7 ms·

FFFG: Freedom from Facebook and Google

67 points by lowmemcpu 6y ago

dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
Is this trolling? They want to fight the two main abusers of personal data by asking me to give them my personal data on a plate? Not having any real contact info is not encouraging either.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
errantmind 6y ago
I don't think the solution is to break them up, but instead to give people back control of their data
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  We need to do both: In order to give people back control of their data, we need to break up the monopolies that decide how our data is controlled.
- paulgb 6y ago
  What would this look like in practice?
  - errantmind 6y ago
    A willingness to totally destroy the business model of companies that rely on targeted advertising. Off the top of my head this could be done by extending something that looks a lot like HIPAA to all personal data collection and sharing, where repeated violations are enough to put even the largest companies out of business. Basically, a big middle finger to anyone involved in data collection / advertising
rehman 6y ago
I hope this gains traction. Everyone is so busy in their survival journey, no one wants to take that big step. Google provides a comfort zone that we don't wanna leave.
HiddenCanary 6y ago
How is giving you our data going to solve this?
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  They'll put it in a Google spreadsheet to track... Oops.
iamstupidsimple 6y ago
> promote dangerous content I'm definitely biased here, but "dangerous" content does not exist -- only dangerous people. But then again, I get called a "free speech extremist" nowadays so what do I know?
- Barrin92 6y ago
  not sure what this is supposed to be other than a platitude. So dangerous weapons and dangerous viruses don't exist either? I think free speech extremism is apt as a description here because a sort of worldview where only humans have agency is extremely mistaken.
  - iamstupidsimple 6y ago
    Freedom isn't free. We pay for freedom of speech in whatever tragedy comes from spreading of "fake news" or whatever because society has generally agreed it's better than tyranny.
    - Barrin92 6y ago
      That's an entirely different argument altogether. Of course one is free to tolerate harm or accept danger in exchange for freedom, but that doesn't imply that ideas or speech cannot be dangerous, or that platforms that mediate speech don't change or weaponise discourse in certain ways, many of which are harmful. And it should be pointed out that most societies don't agree with this at all, and as is becoming more evident, neither does the American society in general. In this era of modern mass communication there hasn't been any social consensus on the nature or acceptance of speech, it's a purely inherited position, ironically enough.
    - nogabebop23 6y ago
      >> Freedom isn't free. that's true. There's a hefty f'in fee. Everyone has to chip in their buck-o-five
    - ardy42 6y ago
      > Freedom isn't free. We pay for freedom of speech in whatever tragedy comes from spreading of "fake news" or whatever because society has generally agreed it's better than tyranny. That isn't the cost of free speech. If it was, we wouldn't mind it if teachers taught kids kooky conspiracy theories in school. Real free speech involves identifying the sources of lies and falsehoods and working to eliminate or minimize their effects.
ketanmaheshwari 6y ago
How do they expect others to get free from FB and Google when they themselves are on Facebook and Instagram?
- justaguyhere 6y ago
  Yeah, that looks weird. I'd like to hear the rationale
  - ardy42 6y ago
    >> Yeah, that looks weird. I'd like to hear the rationale > How do they expect others to get free from FB and Google when they themselves are on Facebook and Instagram? I'm guessing it's because Facebook and Instagram users are exactly their target audience. I quit Facebook several years ago, but I kept my account and continued to occasionally post news articles to my timeline about their scandals and how social media is personally bad for its users. I did this because I figured it would actually help them for me to just delete my account and disappear to their other users, and the best thing to do was to use their own platform to subvert them.
    - dane-pgp 6y ago
      That's a well-reasoned explanation, thank you. A more casual defence of their strategy would be to compare their critics to Mister Gotcha: https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/ https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
- president 6y ago
  It shows how powerful these platforms have come to be that even when you are protesting their monopolies/censorship, that you still have to rely on them to get the word across.
  - chiefofgxbxl 6y ago
    > that you still have to rely on them to get the word across The website doesn't have to rely on React, Google analytics & CDN, et al. This is a simple website that could have been written in plain HTML and CSS, with server-side analytics if desired.
McDev 6y ago
Is the Privacy Policy link broken? It just links to https://www.economicliberties.us https://www.economicliberties.us If you then navigate to the privacy policy on that site, it contains stuff like: "For example, we may use remarketing with Google Analytics or other remarketing tools to advertise online. This enables third-party vendors, including Google, to show our ads on sites across the Internet...."
- ardy42 6y ago
  > Is the Privacy Policy link broken? It just links to https://www.economicliberties.us https://www.economicliberties.us When I click the link in the hamburger menu, I'm getting sent to https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/privacy-policy/ https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/privacy-policy/. Edit 1: looks like they're affiliated: https://www.economicliberties.us/about/ https://www.economicliberties.us/about/: > The American Economic Liberties Project launched in February 2020 to help translate the intellectual victories of the anti-monopoly movement into momentum towards concrete, wide-ranging policy changes that begin to address today’s crisis of concentrated economic power. > Economic Liberties is led by Sarah Miller, who served as the Deputy Director of the Open Markets Institute and has been recognized as “one of the primary architects of the modern antitrust movement.” As concern over concentrated economic power has broadened beyond the community of antitrust reformers, Economic Liberties has quickly grown into a hub for organizing a diverse set of leading policy experts and advocates in areas impacted by concentrated power, ranging from community development to national security to entrepreneurship. Edit 2: it looks like their privacy policy (https://www.economicliberties.us/privacy-policy/ https://www.economicliberties.us/privacy-policy/) is boilerplate language that appears identically on by many, many other sites. For instance: https://www.andrewcuomo.com/privacy https://www.andrewcuomo.com/privacy https://clairemccaskill.com/privacy-policy/ https://clairemccaskill.com/privacy-policy/ https://plantshopgr.com/privacy.html https://plantshopgr.com/privacy.html https://www.missourigreenparty.org/privacy_policy https://www.missourigreenparty.org/privacy_policy
