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I've never been an FB "person", but maybe 6-7 years ago the local running club moved to scheduling everything on FB. For a while, the page was "public", but th
by lsllc 6y ago
I've never been an FB "person", but maybe 6-7 years ago the local running club moved to scheduling everything on FB. For a while, the page was "public", but then you had to have an account (which required a phone number) to see anything other than the club's "landing page". So I ended up making an FB account which I've only ever used to be able to see the club pages (I haven't ever posted anything!) -- dumb of me I know, but FB had almost become a requirement to participate in life.
However recently, I've noticed that I now get a couple of junk text every day or two whereas up until a few weeks ago, I don't think I'd ever had a single junk text.
I wonder if this is why.
- whatever_dude 6y agoYou should disable apps api on your profile.
- rantwasp 6y agoyeah no. FB is not a requirement to participate in life. never was, never will be. i would say FB is a requirement for feeling inadequate and for developing mental health problems early in life. LE: going full stallman on this one: https://stallman.org/facebook.html https://stallman.org/facebook.html read it and tell me i’m crazy
- tester756 6y agoUnfortunely without FB studying (attending) would be 10 times harder.
- rantwasp 6y agois it harder? maybe. is it a requirement? nah
- tester756 6y agoat some point of the increased difficulty it becomes a requirement.
- rantwasp 6y agoit does not. FB becoming a requirement is such a 1st world problem. Try living without clean water and come back to lecture me about “increased difficulty”
- tester756 6y agoholy shit dude yea, water is required to live, facebook is required to get degree times easier in my example, those aren't mutually excluisive what do you want to argue here about, except just arguing for the sake of arguing? I don't like fb, I don't use it when I don't have to and after graduation I'm probably not going to use it more often than once a X months, but I had to have & sometimes use it unless I wanted to make my life harder - I don't like it, but that's the reality.
- rantwasp 6y agoI am not arguing with you. I am pointing out FB is a POS and that it should not be required. Period. Anything that uses FB as a way of keeping people informed should use at least another channel to disseminate that information, preferably not tied to big corporations.
- tester756 6y ago>should use at least another channel how are you going to convince $whole_group_of_students_of_given_year to move communication off the facebook?
- yibg 6y agoIt’s also not a requirement to have a phone, or internet, or electricity. Harder sure, but not a requirement right?
- rantwasp 6y agonah. let’s not compare electricity to a bloated social media platform. if FB goes away tomorrow we can pretty much keep going. if electricity goes away our society would crumble.
- Scoundreller 6y agoI’d use “grid electricity” as my example. You can generate your own in the right circumstances, with a lot of benefits, but it can make things kinda difficult.
- rantwasp 6y agoI agree with you that electricity is something that is required to live a "normal" life. Facebook is not.
- vijaybritto 6y agoI'm not getting the link between study and Facebook. Is it required in your country?
- Raed667 6y agoWhen I was in school, a lot of the teachers would create Facebook Groups per class to share documents, prep-work, assignments etc.. I think the school moved to a self hosted Moodle[0] by now, but when I was there having a Facebook account was definitely required. A friend of mine is also struggling with his kids' soccer practice as they only organize and do announcements over Facebook. [0] https://moodle.org https://moodle.org
- tester756 6y agoit isn't, but if you don't want to make everything harder for you like being aware of what's going on - (projects,tasks,exams,blabla), communication with all other students then you're basically forced.
- easton 6y agoWhat country are you in? In the US everything school related goes onto Canvas, Blackboard or Moodle. There's some other tools people use as well (Piazza being popular at some schools), but I've never heard of school info going primarily on Facebook, even for study groups.
- tester756 6y agoThere's a lot of of informal stuff that you also want to know/be aware of from those facebook chats. It's not like the school itself requires you to use FB, but students desire to use it as a way of _our_ communication
- easton 6y agoInteresting. Around here, that all goes on GroupMe or Discord.
- tester756 6y agoI've been studying in different "mode", cuz it was on weekends so you could work while studying. Because of that I've been studying with people that were e.g 25 or 30 at 1st semester, so probably FB was the handiest solution for everybody. I guess if I started now with 19/20yos, then Discord would be way to go.
- Blikkentrekker 6y agoThere is no objective definition of “participating in life”. What quibble of semantics.
- H_Pylori 6y agoAre shoes really a requirement to partecipate in society?
