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Hacker News is a pretty small bubble, but news about Facebook being awful is pretty mainstream at this point. It surprises me that the majority of my family can

Hacker News is a pretty small bubble, but news about Facebook being awful is pretty mainstream at this point. It surprises me that the majority of my family can still tolerate Facebook (and instagram/whatsapp etc.) despite what is known. I'm pretty vocal among my family about data security/privacy, as I'd like to keep information about me and my family safe from prying eyes, but it takes a lot of effort and know-how to put up walls against the sort of electronic creepiness that's default-on for most of us. It's been almost 3 years, and most of my friends/family still don't have content blockers installed for Safari on iOS. None of my family or friends have made any moves to ditch Facebook, instagram, whatsapp, etc. even though the barrier to entry for new services is so low. It's frustrating to know that despite how bad they are, despite every new discovery of terribleness, nothing's going to change, and they're just going to get bigger.

paulddraper 8y ago
> majority of my family can still tolerate Facebook despite what is known They've got a captive audience. Like it or not, the service that Facebook provides is unparalleled, and short of direct, tangible harm, it's not enough for most people to give that up.
- CharlesColeman 8y ago
  >> It's frustrating to know that despite how bad they are, despite every new discovery of terribleness, nothing's going to change, and they're just going to get bigger. > They've got a captive audience. Like it or not, the service that Facebook provides is unparalleled, and short of direct, tangible harm, it's not enough for most people to give that up. I think it's mainly unparalleled from the advertiser perspective, but not the user perspective. I think network effects aren't as compelling to users as is often assumed. I think Facebook's privacy terribleness will be part of its undoing, but only part. Other things, like fashion, user fatigue, and potentially new regulatory antitrust oversight (to block acquisitions) will be significant factors, and they'll all reenforce each other.
  - paulddraper 8y ago
    > I think network effects aren't as compelling to users as is often assumed. Tell that to the carcasses of Facebook's competitors.
- JohnFen 8y ago
  > the service that Facebook provides is unparalleled Except that it's not. The vast majority of what Facebook does can be done without Facebook. The essential problem now is that there are large numbers of people who have only ever known Facebook and are unaware of how to accomplish those things without it.
  - cm2012 8y ago
    "Can be done" without Facebook and "Is possible now" without Facebook is two separate things. It would take billions of dollars to create the network effect FB has now, which is the moat any other network would have to cross.
  - paulddraper 8y ago
    > Except that it's not. Except that it is. Where else than facebook.com can I go to connect with 80%+ of my coworkers, family, and friends? Like a stereotypical engineer, you're thinking about the software. People don't use Facebook for just the software. They use it for the network.
kzrdude 8y ago
Facebook unfortunately is very useful for social events and events with people you have recently met and want to organize meetups or events with. Facebook messenger or Whatsapp groups are two of the most convenient ways because people will usually have one of those. And of course, the choice between the two doesn't matter for this.
- moreira 8y ago
  WhatsApp having been bought out by Facebook is a big pain. It's the defacto messenger for cross iOS/Android communication (at least where I live), and it's harder and harder to say "no I don't Facebook".
  - Teckla 8y ago
    Google Hangouts is available for both iOS and Android.
    - 908087 8y ago
      So is Signal, which isn't under the control of a mass surveillance / advertising corporation. Replacing Facebook with Google is just replacing one form of terminal cancer with another.
    - llampx 8y ago
      Google products mix the terrible data privacy of Facebook with terrible Google product design. No thank you.
  - cronix 8y ago
    Wouldn't texting be the defacto standard, and works everywhere for the last 25 or so years? Or, omg, actually use that phone app in your phone and call, which also works everywhere?
    - ptd 8y ago
      In a lot of countries the majority of phones plans work on a prepaid credit system and every text you send eats up X amount of credits. You can send an unlimited amount of messages and videos on WhatsApp for free if you have access to the internet. Phone calls eat up even more credits, but you can make as many as you want on WhatsApp.
beambot 8y ago
> even though the barrier to entry for new services is so low. Except for the entire social network that remains on the old service & not the new one -- which comprises most of the value one obtains from a social network.
smallgovt 8y ago
