure the OP is satire. What good is social media without the social?
    - city41 9y ago
      I've done this in the past and am considering doing it again. Facebook is a good way to get updates on companies, products, organizations, etc that you are interested in. Kind of like Twitter but IMO much better. I deleted my Facebook account 2 years ago and haven't been back since, so not sure if the above is still true.
  - mr_spothawk 9y ago
    yeah, deleted all my friends but kept the account. left a public message for folks who discover me. also... not satire. though, that feedback is appreciated.
- djsumdog 9y ago
  How did you do that?
thunfischbrot 9y ago
In a survey of people I know, there are many who claim that they "only use it very rarely", most who say they "should use it less", several who quit (incl. me many ca. 2012) and three who never had an account. Those three also never had whatsapp. Those who do not have fb accounts agree that it did not have a noticeable impact on our social lives. We use mail and calls to keep in touch, and we have more to talk about when we see each other, as we have not seen and read about most of each others' experiences already before we meet. The one thing I missed in the beginning was the simplicity of organizing events with people in common networks who I was not close with, e.g. study groups, student parties, study trips, I hear now for parents this also includes kindergarden activities etc.
rdiddly 9y ago
No but they mention #deletefacebook "trending" (i.e. on Twitter, without even mentioning Twitter and apparently without seeing the irony). You might know a lot of people who want social cred for deleting their accounts, without actually deleting them. But it's also possible that Facebook is keeping those accounts active on purpose so others will continue interacting with them, which is a tool of temptation they can use to get those users to come back. 100% of the people I am deleted their Facebook account long ago, based on a fairly dispassionate assessment of the user experience and the loss of productivity when saddled with it.
bowlich 9y ago
I don't understand why go through the hassle of actually deleting (particularly since it is so onerous). It changes nothing. There's probably still a shadow account of the data you gave them. Deleting the account doesn't put everything back in pandora's box. You can just post that you're abandoning the account with where to reach you online, log out, delete the cookies, and block their domain (what I did) and have the same effect with the bonus that friends can still reach you if they wonder where you went.
- ModernMech 9y ago
  > There's probably still a shadow account of the data you gave them. Let's hope not, for Zuck's sake, because he just testified in front of Congress that when you delete your account it's gone from Facebook's servers for good.
  - Phenomenit 9y ago
    So do they delete your account in all of their backups as well?
    - sdhgaiojfsa 9y ago
      Unlikely, although they do probably keep a listing of accounts not to restore. And of course you'll age out of their backups over time as well.
      - Phenomenit 9y ago
        Yeah but if they wanted to they could just restore the whole thing and ignore the list. I mean as long as you can't see them deleting everything from everywhere you can't be a 100%
        misterhtmlcss 9y ago
        Legally (I believe) they can't delete an account, they can only hide it or deactivate it. There are rules around the data that go beyond Facebook. Think about it. Someone's told the cops I've been using threats using my Facebook account and I hear that and request the service be deleted. Poof it's all gone. Somehow I don't think that's allowed or does anyone think I'm not making a valid and likely assumption here? Then sure they delete YOUR data, but all the inferencial data such as which sites you clicked like on, which sites you signed into with Facebook, the type of commentary or information you share you made/shared isn't yours and the knowledge gained also isn't the users it's Facebook's so that'll all be there. So sure they won't have your face or name, but they'll know everything else about you that makes you you. Anyway most people don't even know that Facebook owns Instagram or WhatsApp, so no matter what they say unless they are tech savvy they have up at most an account on Facebook, but not it's subsidiaries (I believe).
DenisM 9y ago
I have unfollowed everyone, except for a few pages that post interesting events. This way I stay abreast of what's happening, yet suffer little consequence of attention-poisoning effects of FB.
cfadvan 9y ago