- Forge36 6y agoA friend of mine successfully quit for years. He moved to a small town recently made a new account because "small towns apparently run on Facebook". While but true for everyone it's true in some places
- rantwasp 6y agosome places require you to be a hardcore christian and a white supremacist. Are those places the best examples?
- Forge36 6y agoThose don't discount Facebook being required. Fortunately this place didn't require hardcore christianity. (I'm hopeful it's not filled with white supremacists, time will tell)
- rantwasp 6y agomy point was that just because something is "required" does not mean you have to do it or agree with it. especially if you believe it's wrong.
- CameronNemo 6y agoMy RA at uni used Facebook to coordinate floor wide games and events. Several on campus organizations exclusively used Facebook to inform people of events. FB was not a requirement for attending uni, but it was a requirement for being fully involved on my campus.
- rantwasp 6y agosounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen if you ask me. How is uni tied to a crappy corporation? i’m gonna bet you real money that 1) either they had multiple channels (ie you didn’t really need FB) or 2) they will pay legal fees through their noses once the shit hits the proverbial fan.
- johannes1234321 6y agoThere are cases where there might be a basis for a lawsuit (some professor at a public university hiding in Facebook) But for the way the student leaning group organizes or the restaurant down the road takes reservation or what medium is used by the parents of my child's school class to discuss things is not a legal concern.
- barbazoo 6y ago> games and events Not tied to uni but virtually mandatory to participate in social events. Sure you can just say to simply opt out but then it might be more difficult to socialize.
- nradov 6y agoThere's no basis for such a lawsuit. You might not like it but they're not breaking the law.
- rantwasp 6y agohmm. i’m not sure that’s true. a university has more things to consider than just “can we use this app?”
- baby 6y ago> However recently, I've noticed that I now get a couple of junk text every day or two whereas up until a few weeks ago, I don't think I'd ever had a single junk text. I think this is a symptom of living in the US. Been receiving robocalls and text messages all the time since I moved here.
- dylan604 6y agoYou also have to consider that someone somewhere probably had your phone number before you did. There's no telling what the previous person did with that number.
- screamingninja 6y ago> I think this is a symptom of living in the US. Been receiving robocalls and text messages all the time since I moved here. Consider signing up for the Do Not Call registry. Does not do much against the scammers but you will receive significantly fewer telemarketing calls. https://www.donotcall.gov/ https://www.donotcall.gov/
- frongpik 6y agoI can tell you why. It's because you gave FB your personal phone number, while any number would work, e.g. a prepaid sim card (a one time 15 bucks expense).
- Guest42 6y agoI did some research and it seemed as though the companies would auto-renew and make it incredibly tough to close the accounts. I wouldn’t be surprised if some went so far as to send people to collections for “fees”.
- frongpik 6y agoYou don't need to give your ID or sign up for auto renewal.
- koolba 6y agoThere’s no auto renewal, contract, or collections for a prepaid sim. In most states you don’t even show ID to get one. Just give whatever name you’d like on the caller ID and pay the first month.
- Guest42 6y agoCan you show me an example of one that can be purchased online? I didn't notice any on Amazon when I looked. (for curiosity's sake)
- chiph 6y agoThe cost of sending texts has gone to effectively zero, so there's no barrier to someone sending one to all the numbers in sequence. At least, until the phone company catches on and blocks you. The one I got late last night was pretending to be from the US Postal Service, prompting me to click on an anonymous link in order to "rescedule delivery"
- dillondoyle 6y agoGoing to get worse SCOTUS just ruled saying a very strict reading definition on robocall to be only random or sequential numbers. So if you already have a list say bought from a 3rd party company of all the phones in the US sounds like you can bulk send now no repercussions. In my field - politics - campaigns use tools like Hustle which are basically mechanical turk clickers to get around these rules. I'm thinking personally this will change...
- nradov 6y agoHave you actually read the whole SCOTUS decision? Because that's not at all what it said.
- URSpider94 6y agoI haven’t seen a clear analysis of the decision’s impact. I’ve read it, it’s quite brief. As I understand it, this decision essentially guts the blanket prohibition on spam text messages to cell phones. The rest of the law refers to restrictions on calls to “residential” phone lines, which does not include cell phones, so it’s not clear that there are any other limitations on texts to cell phones - do you see it differently? This brings up the side issue that the act doesn’t ever mention text messages at all ... everyone has interpreted them to be covered as if they were phone calls, but that’s never been tested at the Supreme Court level.
