10 ms·

Yes, You Should Delete Facebook

144 points by submeta 9y ago

mbrumlow 9y ago
I already did.
- submeta 9y ago
  So did I a couple of weeks ago. And I have to say: The world did not come to an end. Since I muted most of my contacts posts and used it like a newsreader, I had to find a newsreader alternative. Feedly is a pretty good replacement so far. And I am thinking of reading a printed daily newspaper again. I feel like on a digital detox path. And I haven't finished my journey yet.
- kjgkjhfkjf 9y ago
  Same here. My main concern was that I wouldn't be able to use sites for which I'd used Facebook login. This turned out not to be a problem at all.
docdeek 9y ago
> Be the customer not the product. Didn't someone from the Facebook executive float a paid version of Facebook in an interview recently? I'm not on Facebook but what would be a reasonable price for the services they provide right now, and would anyone pay it?
- theophrastus 9y ago
  I believe this was raised via an inference during the Zuckerberg testimony[1]. That is, since he stated with significance that there would always be a free version of facebook it suggests that there is at least a non-free version on his "whiteboard". [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/10/mark-zuckerberg-there-will-always-be-a-version-of-facebook-that-is-free.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/10/mark-zuckerberg-there-will-a...
  - icebraining 9y ago
    The COO also hypothesized it: http://fortune.com/2018/04/07/sheryl-sandberg-says-facebook-users-would-have-to-pay-for-total-privacy/ http://fortune.com/2018/04/07/sheryl-sandberg-says-facebook-...
- stanmancan 9y ago
  It's a nice idea in theory, but does anyone honestly believe Facebook would stop collecting, analyzing and sharing your data just because you paid them? Sure you might not have any ads displayed to you, but that's not a privacy concern anyways since Facebook doesn't provide user data directly to advertisers anyways; they just allow them to use a set of filters that rely on your data to help target ads. Not to mention the latest privacy concerns with Facebook really have nothing to do with advertising, and more to do with their lack of reliable security with your data (ie the Cambridge Analytica data leak, which was done via an app). The only way I'd truly trust that my data isn't a product in and of itself is if I'm paying for a service from day one, and there are no "free" accounts period.
caser 9y ago
I don't get the argument that giving data to Foursquare / Swarm is somehow better. It seems to be the same misaligned incentives as he argues exists with Facebook, they just haven't taken in as much data yet. For years people have been making the same argument about Facebook (the data makes the ads more relevant).
- tomxor 9y ago
  The difference is that foursquare isn't a monopoly and facebook is. Quiting foursquare if you don't like them is easy (nothing to loose other than a service you didn't like for whatever reason), quiting facebook because you don't like them can be hard because it has a monopoly over your friends. When it's hard to quit something that you don't like, that thing can easily evolve in ways against you, essentially you've removed the democratic aspect of the thing and you have a dictatorship - facebook. I think this problem is a little unique to social networking, it feels like it's inevitable that one will prevail above all others because people _want_ to all be on the same platform. If social network is to survive in a healthy way it would seem that a cross network protocol would need to exist to make it easy to switch between them, but that will likely never come from facebook.
blklivesmatter 9y ago
Absolutely right. When people do understand they lie only to users ? I really do not want my information to be sold or abused by facebook. I cant trust any of these corporations like facebook google and twitter!!
nkkollaw 9y ago
This obsession with Facebook is getting really annoying. When I lived in the States 15 years ago Publix (and I guess other stores, or maybe my bank) already sold a list of everything I bought with my debit card to advertising agencies, along with my full name and home address. I would get ads to my house, tailored to what I had bought a few days before, I'd say at least once a week. There are also hundreds of other companies that sell data besides Facebook. No one is talking about the companies that _buy_ the data, either. Can't the case be made that that's unethical too, and if they didn't happily buy the data Facebook would have to find another way to make money? My point us that it's all good to spread the word about questionable practices employed by companies that people use, but do we have to exclusively focus on Facebook forever, like it's the source of all evil and everyone else is a saint, or can we talk about someone else for a change..? Even in this article other companies are mentioned barely to prove the author's point against Facebook.
- kstrauser 9y ago
  If a million people are upset with the practices of a million companies, each company loses a customer and nothing changes. If the million people concentrate on a single company, that company notices. And when the next company tries the same shenanigans, they can be reminded about what happened to the first once. That's a bigger when for society than spreading out the protests.
  - nkkollaw 9y ago
    If we're talking about efficience, I would argue that concentrating on letting governments know would be even better. Facebook knows that regular users have no idea about privacy and it would take years to lose a big enough portion of users to even matter.
    - kstrauser 9y ago
      Sure, but nothing gets governmental attention like a million angry users being featured on the news.
panarky 9y ago
Maybe we're seeing an awakening that's different from previous episodes. Just like people woke up about tobacco use, high-fructose carbonated beverages, and workplace sexual abuse, maybe we're at a cultural inflection point with Facebook. Facebook will soon require 500 million people to consent to a long list of new terms and conditions to comply with GDPR. There will be no option to decline the new terms, only "accept and continue". What if 5% of users don't accept? That doesn't sound like much, but that 5% is probably the most media savvy and influential cohort on the platform. 5% defection could be a big deal in continuing the awakening. What if 25% of the people who remain with Facebook don't feel as good using it any more, and they use it 25% less. That's another 6% of activity and engagement that evaporates, making the platform less "sticky" for everyone. Just like positive network effects amplified Facebook's importance, negative network effects could cascade into tectonic changes in how people use social media. No, most people won't delete it completely. Facebook will be with us for many years. But if I owned Facebook shares, I'd be worried.
- matte_black 9y ago
  I own Facebook shares. I’m not worried. Facebook owns several other properties and has the cash horde to buy more properties.
  - wyclif 9y ago
    Yes, and this is important to understand about Facebook. Let's say for the sake of argument (and I don't really think it will pan out, but let's pretend for a sec) that Facebook takes a serious hit from the Cambridge Analytica fallout and the company is weakened considerably. Well, they're shown before that they can spin off a new "communications product" under a new name and effectively shed a lot of the ill will surrounding the parent company, but still leverage the massive benefits of their cash reserve and talent.