The unfortunate explanation for the phenomena that you're observing is that most people simply don't care about their privacy -- at least not nearly as much as you do.
- nemild 8y ago
  This. Here's a piece that I wrote that touches on this dissonance: What Open Source Can Learn From Slack https://www.nemil.com/musings/oss-and-slack.html https://www.nemil.com/musings/oss-and-slack.html > Third, we generally overweight the importance of our personal values when developing a product — without considering how users will make their decision. > For example, users do value privacy, but many won’t switch to a product that protects their privacy if it means losing what they have — unlike so many of those commenting in Hacker News threads.
- donohoe 8y ago
  I would also add that they don't properly understand why privacy is important and how its being violated.
- enraged_camel 8y ago
  Yes. Privacy is one of those things that doesn't matter, until it does. Then it's usually too late.
  - jimmy1 8y ago
    But that's actually a tenant of privacy: You are free to care about it only when it matters, and you chose who and on what terms enter into your privacy sphere. Privacy is the inherent understood baseline. Everything else needs to justify it's existence, with explicit consent, and that consent can be removed whenever the individual feels like their individual liberty is now being violated. I really like this definition of privacy on the Wikipedia page about the subject: > The right to privacy is our right to keep a domain around us, which includes all those things that are part of us, such as our body, home, property, thoughts, feelings, secrets and identity. The right to privacy gives us the ability to choose which parts in this domain can be accessed by others, and to control the extent, manner and timing of the use of those parts we choose to disclose
GordonS 8y ago
I feel the same, and I just don't understand it. Even my wife just doesn't care, even though she understands what Facebook are doing.
dfxm12 8y ago
I'd like to keep information about me and my family safe from prying eyes What have these prying eyes done to them directly? Yes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, but realistically, you only truly learn never to touch the stove again until you get burned. If they never get burned, then maybe they are safer than you think.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  This is the real issue, I think. Facebook taking your data has no concrete consequences for most people, so it's easy to see why they might think of the typical "don't use Facebook, it's bad" as fearmongering.
- elagost 8y ago
  I think the burn will come later, and we won't realize the stove is being turned up until we're the frog in boiling water. Facebook is a bad company doing bad things (full of, undoubtedly, good people trying to do good things) and I'd prefer not to give them any information about me, as they've proved they will share it with whomever, whenever, and only change behavior after they've been caught. 10 or 15 years from now, when my daughter grows up a bit, I want her to be able to decide what pictures of her are online, how much Facebook (or the new social monolith company) knows about her, and who to share her data with. I don't know what these companies are going to do with our data in the future, but they have terrible track records, and I know they are not to be trusted. I grew up with a gmail account that holds thousands of hours of gchat logs. I grew up posting stupid stuff on Facebook that probably still exists on their servers. I would gladly give up the meaningless interactions that took place in Facebook for just an ounce of invisibility back. We don't know what the burn will be, but I can tell you it's coming. I'd just rather not have my hand on the stove when it finally gets turned on.
misiti3780 8y ago
it's not that low, read more about Metcalfe's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law
cmsonger 8y ago
> It's frustrating to know that despite how bad they are, despite every new discovery of terribleness, nothing's going to change, and they're just going to get bigger. IMO, they need a non-profit competitor. There's nothing surprising or innovative left in "share photos and news with selected people" so there's not much value-to-consumers left to innovate on. There is innovation left in how to monetize consumers, but there's not likely to be much value to humanity in that; and there is likely to be a lot of harm. (Looking at you anti-vaxers.) Non profit. There's needs to be a non-profit facebook alternative to stop all this idiocy.
- rock_hard 8y ago
  Because non profits have a better track record of keeping peoples informations safe?
  - angott 8y ago
    Not having a for-profit rationale would cut down on most, if not all, attempts to sell personal information, because funding could come in different ways (donations, for instance). Some non-profits have a terrible track record with information security, but that's mostly because their major focus is not IT.
larrymcp 8y ago