- sgerenser 6y agoThe decision was unanimous and is really the only possible conclusion from a plain reading of the law. The court didn’t “gut” anything, it’s just a bad law. It’s up to Congress to enact a law that says what they actually want the law to do.
- sneak 6y agoIt’s antisocial to demand someone submit to surveillance capitalism to participate in a club or a friendship. Complain loudly, and delete your fb account. Be a nuisance about it at club meetups. Caving just makes it worse for the next guy.
- grumple 6y agoI have also noticed this the past couple weeks. I don’t think it’s related to Facebook- I deleted my Facebook account before 2019. However, I’ve also recently had discussions with Twilio (all of the below is non-confidential information according to our conversation): The carriers are cracking down on sms spam. They are going to force registration of all businesses sending texts, not just with services like Twilio, but with them. And prices / rent-seeking from the carriers is going up - they are going to charge for each campaign/brand you run. So in the end you’ll see less spam, but texting will also cost more for companies that send them. The initial rollout by AT&T was supposed to start 5/1, though that’s now been pushed back. Spammers are likely in their death throes, trying to get their last spam out before they get shut down or priced out.
- jrockway 6y agoI get an infinite amount of spam texts and I don't have a Facebook account. (I did have one in college when it first came out, but I don't think I gave them my phone number, and if I did, that phone number is no longer in use. I switch phone numbers every time I switch cell providers.)
- ordx 6y agoFacebook still may have your phone number if a business uploaded your phone number for targeting.
- jrockway 6y agoI'm sure they have plenty of information on me. I doubt that it is the primary source of spam texts, that's all I'm saying. Many of my spam texts seem to know what state I'm in despite my area code being assigned to a different state, so I'm guessing they get them from voter records, political donations, that sort of thing.
- andi999 6y agoUsing WhatsApp?
- jrockway 6y agoNope. It's not really a thing in the US.
- misiti3780 6y agoI have been getting a lot of spam texts and also an unusually large spam calls from the social security administration. I tell teh guy/gal on the line every time to quit calling me because they are wasting their time and i know it's a scam, they keep calling...
- null_deref 6y agoI don't think the little guy that's calling you cares that much, or that the organization that runs the call center is organizaed well enough to receive a piece of information from the bottom end employee and act on it.
- anticristi 6y agoI feel your pain. Getting announcements from my local skating club is the only reason why I keep my FB account. :(
- rogerdickey 6y agoWhy are so many HN users against Facebook, and quick to reassure others that they only signed up out of necessity? FB & Instagram present a perfectly acceptable entertainment vs privacy trade off. Sure, it’s also a waste of time, but so is everything else you don’t like.
- Hydraulix989 6y agoThis is a valid contrarian take.
- wizzwizz4 6y agoFacebook knows where you live, where you shop, who you meet, what you say, what you buy, where you go – perhaps when you wake and sleep –… and in exchange, you get some chat rooms, a MySpace page, advertised at, and to be a non-consensual subject in psychological experiments. (Libel notice: they might not do the last one much any more.)
- rogerdickey 6y agoMost of this happens if you 1) sign up for FB 2) install their app. If you don't do both of these things they can't track you, right?
- sneak 6y agoUnfortunately this is not true.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- SturgeonsLaw 6y agoJust loading a page that has the embedded Facebook Like button generates data points on you regarding your browsing and purchase history. I'm not sure if they can/do read the contents of a checkout form, but it would be simple to infer coarse location and strong identity from that.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y agoTo get an account on Facebook, one can use an email address to sign up (no phone number), and if the email address later becomes invalid, the Facebook account still remains viable. As such, a "disposable" email address should work for the purpose of obtaining a Facebook account. One need never log in to the "throwaway" email account ever again after the Facebook account is established. If one really wanted to use a phone number for sign up, a disposable number such as a "burner" phone should work.
- hansvm 6y agoPrepaid burner numbers don't work, only postpaid. What does the email-only flow look like? Every time I've tried that I've been redirected to various kinds of "additional authorization" or "proof of identity" barriers and haven't been able to find a flow around them.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y agoNot sure what the sign up flow looks like today. What I know is that in the past students created Facebook accounts^1 using their student email accounts. They graduated, the student email accounts were deleted, but their Facebook accounts continue to work today, even though they never updated their email addresses with Facebook or added phone numbers. 1. The website was originally created for students and sign up used to require a university email address.