  - caetris1 6y ago
    Clever. Nice work.
superkuh 6y ago
The easiest way to get freedom from facebook and google is to simply not use them yourself. It's the best solution too. It doesn't hurt anyone. Compare this to the FFFG people advocating for using using government force to control others' behavior. This may solve the problems FFFG perceives but the "solution" does more damage (in terms of actually hurting people) than the problem.
- pmoriarty 6y ago
  Even if you don't use them they'll collect data on you in many different ways: - "like" and "share" buttons on completely unrelated web sites that track your IP when your web browser downloads the images for these buttons or runs the associated javascript - people you know tagging you in photos they upload of you to these sites - recaptchas on unralated sites that collect data about your IP, browser fingerprint, and site you're visiting There are doubtlessly many, many, many other techniques they (and sites and companies you probably have no idea are owned by them and that feed data back in to them) use that don't require you to be on their sites to cyberstalk and spy on you.
  - junga 6y ago
    And without having a google or facebook account you can‘t just check/modify/delete the data they collected.
  - superkuh 6y ago
    >Even if you don't use them they'll collect data on you in many different ways They don't because I don't leave javascript execution on like grandma opening every email attachment she receives. Other people's behaviors are their business but it's pretty easy to ask people not to upload photos of you. And if it happens, well, it's actually not a big deal. Google recaptchas are super annoying and require whitelisting google javascript so I don't go to sites that block me with them. So you see how taking responsibility for my own behavior works here and I don't need people with guns to coerce other people and cause far more damage than the original "problem".
    - 6y ago
jnaddef 6y ago
Did someone understand how they plan on doing so? On first look it reminded me of conservative posts with a lot of outrage but no solution.
anatolinicolae 6y ago
And remember to follow us on Facebook and Instagram...
caetris1 6y ago
Personal opinion here. If you trace the funding of anything on the internet, you usually get to the bottom of things. Here is an article that was published on WIRED that traces those roots. https://www.wired.com/story/freedom-from-facebook-open-markets-institute/ https://www.wired.com/story/freedom-from-facebook-open-marke... I think what the site says is basically true, but also I think it's vaguely disingenuous.
gittes 6y ago
quad9.net DNS servers are blocking freedomfromfacebookandgoogle.com domain... Interesting. https://www.quad9.net/result/?url=freedomfromfacebookandgoogle.com https://www.quad9.net/result/?url=freedomfromfacebookandgoog... https://exchange.xforce.ibmcloud.com/url/freedomfromfacebookandgoogle.com https://exchange.xforce.ibmcloud.com/url/freedomfromfacebook... Might be a false positive probably because bad stuff came from the same subnet of the web server; might be just a byproduct of shared hosting
blakesterz 6y ago
The more I think about this, the less I lump Google and Facebook together when I talk about privacy. Maybe it's just because I don't use Facebook all that much, but I don't consider them to be exactly equal, and suggesting that everyone not use both at the same time no longer works for me. I don't disagree with some or even much of what's on this site, but Google has built some amazing things that are widely used. I can't think of much to say about Facebook in that way. Google has mail and docs and maps and all the chat things and analytics and so on. Really powerful impressive things that are really useful to many people, and certainly useful for Google in obvious ways. Facebook has... Facebook. Maybe I'm missing other things that it does?
- eindiran 6y ago
  The big ones that leap out (at least to me) are WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. But there are a few others that control less of their respective markets: Oculus, Giphy, React, Libra.
  - blakesterz 6y ago
    Ah, of course, Facebook does indeed have other tools. I don't think of those because I never use them. Thanks for reminding me that like Google, Facebook has a bunch of other things people love to use.
- skinnymuch 6y ago
  Adding this because the more I think about it, the more Amazon is used possibly far more by myself and my friends. Amazon’s own as network is on pace possibly to be third with a huge gap after the big two. Amazon has other ambitions as well. Shouldn’t we try to curb usage before things get too bad? I have always thought in my mind for my self I need to lessen Google in my life and then Amazon. As I explain below FB isn’t an issue for me personally though of course for others it is. — To the point of FB vs Google: Facebook has more for sure and I bring up the 3 of their big 4 properties below. But point stands to me. I block major FB domains and sub domains along with FB and it’s properties on my desktop and jailbroken iPad (hosts file) where I spend the majority of my time. I think I don’t block certain google things because it gets hard to navigate with certain sub domains of theirs blocked if you’re not on a crusade which I’m not. Also their CDN is pretty widely used for fonts scripts etc. I do have occasional use of FB Messenger, Whatsapp, and IG which all happen on my iPhone. So they are getting more stuff prob than I think. i haven’t kept up with numbers as recently but IG has ~1.2B users, FBM has ~1.5B, Whatsapp a bit more than that. FB with 2.2B or so. I think those are monthly active users. With tons of overlaps of course. I am assuming Facebook won’t give their number of unique people overall using their services as people here and elsewhere would decry that as a huge invasion even though we know they know some estimate :p.
mceachen 6y ago
1) the chance that the US government is going to break up Google or Facebook is nil. 2) if you actually care about privacy, stop feeding those beast with your data. Self-host what you can, use alternative services for the rest. (That said, I still use g-suite for email and shared docs).