Oh, yeah I can explain that, no problem! I'm one of those people myself. I've never heard of a single example of potential harm that could come as the result of tracking. So as you can imagine, to me these articles seem like a bunch of made-up hoopla over nothing. To explain my mindset, basically it boils down to: "Can something bad happen to me as a result of tracking?" And nobody has ever said "Yes, here are examples."
- cm2012 8y ago
  You'll get ads better suited to you. The horror!
  - GrinningFool 8y ago
    > You'll get ads better suited to you. The horror! Plus all kinds of bonus disinformation based on the profile your data has provided!
    - cm2012 8y ago
      The vast majority of disinformation is from organic posts, not ads, and don't benefit from tracking.
      - frabcus 8y ago
        "Organic" posts can have their ranking boost by money... Essentially, there are no organic posts. It is all advertising.
- balls187 8y ago
  Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. As to the real life consequences of a laissez-faire approach to privacy: https://www.businessinsider.com/china-social-credit-system-punishments-and-rewards-explained-2018-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/china-social-credit-system-p... (Edited to combine my two comments)
  - 8y ago
NickM 8y ago
I know a lot of people who want to quit Facebook, but nobody wants to be the odd one out who misses event invitations and stuff because they're the one person in their social circle who doesn't have an account. To partially solve this, I've been talking to a group of friends about all forming a pact to quit Facebook at the same time. This idea seems to resonate, and I've already gotten about ten of my friends to agree to it. It's frustrating to know that despite how bad they are, despite every new discovery of terribleness, nothing's going to change, and they're just going to get bigger. Plenty of other social networks that once seemed dominant have collapsed in the past. I agree it feels frustrating, but if a large enough minority of users abandons Facebook I do think that we could hit critical mass where even people on FB start using alternative communication tools to keep in touch with ex-Facebookers, and then that'll start creating a positive feedback loop by making it easier for more people to leave as other platforms fill in and pick up the slack.
nacho2sweet 8y ago
Lots of my family just takes the side of "I have nothing to hide". My little brother is 20 years younger then I and was raised by youtube. I find his attitude towards things really weird. Like I asked him why he didn't use an adblocker to get rid of all the ads and he replied "I want to support to the streamers by watching their ads". As someone who grew up in a more punk/fuck authority, don't sell out 90s this threw me for a total loop. If he was on an android phone he would be mashing that ALLOW ACCESS button to play every game. I quit facebook after cambridge analytica. Probably 2 weeks of typing "Fa...." into my browser and going "oh wait". There a few birthday parties/bbqs I probably missed because of not being reminded I exist on peoples invite lists, but they weren't the closest friends to begin with.
- Sumaso 8y ago
  What am I really losing though by allowing access? The company is passing on info to advertising networks so they can try and get me hooked on more mobile games. No one cares who you are, they are just trying to sell ad space.
  - TelmoMenezes 8y ago
    > What am I really losing though by allowing access? Sovereignty over your cognitive processes.
    - wutbrodo 8y ago
      Honest question: have you considered that some people are less susceptible to advertising? I used to think comments like yours were just absurd hyperbole, until I noticed them popping up enough that I considered the possibility that some people really do consider themselves utterly helpless in the face of advertising, and perhaps accurately so. This isn't really an attack on your comment specifically; I just wonder to what extent this differential response drives much of the disagreement I've seen on the topic. (you could perhaps say the same thing about the legalization of certain drugs).
      - 8y ago
umeshunni 8y ago
> news about Facebook being awful is pretty mainstream at this point Given that mainstream media has been pushing the Facebook is evil meme for the last two years since Facebook changed their ranking models to deprioritize news sharing and destroyed traffic to media sites, this is unsurprising.
rifung 8y ago
> It surprises me that the majority of my family can still tolerate Facebook (and instagram/whatsapp etc.) despite what is known. I don't think I'm THAT concerned with privacy but even I have thought about disabling my Facebook account. What stops me from doing that is that there isn't really a replacement for it. I don't even really post. Essentially the only thing I use it for is messenger. However, if I disable it I won't have any way to contact the friends I have who live in other countries or who I don't frequently talk to. And please don't tell me to "just use email". I don't want to use a service where I have to find people by some unique ID instead of their actual names.