- jamesrcole 9y ago
  > What if 5% of users don't accept? ... that 5% is probably the most ... influential cohort on the platform. What's your argument for that claim?
time0ut 9y ago
Which sends the stronger signal: deleting the account or just never logging in again? I haven't visited Facebook since I removed it from my Firefox start page a couple months ago. I was visiting it out habit but getting so little value that just having to type the URL in is too high a barrier for me to visit now. Is it worth the effort to log back in and actually delete the account?
- isostatic 9y ago
  Currently your information is accessible. Removing everything may not (yet) remove it from facebook servers, but it means it's less accessible than before, and come GDPR a good chance they'll have to remove it.
  - polskibus 9y ago
    Afaik, if you delete now, and ask them to delete all after gdpr, they have to obey same as if you waited until gdrp to ask them
elvirs 9y ago
I think this is the beginning of the end for Facebook as we know it
- humanrebar 9y ago
  Facebook as I knew it ended some time ago.
andreyk 9y ago
No, you should not delete Facebook. Not because it's not a good response to recent events, but because it's like fighting climate change with conserving energy at home; primarily a token gesture that will change little (mainly due to not enough people ever doing it). If you actually feel strongly about this, do something about it. I have been setting up a Diaspora* pod for my friends (and exploring the similar https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/ https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/), have been trying to be active on Minds.com (social media is one place crypto may actually make sense, but the community is tiny and highly toxic as is), supporting the idea of a paid-model for FB, and generally thinking about this. Facebook is a powerful tool that is best used to do these more productive things to help create a viable alternative - leaving Facebook is not going to change anything. I also own the domain name hnsocial.club , and have been wanting to try and setup a Diaspora/Scuttlebutt pod to try and get the HN community to embrace it so the network effects of a large community being on such a platform are felt. I don't have much time for this (I am a PhD student at Stanford), but if you think this might be a good idea get in touch to collaborate!
- simonbarker87 9y ago
  Not sure where your idea that fighting climate change by conserving energy at home is token gesture. In the UK 4,000 GWh/day are used for heating during winter, about half of that will be domestic and so moving to something like Passivhaus would be a big step forward in both domestic energy bill reduction and green house gas emissions. To put that 4,000 GWh/day in context the UK hovers around 1,000 GWh/day for electricity and 1,500 GWh/day for transportation.
  - andreyk 9y ago
    It is a token gesture because there is little chance of it being done by enough people to make a difference. I base this off the documentary Before the Flood, in which DiCaprio says that in the early 2000s the big tactic was to promote home energy conservation but it amounts to very little and it has been realized that other more involved strategies are needed. This is stated explicitly early on, and it seems very plausible to me
JohnTHaller 9y ago
You can minimize your Facebook footprint by removing unnecessary data from Facebook and your profile, never using Login with Facebook on websites (and switching any you do to a proper login and strong password), using an ad blocker to block Facebook like/share/login/comment on third party sites, and only using Firefox in a contained way. I use it in Firefox with the Facebook container ( https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/facebookcontainer/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/facebookcontainer/ ) which keeps your Firefox browsing separate and doesn't bleed the data to other sites.
- ianai 9y ago
  I blocked it at the dns and firewall of my network.
- drdeca 9y ago
  > using an ad blocker to block Facebook like/share/login/comment on third party sites, Would blocking domains used for Facebook embedded content using the hosts file also work for this purpose? I would think this would have the advantage of applying to all browsers on ones machine, and not requiring the code to remove the references from the pages on each page load (instead doing stuff when resolving the domains). Is there a reason this wouldn't work as well?
  - downandout 9y ago
    You can do it this way. Though as I have repeatedly said, blocking Facebook is more of a symbolic gesture that you dislike tracking, rather than actually disabling tracking. There are many other companies that are tracking you, who collectively have far more data about you than Facebook does, and because they are lower profile, they can do things with that data that actually are nefarious (unlike in the case of Facebook). If you don't want to be tracked, give your smartphone to a homeless person and cancel your Internet service. Still, if you want to bother with the drop-in-the-ocean strategy and block Facebook domains with your hosts file, see: https://gist.github.com/thomasbilk/1506210/2d20f47bbcca75b2f78d6909c1637501000d846f https://gist.github.com/thomasbilk/1506210/2d20f47bbcca75b2f...
- 9y ago
dizzystar 9y ago
I'm not a huge facebook user, and really eschew social media in general. I only use these sites for promotion, as I have no personal gain from it. None if my friends use Facebook much, and that hasn't stopped us from keeping in contact. In any case, I'm just not sure why people go on and on about deleting these sites. Those who are concerned aren't that active (if they use it at all). Posting on Hacker News is preaching to the choir. Anyone who's had this discussion with regular Joe's and Jane's knows the dead eye glaze all too well. If it makes people happy to use Facebook or whatever, we aren't supposed to judge them. We, as the tech community, ARE the problem, and we add to it with every new IOT device, AI invention, and every database we build. It's up to us to take responsibility before being called on it. We are supposed to be the trusted ones, and we can only betray that trust because of the ignorant masses.
everdev 9y ago
I deleted Facebook years ago, but so many of my friends have persisted or increased their usage. I think instead of scaring people about privacy you have to first understand and appreciate the value people get out of Facebook. For me, it's that I can quickly "feel" connected to and get validation from my friends and community. Trying to scare people into giving up something they enjoy doesn't usually work. Instead, we should be helping people realize how they can build connection outside of Facebook. For me, I just gave up on the "did you see on Facebook" conversations with my friends, but not everyone is willing to just abandon a category of shared experiences with friends. The day will come when we see Facebook as a net negative, but I think it's a long way off unfortunately. The number of people leaving Facebook has to increase to a critical mass where "did you see on Facebook" conversations become un-cool.