67 points by lowmemcpu 6y ago

Is this trolling? They want to fight the two main abusers of personal data by asking me to give them my personal data on a plate? Not having any real contact info is not encouraging either.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

errantmind 6y ago

I don't think the solution is to break them up, but instead to give people back control of their data

ocdtrekkie 6y ago
We need to do both: In order to give people back control of their data, we need to break up the monopolies that decide how our data is controlled.
paulgb 6y ago
What would this look like in practice?
- errantmind 6y ago
  A willingness to totally destroy the business model of companies that rely on targeted advertising. Off the top of my head this could be done by extending something that looks a lot like HIPAA to all personal data collection and sharing, where repeated violations are enough to put even the largest companies out of business. Basically, a big middle finger to anyone involved in data collection / advertising

rehman 6y ago

I hope this gains traction. Everyone is so busy in their survival journey, no one wants to take that big step. Google provides a comfort zone that we don't wanna leave.

HiddenCanary 6y ago

How is giving you our data going to solve this?

shadowgovt 6y ago
They'll put it in a Google spreadsheet to track... Oops.

iamstupidsimple 6y ago

> promote dangerous content I'm definitely biased here, but "dangerous" content does not exist -- only dangerous people. But then again, I get called a "free speech extremist" nowadays so what do I know?

Barrin92 6y ago
not sure what this is supposed to be other than a platitude. So dangerous weapons and dangerous viruses don't exist either? I think free speech extremism is apt as a description here because a sort of worldview where only humans have agency is extremely mistaken.
- iamstupidsimple 6y ago
  Freedom isn't free. We pay for freedom of speech in whatever tragedy comes from spreading of "fake news" or whatever because society has generally agreed it's better than tyranny.
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    That's an entirely different argument altogether. Of course one is free to tolerate harm or accept danger in exchange for freedom, but that doesn't imply that ideas or speech cannot be dangerous, or that platforms that mediate speech don't change or weaponise discourse in certain ways, many of which are harmful. And it should be pointed out that most societies don't agree with this at all, and as is becoming more evident, neither does the American society in general. In this era of modern mass communication there hasn't been any social consensus on the nature or acceptance of speech, it's a purely inherited position, ironically enough.
  - nogabebop23 6y ago
    >> Freedom isn't free. that's true. There's a hefty f'in fee. Everyone has to chip in their buck-o-five
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > Freedom isn't free. We pay for freedom of speech in whatever tragedy comes from spreading of "fake news" or whatever because society has generally agreed it's better than tyranny. That isn't the cost of free speech. If it was, we wouldn't mind it if teachers taught kids kooky conspiracy theories in school. Real free speech involves identifying the sources of lies and falsehoods and working to eliminate or minimize their effects.