A good friend of mine, his wife, his parents and their extended family all decided to (and did) delete their Facebook as a result of this furor. I deleted mine after a few months of first making it, and I’d say all told I know more than a dozen other people who either never had them, or deleted them. They’re not using Messenger or WhatsApp. Some use email chains, others are using Signal, and only two reverted to Facebook. I guess we know different people? It’s probably one of the challenges when talking in terms of anecdotes.
- bertil 9y ago
  What worries me is that email chains (and WhatsApp in many cases) are significantly worst at keeping disinformation at bay: - Hardly anyone writes back the recipients, often copied in the different layers of the email, so disinformation spreads without being corrected; but - Spammers gladly collect the emails through those anyway.
  - tedunangst 9y ago
    Maybe after the next election we can have content regulations for gmail too.
musage 9y ago
I got asked by FB to identify myself with my passport after 9 years of being on it with like 150+ RL friends and classmates etc. and I just thought "fuck that, show me the passport of the random strangers who didn't like my political posts", and haven't look back since. And by political I mean quotes by Noam Chomsky and Hannah Arendt and whatnot, not racist rants or whatever people primed with the notion of FB having some sort of liberal bias might dream up. So I took it as a compliment. FB had precious little to give me, and precious little use for what I had to offer. No worries, like reading a poem to a dog and only then realizing it's a dog. Still a good poem, but the dog wouldn't know. Now if only HN required email addresses for accounts, then I could be real productive. Merely being shadowbanned is actually kinda neat, I can still speak my mind however I want and don't have to check for replies on a site that has zero notifications anyway.
djsumdog 9y ago
Ironically, being able to keep track of who deletes their accounts disappeared when they closed that hole in their API that was used to extract friends lists (it broke this app I wrote years ago): https://penguindreams.org/blog/discoverying-friend-list-changes-on-facebook-with-python/ https://penguindreams.org/blog/discoverying-friend-list-chan... Because I've lived in so many places and different countries, there are a lot of people who I can only communicate with over Messenger. I usually use the purple-facebook and purple-hangouts plugins. I never read status updates. I only update my status to promote my other blogs/websites. I guess I could switch to sending international texts or ask people for their e-mails (which also means asking them to remove my e-mail from spam since I run my own e-mail server and Google/Microsoft don't really use DMARC/DKIM/SPF and always mark my stuff as spam), but messenger is just easier. I think we'll only see people get rid of Facebook when there are better alternatives to connect on. Even then it's dumb to delete a Facebook account; just stop using it like people did with MySpace.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
textmode 9y ago
"I was hoping that this article would talk about how they did the survey through Facebook :)" There is one type of "revolution" that arguably cannot be started on Facebook. The revolution to reclaim privacy from Facebook, to free ourselves from Facebook surveillance. Whenever this "conflict of interest" comes up, there is an unforgettable 1970 song I recall hearing as a youth. Hint 1: It was written before "rap" existed but many rappers and other artists attribute this man's work as a precursor to hip-hop. Hint 2: It has a repeating chorus that expresses a similar "conflict of interest", involving a different "revolution" and a different medium. Can any HN reader guess the song?
- asaph 9y ago
  The Revolution Will Not Be Televised by Gil Scott-Heron. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Revolution_Will_Not_Be_Televised https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Revolution_Will_Not_Be_T...
- Terretta 9y ago
  Paul Simon’s “50 ways to leave your lover”. ;-)
  - textmode 9y ago
    Not 1970.
- cinquemb 9y ago
  Gil Scott-Heron had a great many songs and poems where I sometimes think what modern analogues would take the form of, esp when it comes to people's behaviors with internet connected applications, though reading through them today still gets the message home.
  - textmode 9y ago
    Not only do I agree with you here, but I agree with you strongly on this as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16686723 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16686723 This is why I prefer clients and browsers small enough that I can edit and recompile quickly even on a computer with low resources.