- anonu 9y ago
  Call me old school... But what about meeting a friend for a coffee or dinner? And then getting validation that way? Rhetorical questions probably. Because Facebook has reduced all that friction. Being connected and getting validation gives you that same dopamine hit you get from connecting with someone in person...multiple times over.. and you can do it from your smartphone
  - lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
    As the world becomes increasingly unbound from geography more people are going to have friends outside of the "lets meet for coffee" radius. I think it's arrogant to the extreme to suggest that people should go back to giving up on their connections just because you've made a judgement about a company's business model or privacy tradeoffs.
    - drdeadringer 9y ago
      To be fair, would you like to have coffee with a friend as a minder sits with you?
    - zaphod4prez 9y ago
whataretensors 9y ago
None of this is new information, just another FB hit piece - likely paid. I'm sick of people trashing facebook when they can only wish for the data collection ability of the NSA. Oh, and there's no opt out there.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- bertil 9y ago
  Who do you suspect is paying for pieces like that? I don’t really see a lot of upside from attacking Facebook.
  - downandout 9y ago
    There are many political action groups etc. that would like to see Facebook go down.
    - bertil 9y ago
      What are their actual objectives? I can’t imagine taking Facebook down is the end game.
- arca_vorago 9y ago
  >I'm sick of people trashing facebook when they can only wish for the data collection ability of the NSA. Oh, and there's no opt out there. So because facebook isn't at NSA's level people should'nt trash fb? What an obviously logically fallacious statement. Do you not realize FB is part of the firehose that feeds the NSA et al? It is only one of many firehoses, but don't underestimate the power of the amount of data fb has. Something tells me you know this and are being intellectually dishonest.
downandout 9y ago
tl;dr Guy who had researched Soylent got targeted by ads for one of their competitors, called Ample, and uses that as a basis as to why you should delete Facebook. Really? My guess is that he wound up on a page with the FB pixel as a result of a Soylent search. Ample was likely running a Lookalike audience ad. It doesn't take any sort of deep knowledge, illegal/immoral data processing, or any other of the nefarious things he is implying to make that connection. Let's remember that Ample didn't actually ever have this guy's data. An algorithm on Facebook's side said "this guy lives in San Franscisco, has lots of friends in startups, and has searched for articles related to Soylent before" and showed him an ad based on targeting parameters setup by Ample. This is all data that he voluntarily gave to Facebook. Unless he clicked on the ad and then voluntarily entered his personal information into the Ample's site, Ample does not and will never know anything about him, including whether or not he ever was shown their ad. If you want to avoid this kind of thing, unfortunately deleting Facebook is just the beginning. You'll have to never search the internet (all sites that you click on from any search engine know what you were searching for when you click over), turn off all cookies (which means you can never log in, anywhere), and disable javascript. That doesn't even begin to address the elephant in the room: your ISP knows just about everything you do. The genie is out of the bottle. Referrers are sent by browsers. The Internet works by first connecting to a network provider, which means they know everything you do. Even in the world of SSL everywhere, DNS queries provide a very telling map of your behavior. Almost all sites rely on cookies at least for login purposes, and those can be used to track your behavior. Just want to disable third party cookies? Go ahead. How long will it be until a service shows up for sites to band together and correlate their first party cookies with info about your IP and achieve the same mission? So if you're worried enough about your privacy to delete Facebook, then it's hypocritical of you to be reading this message on the Internet at all. You should not be accessing the Internet if you do not want to be tracked.
- bertil 9y ago
  You don’t seem to consider the possibility of having control over that data -- knowing and editing who knows what about you. I’ve been actively filtering any ad not coming from a network where I had a good knowledge and detailed access over my profile (Google and Facebook); filtering any cookie not justified by my direct usage, and it hasn’t really hampered my usage. I can’t read things on Forbes and Business Insider, but that’s hardly a loss. It doesn’t mean my information doesn’t get leaked, but it means that, starting next month (I’m in the EU) if I see an advertiser in my Spam box, or on https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/ https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/ I will be able to ask how they got around our agreements and not be given evasive answers.
sweden 9y ago
Why do people go to extremes about Facebook? Every single submission I see here on HN, and most of the comments as well, are either about using and abusing Facebook for every single aspect of their lifes or about eradicating it from the face of the Earth. Is this part of the American culture? I'm from Europe and while there is a lot of people sharing every single thing on Facebook here, I would say that most of the people never really post or follow stuff on Facebook. People don't really care that much about the social showoff. Most of people use Facebook because it is really convenient for contacting other people and organizing events, and that's it. Can't you just use Facebook when you find it convenient and then just move on with your life?
- hsljekskfh 9y ago
  i act this way. i go to facebook maybe once a month when i need to contact someone but don’t know their number. i think people like me just don’t comment on this stuff because they don’t care.
- bertil 9y ago
  I believe that has a lot to do with how the experiences are actually different. Advertising are a lot more agressive, significantly more present and rely on data gathered from brokers that are meaningfully more insightful. Just look at the TV ad culture: ads for drugs that are incredibly manipulative, political ads that somehow are worst — and add targeting. The ads I see Americans friends share are terrifying to me. Show-offs are also probably a problem, too; more so that there are less social expectation to peg them down a notch in the US. I absolutely you can make Facebook work for you, but that requires to give it negative feedback (blocking or hiding people, hiding ads) and people have a strong aversion to this, on both sides of the Atlantic -- including data scientists who should know better about training models with balanced feedback.
- 110011 9y ago