ketanmaheshwari 6y ago

How do they expect others to get free from FB and Google when they themselves are on Facebook and Instagram?

justaguyhere 6y ago
Yeah, that looks weird. I'd like to hear the rationale
- ardy42 6y ago
  >> Yeah, that looks weird. I'd like to hear the rationale > How do they expect others to get free from FB and Google when they themselves are on Facebook and Instagram? I'm guessing it's because Facebook and Instagram users are exactly their target audience. I quit Facebook several years ago, but I kept my account and continued to occasionally post news articles to my timeline about their scandals and how social media is personally bad for its users. I did this because I figured it would actually help them for me to just delete my account and disappear to their other users, and the best thing to do was to use their own platform to subvert them.
  - dane-pgp 6y ago
    That's a well-reasoned explanation, thank you. A more casual defence of their strategy would be to compare their critics to Mister Gotcha: https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/ https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
president 6y ago
It shows how powerful these platforms have come to be that even when you are protesting their monopolies/censorship, that you still have to rely on them to get the word across.
- chiefofgxbxl 6y ago
  > that you still have to rely on them to get the word across The website doesn't have to rely on React, Google analytics & CDN, et al. This is a simple website that could have been written in plain HTML and CSS, with server-side analytics if desired.

McDev 6y ago

Is the Privacy Policy link broken? It just links to https://www.economicliberties.us https://www.economicliberties.us If you then navigate to the privacy policy on that site, it contains stuff like: "For example, we may use remarketing with Google Analytics or other remarketing tools to advertise online. This enables third-party vendors, including Google, to show our ads on sites across the Internet...."

ardy42 6y ago
> Is the Privacy Policy link broken? It just links to https://www.economicliberties.us https://www.economicliberties.us When I click the link in the hamburger menu, I'm getting sent to https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/privacy-policy/ https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/privacy-policy/. Edit 1: looks like they're affiliated: https://www.economicliberties.us/about/ https://www.economicliberties.us/about/: > The American Economic Liberties Project launched in February 2020 to help translate the intellectual victories of the anti-monopoly movement into momentum towards concrete, wide-ranging policy changes that begin to address today’s crisis of concentrated economic power. > Economic Liberties is led by Sarah Miller, who served as the Deputy Director of the Open Markets Institute and has been recognized as “one of the primary architects of the modern antitrust movement.” As concern over concentrated economic power has broadened beyond the community of antitrust reformers, Economic Liberties has quickly grown into a hub for organizing a diverse set of leading policy experts and advocates in areas impacted by concentrated power, ranging from community development to national security to entrepreneurship. Edit 2: it looks like their privacy policy (https://www.economicliberties.us/privacy-policy/ https://www.economicliberties.us/privacy-policy/) is boilerplate language that appears identically on by many, many other sites. For instance: https://www.andrewcuomo.com/privacy https://www.andrewcuomo.com/privacy https://clairemccaskill.com/privacy-policy/ https://clairemccaskill.com/privacy-policy/ https://plantshopgr.com/privacy.html https://plantshopgr.com/privacy.html https://www.missourigreenparty.org/privacy_policy https://www.missourigreenparty.org/privacy_policy
- caetris1 6y ago
  Clever. Nice work.

superkuh 6y ago

The easiest way to get freedom from facebook and google is to simply not use them yourself. It's the best solution too. It doesn't hurt anyone. Compare this to the FFFG people advocating for using using government force to control others' behavior. This may solve the problems FFFG perceives but the "solution" does more damage (in terms of actually hurting people) than the problem.