elorant 8y ago
I had a conversation the other day with two journalists on this subject and I was flabbergasted by how little they seem to know. They were under the pretext that when something is free you're the product, but they didn't seem to realize just how many shit Facebook knows about them or how far and deep the tracking goes. I've come to the realization that apart from our community no one else seems to understand what's at stake here. The real issue is that most people can't make the correlation between personal data that are monitored and ways of exploitation. They don't know that any individual can target them specifically by using their e-mail or phone number. They have this abstract notion that somewhere a company is running a generic ad that shows shoes or cars to them and that's all there is.
shados 8y ago
Im fairly security conscious (conscious, as in I see it, but it doesn't mean I care...case by case basis). I use a password manager, all my passwords are separate, Im very careful who I give which piece of data to, etc. On the other hand, my identity has been stolen 16 billion times by now. Even if it didn't, I own real estate, which means you can infer a hell of a lot of info about me by just looking up my property tax bill, which is public. You could cross reference a lot of data source and get way more than I've ever put on Facebook. Ironically, if you wanted to make my life miserable, Facebook is probably not the first, second, or third place you'd want to go to get the juicy stuff. So yeah, it's pretty hard to care after a while. My credit reports are frozen, I post on social medias as if I was doing so under my first and last name, assuming they're public anyway, there doesn't exist any embarrassing picture of me or my immediate family in any form (at least that I know of), etc. I'd like to have privacy, but even if I take every measure I can take, unless I get rid of my credit cards, bank accounts, house, etc, I'll never have it anyway, so...
- hjek 8y ago
  > I'd like to have privacy, but even if I take every measure I can take, unless I get rid of my credit cards, bank accounts, house, etc, I'll never have it anyway, so... So if you can't have perfect privacy, you'll have nothing at all? That's quite an all-or-nothing way of looking at this issue. Well, I was out today when it started raining. I had my raincoat and my wellies in my rucksack, but I didn't have any water proof pants. I'd like to be dry, but unless I could get water proof pants, I'm not going to be dry, so ...
  - Gpetrium 8y ago
    I don't think he is saying to have nothing at all (refer to credit report freeze), it just means that he picked different fights than the ones you have. Similar to your close family members
    - shados 8y ago
      Bingo. There's a subset of battles I just gave up on to spend my energy elsewhere. The info Facebook has on me is extremely trivial compared to what's actually out there for anyone to see (like my home address, my phone number, associated with my property value and my email address...which is something I actually care about but can't hide...by law. So what silly things my cat did yesterday? Go right ahead.)
bloemy 8y ago
What is wrong with whatsapp?
diminoten 8y ago
It's because nothing's actually happened, from a day-to-day standpoint. Sure, their data is "out there", but what does that even mean? Nothing actually happens, as a result. The problem is too abstract, too theoretical.
vedantroy 8y ago
>It surprises me that the majority of my family can still tolerate Facebook (and instagram/whatsapp etc.) despite what is known. I'm not sure why it's super surprising. Facebook's data collection has never personally harmed me. I like Facebook because it helps me stay connected and tools like whatsapp/messenger are some of the best cross-platform messaging tools. Yes, Facebook has downsides, but I've never experienced a privacy-related downside. Someone should provide a link to an article that exposes some really nasty stuff about Facebook--I already know Facebook knows my address and my likes/dislikes and probably what sites I browse (since many sites use Facebook tracking), and it reads my messages, but in a way, I don't really care about those things because Whatsapp and FB Messenger are free.
- blub 8y ago
  "I'm not sure why it's super surprising. Facebook's data collection has never personally harmed me." No need to worry, they have the rest of your life to think of something and a lot more of your data to collect. Best of all: you will dutifully provide the data while continuing to think that Facebook has never harmed you and you will likely never know how they harm you.
  - vedantroy 8y ago
    My point is that people keep on saying Facebook is harming me through its data collection, but no one has provided an example. Same with you, you assert that Facebook is harming me without giving evidence or examples of how the data is being misused.
    - blub 8y ago
      I'm not saying FB is harming you, I'm saying the probability of them harming any user approaches 1 as more data about them is collected and FB get more desperate for growth/money.