  The problem is that most people conflate social media with the predominant mode of social media use, i.e., smartphones. Many of the jedi mind tricks that the mobile apps play to keep us addicted don't really work that well on a computer. For example, here is a TED Talk by a very smart person on "Why you should quit social media": https://www.ted.com/talks/cal_newport_why_you_should_quit_social_media https://www.ted.com/talks/cal_newport_why_you_should_quit_so... but listen to his arguments and you see that most of his objections are to the mode of social media use in the present day, i.e., smartphones. In my opinion people should not quit social media, rather they should quit using smartphones and find out what their friends are up to on a weekly/monthly basis by logging in to their facebook account on a computer. This is a healthy way to use social media. Let me not get into the obvious rebuttal "but, how do I quit smartphones! they're so useful!". Personally, I use a Nokia 105 and I am very happy.
kull 9y ago
I am visiting a small town in Texas near the border, I am living here with a friend for few months (originally I live in NYC), and Facebook is really the only place where I can find info about local restaurants and events. There is no delivery.com here and google maps often list places that were closed. I have never used really Facebook but I am finding myself now this being the only option to connect with locals online.
contoraria 9y ago
It's too much low quality data. If you yourself agree that you neither contribute nor can find valuable data, do Facebook a favor and leave. They probably have enough vacation and family reporting to not need anymore of that. They are interested in finding trends, so if you are trendy enough and use facebook for trending, feel free to try to take advantage of it and hope you wont miss out.
kjgkjhfkjf 9y ago
If you're experiencing withdrawal symptoms due to a lack of attention from people on the internet after deleting Facebook, you can just re-enable your account. There's no need to write yet another article about why you did it.
methodover 9y ago
For any ad on Facebook, you can click on it and see why you're seeing it. They are not listening into your conversations. You can review your ad preferences, including what information is used for FB's ad targeting, here: https://m.facebook.com/ads/preferences/ https://m.facebook.com/ads/preferences/
wyclif 9y ago
And as for staying up to date on my friends lives… well I just do it the old fashioned way. Talking to them. We hear this bromide constantly from people in the #DeleteFacebook movement, but it's facile. It is because it assumes that a "friend" on FB and a friend IRL are equivalent but they're not, and intelligent people know this. There are people in your life that you either want or need to passively keep up with rather than actively socialise or reach. I've been critical of Facebook's lack of privacy and other issues surrounding the company but I can't get too worked up about the danger of perpetuating passive/active friend distinctions because I think it exists outside of social media and is simply a reflection of the meatspace, and it's actually healthy to do.
Yizahi 9y ago
It is hilarious how people believe that free application/site A sells user data for profit and that application/site B does not. I just wonder what logic is going on in their heads. It's like saying that if I close my eyes and doesn't see the monitor in front of me then it doesn't exist. Writing stuff like this is delusional: "These are apps where I volunteer my location, travel, eating, and shopping habits, and I’ve never had the slightest sense that Foursquare was using this data in a way that made my life worse." (c)
Sophira 9y ago
> And since we’ve been sipping the Facebook friend juice for so long, it’s legitimately scary to quit. How will you know what events are going on? How will you know if something big happens in your friend’s life? How will you stay in touch with people? > The simple answer is… all the ways we did for the last 100,000 years. Talking to people. Being an active consumer of information and knowledge about your friends’ lives instead of letting it passively wash over you. That's a nice sentiment and one I absolutely agree with, but there's a big problem with it - how do we do this? Before the Internet, the answer was obvious; talk to them. That's because friendships tended to be mostly local; you probably knew your friends' addresses and phone numbers. When the Internet got popular, friendships were made on a global scale, and instant messaging became a thing. A lot of people grew up with AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, and MSN. It's important to note that these services weren't provided by companies whose soul reason for existing was to provide communication platforms. They were all secondary platforms provided by companies whose main business was elsewhere. Now, all of these services are gone. In its place are apps like Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram and Discord, which would be great, except that WhatsApp and Instagram are owned by the very company you're trying to escape from (Facebook) and Discord is a company whose soul product is their communication platform and thus have the mother of all motivations to make money from your data (even if they don't do that right now, thanks to unsustainable VC funding). Twitter is also a platform owned by a company which has the communication tool as its soul product, and to its credit hasn't made too much controversy in its long tenure, but even though it can be used for direct communication (and is used more for this purpose than Facebook), it's still primarily a "push" platform; for the most part, tweets come to you, as determined by algorithms. Yes, there do still exist chat platforms provided by companies whose main product isn't their communication platforms: GTalk (or Hangouts) and Skype. Unfortunately these are both owned by companies who have been proven to behave in predatory fashions to their users: Google and Microsoft. There are free and open-source programs that can be used. Jitsi allows instant messaging and video conferencing via XMPP, for example, Mastadon is a recent Twitter-like platform, and Signal allows for encrypted conversation. Each of these (and others) allow communication with users connected to other servers (and in most cases using other protocols), but even so the problem is that it's unlikely that your friends use programs that communicate over these protocols and are compatible. (The exception is GTalk, which uses XMPP.) Then there are the numerous decentralised free/open-source methods. Mumble provides text-based and audio-based communication, numerous IRC servers provide text communication, etc. On a wide scale, the biggest issue with these are that you can't communicate with anybody unless they're connected to the same server as you. That might be desirable in the case where you have groups all interested in the same thing or otherwise tied by a common bond, but people can't be expected to join multiple servers just to keep in touch with their friends. Of course, all of these can be used as primary methods of communication, particularly among small groups of friends, and maybe this is actually what the article is arguing for. I personally would love if Mastadon became more popular, even though it's a "push"-style system like Twitter, because I think it has the best shot at doing so and it allows communication with potentially your entire circle of friends while simultaneously having differing servers with different policies. It's probably the closest thing to democratic messaging that we have.