spullara 9y ago

Liars.

ajeet_dhaliwal 9y ago

We can all be ignorant. I would never have thought so many people would consider this a new concern and felt the time to act was now, in April 2018. Although I don't personally use Facebook I think most people who like it should just continue using it but just think more carefully about the information they share. Deleting now isn't going to bring back the data that has already been shared.

908087 9y ago
The problem is that "the information they share" and "the information Facebook collects" are two very different things. During the recent hearings, Zuckerberg kept stressing the fact that users "choose what they share", while conveniently dodging addressing the fact that Facebook collects much more than that.

acconrad 9y ago

Would you be concerned if less than 2% of your userbase left?

codingdave 9y ago
Yes. Having worked at a company with a 99.8% retention rate, I'd absolutely be concerned if that jumped 10x. Because that is the real metric... not how many people left, but how does it compare to the retention rate prior to the recent events?
- InterestBazinga 9y ago
  I agree. But, I feel it is not as serious as in other areas because there are no true competitors to Facebook?

everdev 9y ago

I did this years ago to claims even here on HN that people think when you say "I deleted FB" or "I haven't used FB in years" are bragging. I think it's important to spread the message that life goes on outside of FB. If you delete, you'll be in good company. In a less extreme version, try not using it for 10 days and notice how you feel. There will be withdrawal, but if you can't pause a behavior for 10 days, you're probably addicted. Maintaining relationships outside of FB is like riding a bike and it'll feel awkward not to be involved in the "Did you see on FB" conversations at first, but you'll be past it in no time and back to more present conversations.

nightski 9y ago
For the most part I really dislike FB, and have no meaningful relationships on it. But unfortunately many local restaurants, breweries, and biking/activity clubs post activities on FB which I would likely completely miss out on. Until there is a competitor which is able to provide this I'm stuck on FB for the foreseeable future. However my profile is pretty minimal, I haven't shared anything for several years, and I run an adblocker. I don't think this is much more of a privacy concern than not having one as you are still tracked.
return1 9y ago
> that life goes on outside of FB. If you delete, you'll be in good company. That's interesting. I think a lot of people would say they are in worse company. And that it takes a lot of effort to find that good company offline.

sho 9y ago

These kinds of surveys are notoriously unreliable. There is no way for the interviewer to verify, no penalty for the participant lying, and you're talking to a complete stranger over the phone, further reducing the barrier for lying. There's also possibly a motivation to "send a message" to FB such that they improve their policy without the interviewee personally having to pay a price. Would be amazed if even half the "yes" responders actually did. Wouldn't be surprised if literally none of them had. Probably the best way for most people to "resist" would be to block FB tracking, and anyone who sells it to them, at the browser level. If enough people did, that swing the "materially hurt FB" vs "keep my personal utility of the platform" balance into the positive. edit: to clarify I meant the respondees lying.

evo_9 9y ago

So if you have never had a FB account, is there a way to delete your shadow profile and/or even check if they have one on you?

908087 9y ago
If any number of people have your phone number in their contact list, and any number of those use Facebook/WhatsApp/etc, then at the very least it's highly likely that Facebook has a shadow profile containing a portion of your social connections.
lancefisher 9y ago
Move to Europe, and file a right to be forgotten request after May 25th, when the GDPR goes into effect.
- ajmurmann 9y ago
  Do I have to live there or can I just be a citizen?
jwilk 9y ago
Good news: Facebook has UI for getting your personal data if you don't have an account. Bad news: Apparently it only works if you have an account. Go figure... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16821437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16821437

coldtea 9y ago

>1 in 10 Americans in survey say they deleted their Facebook account over privacy So, we might not have gained more hope on privacy issues, but at least we now know that a lot more people will outright lie and BS when polled on the matter, than we previously thought....

propman 9y ago

Go on your friends list and look at all the deleted profiles. Facebook no longer deletes the profile from your friendlist. If you have 900 friends and 50 delete, it still shows 900 and the names of deactivated profiles are still in friend list, but with no avatar. I went to my Facebook and found 8% of my friend list deactivated. I would be surprised if this entire hoopla resulted in more than 1% deletion but even 1% in NA is 1.8M accounts. That is around $200M a year loss for fb. Not a big deal, but their valuation is based on forward growth, so not tiny either

jghn 9y ago
Interesting, I didn't know that. Roughly 1.5% of my friends list was deleted. Probably closer to 1 as I think some of them deleted a long while back.
sdhgaiojfsa 9y ago
Note that they'll also have no avatar if they never set an avatar, and further if they deleted their account in the past, before the latest hoopla. So this way of estimating the number of people who have deactivated lately necessarily provides only an upper bound on the total number of deactivations.

poletopole 9y ago

I deleted my facebook account with all my content eight years ago after I was told some eastern European accessed my account, which made me realize what a liability facebook is, not to mention your page is the first thing an employer looks at when hiring.