paulddraper 8y ago

> majority of my family can still tolerate Facebook despite what is known They've got a captive audience. Like it or not, the service that Facebook provides is unparalleled, and short of direct, tangible harm, it's not enough for most people to give that up.

CharlesColeman 8y ago
>> It's frustrating to know that despite how bad they are, despite every new discovery of terribleness, nothing's going to change, and they're just going to get bigger. > They've got a captive audience. Like it or not, the service that Facebook provides is unparalleled, and short of direct, tangible harm, it's not enough for most people to give that up. I think it's mainly unparalleled from the advertiser perspective, but not the user perspective. I think network effects aren't as compelling to users as is often assumed. I think Facebook's privacy terribleness will be part of its undoing, but only part. Other things, like fashion, user fatigue, and potentially new regulatory antitrust oversight (to block acquisitions) will be significant factors, and they'll all reenforce each other.
- paulddraper 8y ago
  > I think network effects aren't as compelling to users as is often assumed. Tell that to the carcasses of Facebook's competitors.
JohnFen 8y ago
> the service that Facebook provides is unparalleled Except that it's not. The vast majority of what Facebook does can be done without Facebook. The essential problem now is that there are large numbers of people who have only ever known Facebook and are unaware of how to accomplish those things without it.
- cm2012 8y ago
  "Can be done" without Facebook and "Is possible now" without Facebook is two separate things. It would take billions of dollars to create the network effect FB has now, which is the moat any other network would have to cross.
- paulddraper 8y ago
  > Except that it's not. Except that it is. Where else than facebook.com can I go to connect with 80%+ of my coworkers, family, and friends? Like a stereotypical engineer, you're thinking about the software. People don't use Facebook for just the software. They use it for the network.

kzrdude 8y ago

Facebook unfortunately is very useful for social events and events with people you have recently met and want to organize meetups or events with. Facebook messenger or Whatsapp groups are two of the most convenient ways because people will usually have one of those. And of course, the choice between the two doesn't matter for this.

moreira 8y ago
WhatsApp having been bought out by Facebook is a big pain. It's the defacto messenger for cross iOS/Android communication (at least where I live), and it's harder and harder to say "no I don't Facebook".
- Teckla 8y ago
  Google Hangouts is available for both iOS and Android.
  - 908087 8y ago
    So is Signal, which isn't under the control of a mass surveillance / advertising corporation. Replacing Facebook with Google is just replacing one form of terminal cancer with another.
  - llampx 8y ago
    Google products mix the terrible data privacy of Facebook with terrible Google product design. No thank you.
- cronix 8y ago
  Wouldn't texting be the defacto standard, and works everywhere for the last 25 or so years? Or, omg, actually use that phone app in your phone and call, which also works everywhere?
  - ptd 8y ago
    In a lot of countries the majority of phones plans work on a prepaid credit system and every text you send eats up X amount of credits. You can send an unlimited amount of messages and videos on WhatsApp for free if you have access to the internet. Phone calls eat up even more credits, but you can make as many as you want on WhatsApp.

beambot 8y ago

> even though the barrier to entry for new services is so low. Except for the entire social network that remains on the old service & not the new one -- which comprises most of the value one obtains from a social network.

smallgovt 8y ago

The unfortunate explanation for the phenomena that you're observing is that most people simply don't care about their privacy -- at least not nearly as much as you do.