pmoriarty 6y ago
Even if you don't use them they'll collect data on you in many different ways: - "like" and "share" buttons on completely unrelated web sites that track your IP when your web browser downloads the images for these buttons or runs the associated javascript - people you know tagging you in photos they upload of you to these sites - recaptchas on unralated sites that collect data about your IP, browser fingerprint, and site you're visiting There are doubtlessly many, many, many other techniques they (and sites and companies you probably have no idea are owned by them and that feed data back in to them) use that don't require you to be on their sites to cyberstalk and spy on you.
- junga 6y ago
  And without having a google or facebook account you can‘t just check/modify/delete the data they collected.
- superkuh 6y ago
  >Even if you don't use them they'll collect data on you in many different ways They don't because I don't leave javascript execution on like grandma opening every email attachment she receives. Other people's behaviors are their business but it's pretty easy to ask people not to upload photos of you. And if it happens, well, it's actually not a big deal. Google recaptchas are super annoying and require whitelisting google javascript so I don't go to sites that block me with them. So you see how taking responsibility for my own behavior works here and I don't need people with guns to coerce other people and cause far more damage than the original "problem".
  - 6y ago

jnaddef 6y ago

Did someone understand how they plan on doing so? On first look it reminded me of conservative posts with a lot of outrage but no solution.

anatolinicolae 6y ago

And remember to follow us on Facebook and Instagram...

caetris1 6y ago

Personal opinion here. If you trace the funding of anything on the internet, you usually get to the bottom of things. Here is an article that was published on WIRED that traces those roots. https://www.wired.com/story/freedom-from-facebook-open-markets-institute/ https://www.wired.com/story/freedom-from-facebook-open-marke... I think what the site says is basically true, but also I think it's vaguely disingenuous.

gittes 6y ago

quad9.net DNS servers are blocking freedomfromfacebookandgoogle.com domain... Interesting. https://www.quad9.net/result/?url=freedomfromfacebookandgoogle.com https://www.quad9.net/result/?url=freedomfromfacebookandgoog... https://exchange.xforce.ibmcloud.com/url/freedomfromfacebookandgoogle.com https://exchange.xforce.ibmcloud.com/url/freedomfromfacebook... Might be a false positive probably because bad stuff came from the same subnet of the web server; might be just a byproduct of shared hosting

blakesterz 6y ago

The more I think about this, the less I lump Google and Facebook together when I talk about privacy. Maybe it's just because I don't use Facebook all that much, but I don't consider them to be exactly equal, and suggesting that everyone not use both at the same time no longer works for me. I don't disagree with some or even much of what's on this site, but Google has built some amazing things that are widely used. I can't think of much to say about Facebook in that way. Google has mail and docs and maps and all the chat things and analytics and so on. Really powerful impressive things that are really useful to many people, and certainly useful for Google in obvious ways. Facebook has... Facebook. Maybe I'm missing other things that it does?

eindiran 6y ago
The big ones that leap out (at least to me) are WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. But there are a few others that control less of their respective markets: Oculus, Giphy, React, Libra.
- blakesterz 6y ago
  Ah, of course, Facebook does indeed have other tools. I don't think of those because I never use them. Thanks for reminding me that like Google, Facebook has a bunch of other things people love to use.
skinnymuch 6y ago
Adding this because the more I think about it, the more Amazon is used possibly far more by myself and my friends. Amazon’s own as network is on pace possibly to be third with a huge gap after the big two. Amazon has other ambitions as well. Shouldn’t we try to curb usage before things get too bad? I have always thought in my mind for my self I need to lessen Google in my life and then Amazon. As I explain below FB isn’t an issue for me personally though of course for others it is. — To the point of FB vs Google: Facebook has more for sure and I bring up the 3 of their big 4 properties below. But point stands to me. I block major FB domains and sub domains along with FB and it’s properties on my desktop and jailbroken iPad (hosts file) where I spend the majority of my time. I think I don’t block certain google things because it gets hard to navigate with certain sub domains of theirs blocked if you’re not on a crusade which I’m not. Also their CDN is pretty widely used for fonts scripts etc. I do have occasional use of FB Messenger, Whatsapp, and IG which all happen on my iPhone. So they are getting more stuff prob than I think. i haven’t kept up with numbers as recently but IG has ~1.2B users, FBM has ~1.5B, Whatsapp a bit more than that. FB with 2.2B or so. I think those are monthly active users. With tons of overlaps of course. I am assuming Facebook won’t give their number of unique people overall using their services as people here and elsewhere would decry that as a huge invasion even though we know they know some estimate :p.

mceachen 6y ago

1) the chance that the US government is going to break up Google or Facebook is nil. 2) if you actually care about privacy, stop feeding those beast with your data. Self-host what you can, use alternative services for the rest. (That said, I still use g-suite for email and shared docs).