Thaxll 9y ago

This kind of survey are bs, why do people even talk about them. No one care about the privacy issue and people will keep using Facebook.

ilovecars2 9y ago
Having spoken to a number of friends and people I haven’t met on the Facebook groups I was in (theme was all car enthusiasts) - not one of them cared. Their arguments were that Facebook knows everything about them anyway. My flatmate also gave he same opinion when I asked her. I can only assume that the general public just don’t care or feel that they have bigger things to worry about.
- musage 9y ago
  Then stop asking, and start telling maybe? By that I mean state your opinion, not tell people what to do; and then organize with those you can organize with. How many people did it take to end segregation? Certainly it didn't just "happen when most people said, when asked, that it should end". I think there's a reason there is so little positive social change these days, it seems like everybody (I don't exclude myself, far from it) expects some else to make it so they can just buy it, vote for it, sign up for an account or run a local copy. We, each of us, need to actually make our society together. Not just talk about what "happens" to it endlessly. It's hard. It's also worth it.
greggarious 9y ago
Do you have any specific criticism's of the methodology, or are you advocating that all survey results are meaningless?

jiveturkey 9y ago

I doubt that. It’d be bigger news than Syria (sadly) if FB lost 10% of its US users.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

nodesocket 9y ago

Either this survey is biased, or Zuckerberg and FB are outright lying when they say they have not seen a noticeable increase in deletions. My money is on the survey and media who push these headlines being BS.

humanrebar 9y ago
Why?

KasianFranks 9y ago

You can't delete 'Search', a lesson for 'Social' and why it will always lose to Search. Just ask AOL, Geocities, friendster and MySpace. Doing something that's easy to duplicate makes it easy to exploit and rarely pays off in the long term.

erikb 9y ago

Did they also delete their Whatsapp and their Instagram, their browser cache and their current mobile phone number? Otherwise it probably doesn't matter much.

adrianlmm 9y ago

>a survey right

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Kiro 9y ago

I really want to know the demographics here. I don't know a single one out of my hundreds of friends.

amelius 9y ago

I would quit Facebook if there was an alternative for keeping track of events and inviting people, which my friends would actually use.

amelius 9y ago

By the way, Facebook still leaks information. Proof: On Facebook, create a targeted ad, targeting people who have secret property "X"; the ad should be about a product "Y" not involving X. Wait for people to click the ad, visiting your website, and buying the product Y. Now you know the identities of these people coupled to the fact that they have property X. This also works for Google.

titzer 9y ago

Crazy idea: introduce a tax, per byte, on personal information, even if anonymized.

JumpCrisscross 9y ago

Deletion is too extreme for most people. Facebook is a monopoly for users and in an oligopoly for advertisers. This is a market failure [1]. More reasonable: escalating partial dis-engagement. Here's what I did, sequentially, over the years: 1. Turn off notifications for the Facebook app on your phone; 2. Turn off notifications for the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps on your phone; 3. Delete the Facebook app from your phone; 4. Delete the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps from your phone; and finally 5. Log out of Facebook on your desktop. It took me 2 years to go through from step 1 to step 5. It has made me happier and more productive. I still have a Facebook account. But the friction of grabbing my laptop and logging in forces me to consider "is this what I want to do? Or am I thoughtlessly reaching for the crack pipe?" [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure

ummonUncommon 9y ago
Knowledge that one need not use heroin this day has never saved those who are its servants, nor those servants' prey.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > Knowledge that one need not use heroin this day has never saved those who are its servants Recovery rates for heroin addicts "ranges from 35-65%" [1]. And Facebook isn't as addictive as heroin. [1] http://crehab.org/2017/08/14/heroin-addiction-why-the-recovery-rate-is-better-than-you-think/ http://crehab.org/2017/08/14/heroin-addiction-why-the-recove...
  - whiddershins 9y ago
    I am a little unsure whether Facebook truly isn't as addictive as heroin, or that it couldn't ultimately be as the algorithms improve. I find it as pernicious as alcohol, for my personal, subjective, experience.
- __onetimeacc__ 9y ago
  Have you done heroin yourself? I haven't, but it's a mistake to assume that Heroin is the most addictive drug ever. Anecdotally, I'm had several friends completely had their lives ruined by benzodiazapene addiction (usually in the form of street-pressed xanax [alprazolam]), so personally I would probably rather be addicted to heroin than benzos (not that I would want to be addicted to either)