nemild 8y ago
This. Here's a piece that I wrote that touches on this dissonance: What Open Source Can Learn From Slack https://www.nemil.com/musings/oss-and-slack.html https://www.nemil.com/musings/oss-and-slack.html > Third, we generally overweight the importance of our personal values when developing a product — without considering how users will make their decision. > For example, users do value privacy, but many won’t switch to a product that protects their privacy if it means losing what they have — unlike so many of those commenting in Hacker News threads.
donohoe 8y ago
I would also add that they don't properly understand why privacy is important and how its being violated.
enraged_camel 8y ago
Yes. Privacy is one of those things that doesn't matter, until it does. Then it's usually too late.
- jimmy1 8y ago
  But that's actually a tenant of privacy: You are free to care about it only when it matters, and you chose who and on what terms enter into your privacy sphere. Privacy is the inherent understood baseline. Everything else needs to justify it's existence, with explicit consent, and that consent can be removed whenever the individual feels like their individual liberty is now being violated. I really like this definition of privacy on the Wikipedia page about the subject: > The right to privacy is our right to keep a domain around us, which includes all those things that are part of us, such as our body, home, property, thoughts, feelings, secrets and identity. The right to privacy gives us the ability to choose which parts in this domain can be accessed by others, and to control the extent, manner and timing of the use of those parts we choose to disclose

GordonS 8y ago

I feel the same, and I just don't understand it. Even my wife just doesn't care, even though she understands what Facebook are doing.

dfxm12 8y ago

I'd like to keep information about me and my family safe from prying eyes What have these prying eyes done to them directly? Yes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, but realistically, you only truly learn never to touch the stove again until you get burned. If they never get burned, then maybe they are safer than you think.

saagarjha 8y ago
This is the real issue, I think. Facebook taking your data has no concrete consequences for most people, so it's easy to see why they might think of the typical "don't use Facebook, it's bad" as fearmongering.
elagost 8y ago
I think the burn will come later, and we won't realize the stove is being turned up until we're the frog in boiling water. Facebook is a bad company doing bad things (full of, undoubtedly, good people trying to do good things) and I'd prefer not to give them any information about me, as they've proved they will share it with whomever, whenever, and only change behavior after they've been caught. 10 or 15 years from now, when my daughter grows up a bit, I want her to be able to decide what pictures of her are online, how much Facebook (or the new social monolith company) knows about her, and who to share her data with. I don't know what these companies are going to do with our data in the future, but they have terrible track records, and I know they are not to be trusted. I grew up with a gmail account that holds thousands of hours of gchat logs. I grew up posting stupid stuff on Facebook that probably still exists on their servers. I would gladly give up the meaningless interactions that took place in Facebook for just an ounce of invisibility back. We don't know what the burn will be, but I can tell you it's coming. I'd just rather not have my hand on the stove when it finally gets turned on.

misiti3780 8y ago

it's not that low, read more about Metcalfe's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law

cmsonger 8y ago

> It's frustrating to know that despite how bad they are, despite every new discovery of terribleness, nothing's going to change, and they're just going to get bigger. IMO, they need a non-profit competitor. There's nothing surprising or innovative left in "share photos and news with selected people" so there's not much value-to-consumers left to innovate on. There is innovation left in how to monetize consumers, but there's not likely to be much value to humanity in that; and there is likely to be a lot of harm. (Looking at you anti-vaxers.) Non profit. There's needs to be a non-profit facebook alternative to stop all this idiocy.

rock_hard 8y ago
Because non profits have a better track record of keeping peoples informations safe?
- angott 8y ago
  Not having a for-profit rationale would cut down on most, if not all, attempts to sell personal information, because funding could come in different ways (donations, for instance). Some non-profits have a terrible track record with information security, but that's mostly because their major focus is not IT.

larrymcp 8y ago

Oh, yeah I can explain that, no problem! I'm one of those people myself. I've never heard of a single example of potential harm that could come as the result of tracking. So as you can imagine, to me these articles seem like a bunch of made-up hoopla over nothing. To explain my mindset, basically it boils down to: "Can something bad happen to me as a result of tracking?" And nobody has ever said "Yes, here are examples."