144 points by submeta 9y ago

mbrumlow 9y ago

I already did.

submeta 9y ago
So did I a couple of weeks ago. And I have to say: The world did not come to an end. Since I muted most of my contacts posts and used it like a newsreader, I had to find a newsreader alternative. Feedly is a pretty good replacement so far. And I am thinking of reading a printed daily newspaper again. I feel like on a digital detox path. And I haven't finished my journey yet.
kjgkjhfkjf 9y ago
Same here. My main concern was that I wouldn't be able to use sites for which I'd used Facebook login. This turned out not to be a problem at all.

docdeek 9y ago

> Be the customer not the product. Didn't someone from the Facebook executive float a paid version of Facebook in an interview recently? I'm not on Facebook but what would be a reasonable price for the services they provide right now, and would anyone pay it?

theophrastus 9y ago
I believe this was raised via an inference during the Zuckerberg testimony[1]. That is, since he stated with significance that there would always be a free version of facebook it suggests that there is at least a non-free version on his "whiteboard". [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/10/mark-zuckerberg-there-will-always-be-a-version-of-facebook-that-is-free.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/10/mark-zuckerberg-there-will-a...
- icebraining 9y ago
  The COO also hypothesized it: http://fortune.com/2018/04/07/sheryl-sandberg-says-facebook-users-would-have-to-pay-for-total-privacy/ http://fortune.com/2018/04/07/sheryl-sandberg-says-facebook-...
stanmancan 9y ago
It's a nice idea in theory, but does anyone honestly believe Facebook would stop collecting, analyzing and sharing your data just because you paid them? Sure you might not have any ads displayed to you, but that's not a privacy concern anyways since Facebook doesn't provide user data directly to advertisers anyways; they just allow them to use a set of filters that rely on your data to help target ads. Not to mention the latest privacy concerns with Facebook really have nothing to do with advertising, and more to do with their lack of reliable security with your data (ie the Cambridge Analytica data leak, which was done via an app). The only way I'd truly trust that my data isn't a product in and of itself is if I'm paying for a service from day one, and there are no "free" accounts period.

caser 9y ago

I don't get the argument that giving data to Foursquare / Swarm is somehow better. It seems to be the same misaligned incentives as he argues exists with Facebook, they just haven't taken in as much data yet. For years people have been making the same argument about Facebook (the data makes the ads more relevant).

tomxor 9y ago
The difference is that foursquare isn't a monopoly and facebook is. Quiting foursquare if you don't like them is easy (nothing to loose other than a service you didn't like for whatever reason), quiting facebook because you don't like them can be hard because it has a monopoly over your friends. When it's hard to quit something that you don't like, that thing can easily evolve in ways against you, essentially you've removed the democratic aspect of the thing and you have a dictatorship - facebook. I think this problem is a little unique to social networking, it feels like it's inevitable that one will prevail above all others because people _want_ to all be on the same platform. If social network is to survive in a healthy way it would seem that a cross network protocol would need to exist to make it easy to switch between them, but that will likely never come from facebook.

blklivesmatter 9y ago

Absolutely right. When people do understand they lie only to users ? I really do not want my information to be sold or abused by facebook. I cant trust any of these corporations like facebook google and twitter!!

nkkollaw 9y ago

This obsession with Facebook is getting really annoying. When I lived in the States 15 years ago Publix (and I guess other stores, or maybe my bank) already sold a list of everything I bought with my debit card to advertising agencies, along with my full name and home address. I would get ads to my house, tailored to what I had bought a few days before, I'd say at least once a week. There are also hundreds of other companies that sell data besides Facebook. No one is talking about the companies that _buy_ the data, either. Can't the case be made that that's unethical too, and if they didn't happily buy the data Facebook would have to find another way to make money? My point us that it's all good to spread the word about questionable practices employed by companies that people use, but do we have to exclusively focus on Facebook forever, like it's the source of all evil and everyone else is a saint, or can we talk about someone else for a change..? Even in this article other companies are mentioned barely to prove the author's point against Facebook.

kstrauser 9y ago
If a million people are upset with the practices of a million companies, each company loses a customer and nothing changes. If the million people concentrate on a single company, that company notices. And when the next company tries the same shenanigans, they can be reminded about what happened to the first once. That's a bigger when for society than spreading out the protests.
- nkkollaw 9y ago
  If we're talking about efficience, I would argue that concentrating on letting governments know would be even better. Facebook knows that regular users have no idea about privacy and it would take years to lose a big enough portion of users to even matter.
  - kstrauser 9y ago
    Sure, but nothing gets governmental attention like a million angry users being featured on the news.

panarky 9y ago

Maybe we're seeing an awakening that's different from previous episodes. Just like people woke up about tobacco use, high-fructose carbonated beverages, and workplace sexual abuse, maybe we're at a cultural inflection point with Facebook. Facebook will soon require 500 million people to consent to a long list of new terms and conditions to comply with GDPR. There will be no option to decline the new terms, only "accept and continue". What if 5% of users don't accept? That doesn't sound like much, but that 5% is probably the most media savvy and influential cohort on the platform. 5% defection could be a big deal in continuing the awakening. What if 25% of the people who remain with Facebook don't feel as good using it any more, and they use it 25% less. That's another 6% of activity and engagement that evaporates, making the platform less "sticky" for everyone. Just like positive network effects amplified Facebook's importance, negative network effects could cascade into tectonic changes in how people use social media. No, most people won't delete it completely. Facebook will be with us for many years. But if I owned Facebook shares, I'd be worried.