ummonUncommon 9y ago

MySpace was a thing my friends and I resisted, but Facebook entered my life around age 15, when an attractive classmate invited me. I could be criticized for a lack of willpower when I joined the tool at that age, though I think that'd be unfair. Shortly thereafter, the service atomized every in-person form of social interaction I had once held dear, into a set of in-person interactions which were the footnote to an online logbook. I'm not sure how to qualify the negative impact the "social internet" had on myself and my peers, but I think it's probably immeasurable and not dissimilar from epidemic narcotic use. This continued through my young adulthood, during which time the traditional media was covering the suicide of Tyler Clementi and later Aaron Schwarz. I noticed the tool routinely used for cyberbullying, outing classmates of alternate sexualities, contact with strangers and subsequent dysfunctional communication, race hate, other forms of anomic and disinhibited communication, abusive surveillance of individuals within human courtships, and the routine use of aliases. Violence associated with online "socialization" continues to escalate in countless communities. Later, the implementation of Facebook Live would popularize its worldwide use for live video broadcast of interpersonal physical violence. Knowing the marketing effects of most other media, the deployment of that particular functionality was probably a given after the Clementi suicide. The effects of the tool upon partly-or-entirely political processes such as election, incarceration, hiring, policing, etc., are still for-profit and poorly-characterized. With a user count in the billions, billions in value, contracts with data mining firms, use as a media outlet by municipalities in lieu of traditional public media, its probably safe to say they are sizable and wholly-undemocratic. It is comedic that the idea of "democratization" is used in conjunction with a technology whose aim is to recontextualize friendship as an interaction which occurs at an extreme distance and with intensive record-keeping, as opposed to the chance in-person encounter of individuals with their spoken narratives in an agora, square, etc. The sort of behavior for which Facebook exists and continues to exist is the exact behavior legislated against upon the now-decommissioned ARPANet. The internet was never open or free. To say now, "The internet should neither be commercial nor political, but can be free" is too late, a lie, and unfair. The Kindle is a great device. Text messaging may be a small improvement to the human condition, like the lightbulb, or motor cartage. Remarks on Facebook are likely confined to the realm of observation. Media is not inherently social. For it to be social, its purpose has to be removed from a dominant narrative and subsequent revenues upon this narrative, which is necessarily impossible. Community farming, in spite of its tremendous cost, is social. Healthcare, in spite of its tremendous cost, is social. I post these remarks only to document my experiences for posterity. I cannot undo the damage these tools and their attached profit motives have done to my life, but I can note them publicly.

beizhia 9y ago

I actually deleted my facebook account because I felt like it was negatively affecting me mentally. I've never been the most social person (although I'm working to change that), and I would spend a lot of time alone reading my facebook feed, thinking about how I don't do as much cool stuff as all the people I'm friends with. I realized that I would only really post things to seek affirmation. Initially I just changed my password to something long that I couldnt remember, to keep me from logging in, knowing that I could reset the password if I needed to login. I never did though for the next 6 months. I also deleted the instagram app from my phone, and blocked reddit on all my PCs. Hackernews might be next I'm afraid - I just don't see that it's a good use of my time anymore. I've even been considering getting a non-smartphone next time I need a new phone. Maybe it's just a reaction to everything going on online, but I'm enjoying being free from social media.

beenBoutIT 9y ago

According to FB, it takes 90 days for an account to actually be deleted. If you 'delete' your account and then login before the 90 day period has passed your account is just reinstated. I'd love to see what percentage of these users stay off of FB long enough for their accounts to actually get removed.

MarkMc 9y ago

9% seems rather high to me. No mention of how the survey was conducted. Was it a telephone survey? How were the respondents chosen? It will be interesting to compare this 9% figure with the change in users that Facebook reports at their next earnings release.

MR4D 9y ago

I posted this article [1] Earlier today, but am linking here because I thought it showed how futile deleting an account actually is. In short, your data doesn’t hardly matter. Facebook is capable of generating tons of meta-data that you have no control over. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16845031 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16845031