cm2012 8y ago
You'll get ads better suited to you. The horror!
- GrinningFool 8y ago
  > You'll get ads better suited to you. The horror! Plus all kinds of bonus disinformation based on the profile your data has provided!
  - cm2012 8y ago
    The vast majority of disinformation is from organic posts, not ads, and don't benefit from tracking.
    - frabcus 8y ago
      "Organic" posts can have their ranking boost by money... Essentially, there are no organic posts. It is all advertising.
balls187 8y ago
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. As to the real life consequences of a laissez-faire approach to privacy: https://www.businessinsider.com/china-social-credit-system-punishments-and-rewards-explained-2018-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/china-social-credit-system-p... (Edited to combine my two comments)
- 8y ago

NickM 8y ago

I know a lot of people who want to quit Facebook, but nobody wants to be the odd one out who misses event invitations and stuff because they're the one person in their social circle who doesn't have an account. To partially solve this, I've been talking to a group of friends about all forming a pact to quit Facebook at the same time. This idea seems to resonate, and I've already gotten about ten of my friends to agree to it. It's frustrating to know that despite how bad they are, despite every new discovery of terribleness, nothing's going to change, and they're just going to get bigger. Plenty of other social networks that once seemed dominant have collapsed in the past. I agree it feels frustrating, but if a large enough minority of users abandons Facebook I do think that we could hit critical mass where even people on FB start using alternative communication tools to keep in touch with ex-Facebookers, and then that'll start creating a positive feedback loop by making it easier for more people to leave as other platforms fill in and pick up the slack.

nacho2sweet 8y ago

Lots of my family just takes the side of "I have nothing to hide". My little brother is 20 years younger then I and was raised by youtube. I find his attitude towards things really weird. Like I asked him why he didn't use an adblocker to get rid of all the ads and he replied "I want to support to the streamers by watching their ads". As someone who grew up in a more punk/fuck authority, don't sell out 90s this threw me for a total loop. If he was on an android phone he would be mashing that ALLOW ACCESS button to play every game. I quit facebook after cambridge analytica. Probably 2 weeks of typing "Fa...." into my browser and going "oh wait". There a few birthday parties/bbqs I probably missed because of not being reminded I exist on peoples invite lists, but they weren't the closest friends to begin with.

Sumaso 8y ago
What am I really losing though by allowing access? The company is passing on info to advertising networks so they can try and get me hooked on more mobile games. No one cares who you are, they are just trying to sell ad space.
- TelmoMenezes 8y ago
  > What am I really losing though by allowing access? Sovereignty over your cognitive processes.
  - wutbrodo 8y ago
    Honest question: have you considered that some people are less susceptible to advertising? I used to think comments like yours were just absurd hyperbole, until I noticed them popping up enough that I considered the possibility that some people really do consider themselves utterly helpless in the face of advertising, and perhaps accurately so. This isn't really an attack on your comment specifically; I just wonder to what extent this differential response drives much of the disagreement I've seen on the topic. (you could perhaps say the same thing about the legalization of certain drugs).
    - 8y ago

umeshunni 8y ago

> news about Facebook being awful is pretty mainstream at this point Given that mainstream media has been pushing the Facebook is evil meme for the last two years since Facebook changed their ranking models to deprioritize news sharing and destroyed traffic to media sites, this is unsurprising.

rifung 8y ago

> It surprises me that the majority of my family can still tolerate Facebook (and instagram/whatsapp etc.) despite what is known. I don't think I'm THAT concerned with privacy but even I have thought about disabling my Facebook account. What stops me from doing that is that there isn't really a replacement for it. I don't even really post. Essentially the only thing I use it for is messenger. However, if I disable it I won't have any way to contact the friends I have who live in other countries or who I don't frequently talk to. And please don't tell me to "just use email". I don't want to use a service where I have to find people by some unique ID instead of their actual names.