matte_black 9y ago
I own Facebook shares. I’m not worried. Facebook owns several other properties and has the cash horde to buy more properties.
- wyclif 9y ago
  Yes, and this is important to understand about Facebook. Let's say for the sake of argument (and I don't really think it will pan out, but let's pretend for a sec) that Facebook takes a serious hit from the Cambridge Analytica fallout and the company is weakened considerably. Well, they're shown before that they can spin off a new "communications product" under a new name and effectively shed a lot of the ill will surrounding the parent company, but still leverage the massive benefits of their cash reserve and talent.
jamesrcole 9y ago
> What if 5% of users don't accept? ... that 5% is probably the most ... influential cohort on the platform. What's your argument for that claim?

time0ut 9y ago

Which sends the stronger signal: deleting the account or just never logging in again? I haven't visited Facebook since I removed it from my Firefox start page a couple months ago. I was visiting it out habit but getting so little value that just having to type the URL in is too high a barrier for me to visit now. Is it worth the effort to log back in and actually delete the account?

isostatic 9y ago
Currently your information is accessible. Removing everything may not (yet) remove it from facebook servers, but it means it's less accessible than before, and come GDPR a good chance they'll have to remove it.
- polskibus 9y ago
  Afaik, if you delete now, and ask them to delete all after gdpr, they have to obey same as if you waited until gdrp to ask them

elvirs 9y ago

I think this is the beginning of the end for Facebook as we know it

humanrebar 9y ago
Facebook as I knew it ended some time ago.

andreyk 9y ago

No, you should not delete Facebook. Not because it's not a good response to recent events, but because it's like fighting climate change with conserving energy at home; primarily a token gesture that will change little (mainly due to not enough people ever doing it). If you actually feel strongly about this, do something about it. I have been setting up a Diaspora* pod for my friends (and exploring the similar https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/ https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/), have been trying to be active on Minds.com (social media is one place crypto may actually make sense, but the community is tiny and highly toxic as is), supporting the idea of a paid-model for FB, and generally thinking about this. Facebook is a powerful tool that is best used to do these more productive things to help create a viable alternative - leaving Facebook is not going to change anything. I also own the domain name hnsocial.club , and have been wanting to try and setup a Diaspora/Scuttlebutt pod to try and get the HN community to embrace it so the network effects of a large community being on such a platform are felt. I don't have much time for this (I am a PhD student at Stanford), but if you think this might be a good idea get in touch to collaborate!

simonbarker87 9y ago
Not sure where your idea that fighting climate change by conserving energy at home is token gesture. In the UK 4,000 GWh/day are used for heating during winter, about half of that will be domestic and so moving to something like Passivhaus would be a big step forward in both domestic energy bill reduction and green house gas emissions. To put that 4,000 GWh/day in context the UK hovers around 1,000 GWh/day for electricity and 1,500 GWh/day for transportation.
- andreyk 9y ago
  It is a token gesture because there is little chance of it being done by enough people to make a difference. I base this off the documentary Before the Flood, in which DiCaprio says that in the early 2000s the big tactic was to promote home energy conservation but it amounts to very little and it has been realized that other more involved strategies are needed. This is stated explicitly early on, and it seems very plausible to me

JohnTHaller 9y ago

You can minimize your Facebook footprint by removing unnecessary data from Facebook and your profile, never using Login with Facebook on websites (and switching any you do to a proper login and strong password), using an ad blocker to block Facebook like/share/login/comment on third party sites, and only using Firefox in a contained way. I use it in Firefox with the Facebook container ( https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/facebookcontainer/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/facebookcontainer/ ) which keeps your Firefox browsing separate and doesn't bleed the data to other sites.

ianai 9y ago
I blocked it at the dns and firewall of my network.
drdeca 9y ago
> using an ad blocker to block Facebook like/share/login/comment on third party sites, Would blocking domains used for Facebook embedded content using the hosts file also work for this purpose? I would think this would have the advantage of applying to all browsers on ones machine, and not requiring the code to remove the references from the pages on each page load (instead doing stuff when resolving the domains). Is there a reason this wouldn't work as well?
- downandout 9y ago
  You can do it this way. Though as I have repeatedly said, blocking Facebook is more of a symbolic gesture that you dislike tracking, rather than actually disabling tracking. There are many other companies that are tracking you, who collectively have far more data about you than Facebook does, and because they are lower profile, they can do things with that data that actually are nefarious (unlike in the case of Facebook). If you don't want to be tracked, give your smartphone to a homeless person and cancel your Internet service. Still, if you want to bother with the drop-in-the-ocean strategy and block Facebook domains with your hosts file, see: https://gist.github.com/thomasbilk/1506210/2d20f47bbcca75b2f78d6909c1637501000d846f https://gist.github.com/thomasbilk/1506210/2d20f47bbcca75b2f...
9y ago

dizzystar 9y ago

I'm not a huge facebook user, and really eschew social media in general. I only use these sites for promotion, as I have no personal gain from it. None if my friends use Facebook much, and that hasn't stopped us from keeping in contact. In any case, I'm just not sure why people go on and on about deleting these sites. Those who are concerned aren't that active (if they use it at all). Posting on Hacker News is preaching to the choir. Anyone who's had this discussion with regular Joe's and Jane's knows the dead eye glaze all too well. If it makes people happy to use Facebook or whatever, we aren't supposed to judge them. We, as the tech community, ARE the problem, and we add to it with every new IOT device, AI invention, and every database we build. It's up to us to take responsibility before being called on it. We are supposed to be the trusted ones, and we can only betray that trust because of the ignorant masses.

everdev 9y ago

I deleted Facebook years ago, but so many of my friends have persisted or increased their usage. I think instead of scaring people about privacy you have to first understand and appreciate the value people get out of Facebook. For me, it's that I can quickly "feel" connected to and get validation from my friends and community. Trying to scare people into giving up something they enjoy doesn't usually work. Instead, we should be helping people realize how they can build connection outside of Facebook. For me, I just gave up on the "did you see on Facebook" conversations with my friends, but not everyone is willing to just abandon a category of shared experiences with friends. The day will come when we see Facebook as a net negative, but I think it's a long way off unfortunately. The number of people leaving Facebook has to increase to a critical mass where "did you see on Facebook" conversations become un-cool.

anonu 9y ago
Call me old school... But what about meeting a friend for a coffee or dinner? And then getting validation that way? Rhetorical questions probably. Because Facebook has reduced all that friction. Being connected and getting validation gives you that same dopamine hit you get from connecting with someone in person...multiple times over.. and you can do it from your smartphone
- lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
  As the world becomes increasingly unbound from geography more people are going to have friends outside of the "lets meet for coffee" radius. I think it's arrogant to the extreme to suggest that people should go back to giving up on their connections just because you've made a judgement about a company's business model or privacy tradeoffs.
  - drdeadringer 9y ago
    To be fair, would you like to have coffee with a friend as a minder sits with you?
  - zaphod4prez 9y ago

whataretensors 9y ago

None of this is new information, just another FB hit piece - likely paid. I'm sick of people trashing facebook when they can only wish for the data collection ability of the NSA. Oh, and there's no opt out there.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
bertil 9y ago
Who do you suspect is paying for pieces like that? I don’t really see a lot of upside from attacking Facebook.
- downandout 9y ago
  There are many political action groups etc. that would like to see Facebook go down.
  - bertil 9y ago
    What are their actual objectives? I can’t imagine taking Facebook down is the end game.
arca_vorago 9y ago
>I'm sick of people trashing facebook when they can only wish for the data collection ability of the NSA. Oh, and there's no opt out there. So because facebook isn't at NSA's level people should'nt trash fb? What an obviously logically fallacious statement. Do you not realize FB is part of the firehose that feeds the NSA et al? It is only one of many firehoses, but don't underestimate the power of the amount of data fb has. Something tells me you know this and are being intellectually dishonest.

downandout 9y ago

tl;dr Guy who had researched Soylent got targeted by ads for one of their competitors, called Ample, and uses that as a basis as to why you should delete Facebook. Really? My guess is that he wound up on a page with the FB pixel as a result of a Soylent search. Ample was likely running a Lookalike audience ad. It doesn't take any sort of deep knowledge, illegal/immoral data processing, or any other of the nefarious things he is implying to make that connection. Let's remember that Ample didn't actually ever have this guy's data. An algorithm on Facebook's side said "this guy lives in San Franscisco, has lots of friends in startups, and has searched for articles related to Soylent before" and showed him an ad based on targeting parameters setup by Ample. This is all data that he voluntarily gave to Facebook. Unless he clicked on the ad and then voluntarily entered his personal information into the Ample's site, Ample does not and will never know anything about him, including whether or not he ever was shown their ad. If you want to avoid this kind of thing, unfortunately deleting Facebook is just the beginning. You'll have to never search the internet (all sites that you click on from any search engine know what you were searching for when you click over), turn off all cookies (which means you can never log in, anywhere), and disable javascript. That doesn't even begin to address the elephant in the room: your ISP knows just about everything you do. The genie is out of the bottle. Referrers are sent by browsers. The Internet works by first connecting to a network provider, which means they know everything you do. Even in the world of SSL everywhere, DNS queries provide a very telling map of your behavior. Almost all sites rely on cookies at least for login purposes, and those can be used to track your behavior. Just want to disable third party cookies? Go ahead. How long will it be until a service shows up for sites to band together and correlate their first party cookies with info about your IP and achieve the same mission? So if you're worried enough about your privacy to delete Facebook, then it's hypocritical of you to be reading this message on the Internet at all. You should not be accessing the Internet if you do not want to be tracked.

bertil 9y ago
You don’t seem to consider the possibility of having control over that data -- knowing and editing who knows what about you. I’ve been actively filtering any ad not coming from a network where I had a good knowledge and detailed access over my profile (Google and Facebook); filtering any cookie not justified by my direct usage, and it hasn’t really hampered my usage. I can’t read things on Forbes and Business Insider, but that’s hardly a loss. It doesn’t mean my information doesn’t get leaked, but it means that, starting next month (I’m in the EU) if I see an advertiser in my Spam box, or on https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/ https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/ I will be able to ask how they got around our agreements and not be given evasive answers.

sweden 9y ago

Why do people go to extremes about Facebook? Every single submission I see here on HN, and most of the comments as well, are either about using and abusing Facebook for every single aspect of their lifes or about eradicating it from the face of the Earth. Is this part of the American culture? I'm from Europe and while there is a lot of people sharing every single thing on Facebook here, I would say that most of the people never really post or follow stuff on Facebook. People don't really care that much about the social showoff. Most of people use Facebook because it is really convenient for contacting other people and organizing events, and that's it. Can't you just use Facebook when you find it convenient and then just move on with your life?

hsljekskfh 9y ago
i act this way. i go to facebook maybe once a month when i need to contact someone but don’t know their number. i think people like me just don’t comment on this stuff because they don’t care.
bertil 9y ago
I believe that has a lot to do with how the experiences are actually different. Advertising are a lot more agressive, significantly more present and rely on data gathered from brokers that are meaningfully more insightful. Just look at the TV ad culture: ads for drugs that are incredibly manipulative, political ads that somehow are worst — and add targeting. The ads I see Americans friends share are terrifying to me. Show-offs are also probably a problem, too; more so that there are less social expectation to peg them down a notch in the US. I absolutely you can make Facebook work for you, but that requires to give it negative feedback (blocking or hiding people, hiding ads) and people have a strong aversion to this, on both sides of the Atlantic -- including data scientists who should know better about training models with balanced feedback.
110011 9y ago
The problem is that most people conflate social media with the predominant mode of social media use, i.e., smartphones. Many of the jedi mind tricks that the mobile apps play to keep us addicted don't really work that well on a computer. For example, here is a TED Talk by a very smart person on "Why you should quit social media": https://www.ted.com/talks/cal_newport_why_you_should_quit_social_media https://www.ted.com/talks/cal_newport_why_you_should_quit_so... but listen to his arguments and you see that most of his objections are to the mode of social media use in the present day, i.e., smartphones. In my opinion people should not quit social media, rather they should quit using smartphones and find out what their friends are up to on a weekly/monthly basis by logging in to their facebook account on a computer. This is a healthy way to use social media. Let me not get into the obvious rebuttal "but, how do I quit smartphones! they're so useful!". Personally, I use a Nokia 105 and I am very happy.