elorant 8y ago

I had a conversation the other day with two journalists on this subject and I was flabbergasted by how little they seem to know. They were under the pretext that when something is free you're the product, but they didn't seem to realize just how many shit Facebook knows about them or how far and deep the tracking goes. I've come to the realization that apart from our community no one else seems to understand what's at stake here. The real issue is that most people can't make the correlation between personal data that are monitored and ways of exploitation. They don't know that any individual can target them specifically by using their e-mail or phone number. They have this abstract notion that somewhere a company is running a generic ad that shows shoes or cars to them and that's all there is.

shados 8y ago

Im fairly security conscious (conscious, as in I see it, but it doesn't mean I care...case by case basis). I use a password manager, all my passwords are separate, Im very careful who I give which piece of data to, etc. On the other hand, my identity has been stolen 16 billion times by now. Even if it didn't, I own real estate, which means you can infer a hell of a lot of info about me by just looking up my property tax bill, which is public. You could cross reference a lot of data source and get way more than I've ever put on Facebook. Ironically, if you wanted to make my life miserable, Facebook is probably not the first, second, or third place you'd want to go to get the juicy stuff. So yeah, it's pretty hard to care after a while. My credit reports are frozen, I post on social medias as if I was doing so under my first and last name, assuming they're public anyway, there doesn't exist any embarrassing picture of me or my immediate family in any form (at least that I know of), etc. I'd like to have privacy, but even if I take every measure I can take, unless I get rid of my credit cards, bank accounts, house, etc, I'll never have it anyway, so...

hjek 8y ago
> I'd like to have privacy, but even if I take every measure I can take, unless I get rid of my credit cards, bank accounts, house, etc, I'll never have it anyway, so... So if you can't have perfect privacy, you'll have nothing at all? That's quite an all-or-nothing way of looking at this issue. Well, I was out today when it started raining. I had my raincoat and my wellies in my rucksack, but I didn't have any water proof pants. I'd like to be dry, but unless I could get water proof pants, I'm not going to be dry, so ...
- Gpetrium 8y ago
  I don't think he is saying to have nothing at all (refer to credit report freeze), it just means that he picked different fights than the ones you have. Similar to your close family members
  - shados 8y ago
    Bingo. There's a subset of battles I just gave up on to spend my energy elsewhere. The info Facebook has on me is extremely trivial compared to what's actually out there for anyone to see (like my home address, my phone number, associated with my property value and my email address...which is something I actually care about but can't hide...by law. So what silly things my cat did yesterday? Go right ahead.)

bloemy 8y ago

What is wrong with whatsapp?

diminoten 8y ago

It's because nothing's actually happened, from a day-to-day standpoint. Sure, their data is "out there", but what does that even mean? Nothing actually happens, as a result. The problem is too abstract, too theoretical.

vedantroy 8y ago

>It surprises me that the majority of my family can still tolerate Facebook (and instagram/whatsapp etc.) despite what is known. I'm not sure why it's super surprising. Facebook's data collection has never personally harmed me. I like Facebook because it helps me stay connected and tools like whatsapp/messenger are some of the best cross-platform messaging tools. Yes, Facebook has downsides, but I've never experienced a privacy-related downside. Someone should provide a link to an article that exposes some really nasty stuff about Facebook--I already know Facebook knows my address and my likes/dislikes and probably what sites I browse (since many sites use Facebook tracking), and it reads my messages, but in a way, I don't really care about those things because Whatsapp and FB Messenger are free.

blub 8y ago
"I'm not sure why it's super surprising. Facebook's data collection has never personally harmed me." No need to worry, they have the rest of your life to think of something and a lot more of your data to collect. Best of all: you will dutifully provide the data while continuing to think that Facebook has never harmed you and you will likely never know how they harm you.
- vedantroy 8y ago
  My point is that people keep on saying Facebook is harming me through its data collection, but no one has provided an example. Same with you, you assert that Facebook is harming me without giving evidence or examples of how the data is being misused.
  - blub 8y ago
    I'm not saying FB is harming you, I'm saying the probability of them harming any user approaches 1 as more data about them is collected and FB get more desperate for growth/money.