kull 9y ago

I am visiting a small town in Texas near the border, I am living here with a friend for few months (originally I live in NYC), and Facebook is really the only place where I can find info about local restaurants and events. There is no delivery.com here and google maps often list places that were closed. I have never used really Facebook but I am finding myself now this being the only option to connect with locals online.

contoraria 9y ago

It's too much low quality data. If you yourself agree that you neither contribute nor can find valuable data, do Facebook a favor and leave. They probably have enough vacation and family reporting to not need anymore of that. They are interested in finding trends, so if you are trendy enough and use facebook for trending, feel free to try to take advantage of it and hope you wont miss out.

kjgkjhfkjf 9y ago

If you're experiencing withdrawal symptoms due to a lack of attention from people on the internet after deleting Facebook, you can just re-enable your account. There's no need to write yet another article about why you did it.

methodover 9y ago

For any ad on Facebook, you can click on it and see why you're seeing it. They are not listening into your conversations. You can review your ad preferences, including what information is used for FB's ad targeting, here: https://m.facebook.com/ads/preferences/ https://m.facebook.com/ads/preferences/

wyclif 9y ago

And as for staying up to date on my friends lives… well I just do it the old fashioned way. Talking to them. We hear this bromide constantly from people in the #DeleteFacebook movement, but it's facile. It is because it assumes that a "friend" on FB and a friend IRL are equivalent but they're not, and intelligent people know this. There are people in your life that you either want or need to passively keep up with rather than actively socialise or reach. I've been critical of Facebook's lack of privacy and other issues surrounding the company but I can't get too worked up about the danger of perpetuating passive/active friend distinctions because I think it exists outside of social media and is simply a reflection of the meatspace, and it's actually healthy to do.

Yizahi 9y ago

It is hilarious how people believe that free application/site A sells user data for profit and that application/site B does not. I just wonder what logic is going on in their heads. It's like saying that if I close my eyes and doesn't see the monitor in front of me then it doesn't exist. Writing stuff like this is delusional: "These are apps where I volunteer my location, travel, eating, and shopping habits, and I’ve never had the slightest sense that Foursquare was using this data in a way that made my life worse." (c)

Sophira 9y ago

> And since we’ve been sipping the Facebook friend juice for so long, it’s legitimately scary to quit. How will you know what events are going on? How will you know if something big happens in your friend’s life? How will you stay in touch with people? > The simple answer is… all the ways we did for the last 100,000 years. Talking to people. Being an active consumer of information and knowledge about your friends’ lives instead of letting it passively wash over you. That's a nice sentiment and one I absolutely agree with, but there's a big problem with it - how do we do this? Before the Internet, the answer was obvious; talk to them. That's because friendships tended to be mostly local; you probably knew your friends' addresses and phone numbers. When the Internet got popular, friendships were made on a global scale, and instant messaging became a thing. A lot of people grew up with AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, and MSN. It's important to note that these services weren't provided by companies whose soul reason for existing was to provide communication platforms. They were all secondary platforms provided by companies whose main business was elsewhere. Now, all of these services are gone. In its place are apps like Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram and Discord, which would be great, except that WhatsApp and Instagram are owned by the very company you're trying to escape from (Facebook) and Discord is a company whose soul product is their communication platform and thus have the mother of all motivations to make money from your data (even if they don't do that right now, thanks to unsustainable VC funding). Twitter is also a platform owned by a company which has the communication tool as its soul product, and to its credit hasn't made too much controversy in its long tenure, but even though it can be used for direct communication (and is used more for this purpose than Facebook), it's still primarily a "push" platform; for the most part, tweets come to you, as determined by algorithms. Yes, there do still exist chat platforms provided by companies whose main product isn't their communication platforms: GTalk (or Hangouts) and Skype. Unfortunately these are both owned by companies who have been proven to behave in predatory fashions to their users: Google and Microsoft. There are free and open-source programs that can be used. Jitsi allows instant messaging and video conferencing via XMPP, for example, Mastadon is a recent Twitter-like platform, and Signal allows for encrypted conversation. Each of these (and others) allow communication with users connected to other servers (and in most cases using other protocols), but even so the problem is that it's unlikely that your friends use programs that communicate over these protocols and are compatible. (The exception is GTalk, which uses XMPP.) Then there are the numerous decentralised free/open-source methods. Mumble provides text-based and audio-based communication, numerous IRC servers provide text communication, etc. On a wide scale, the biggest issue with these are that you can't communicate with anybody unless they're connected to the same server as you. That might be desirable in the case where you have groups all interested in the same thing or otherwise tied by a common bond, but people can't be expected to join multiple servers just to keep in touch with their friends. Of course, all of these can be used as primary methods of communication, particularly among small groups of friends, and maybe this is actually what the article is arguing for. I personally would love if Mastadon became more popular, even though it's a "push"-style system like Twitter, because I think it has the best shot at doing so and it allows communication with potentially your entire circle of friends while simultaneously having differing servers with different policies. It's probably the closest thing to democratic messaging that we have.