6 ms·

FB has, over the years, gradually lost my trust until I deleted my account in November 2010 after having been a member since late 2004 when FB was college-only.

by novum 13y ago

FB has, over the years, gradually lost my trust until I deleted my account in November 2010 after having been a member since late 2004 when FB was college-only. As a 20-something living in SF, it's a daily thing now: I don't get invited to parties, I don't know about birthdays, I don't see my friends' photos, I don't have any contact with anyone from high school or college anymore. There is a real social cost for someone in my situation to not be on FB. I struggle to quantify the harm, but it's there. I struggle too to explain to my friends why I'm not on FB. And yet I still think I'm better off without it. The whole situation contributes to the isolation I already experience as an introvert and someone who doesn't much care for bars, clubs, or alcohol -- though I suppose I don't need to remind this audience that being alone != loneliness. I guess it doesn't matter much anyway, since FB is still collecting information on me (and other 'shadow profiles' of users not on FB).

eblume 13y ago
As a fellow 20-something in SF, I feel your pain. I recently made a FB account that I keep absolutely bare except for my friends to invite me to things. It still results in 'leak' that I'm not fond of, but the alternate choice is to continue to be left in the dust.
- holri 13y ago
  People that don't understand that I do not like FB are not my friends.
  - a3_nm 13y ago
    I used to think this, but the truth is more complex. Facebook makes it easy for a lot of people to manage very large number of friends. If you're not using Facebook but most people around you are using it, even though your close friends would probably care enough about you to communicate with you through some other means, you will probably be missing out on a large number of distant acquaintances. The usual counter-argument to this is that it isn't worth it to care about such relationships anyway, and that you should only be concerned about close friends. It is true that close friends are important, but it might not be true that the optimal strategy is to care only about them. It may be useful to keeping distant connections with old friends in case you ever run into them again, or to have a large distant social circle with diverse backgrounds and physical locations to get more diverse recommendations, opinions, help, etc. More dramatically, say you arrive in a new city where you don't know anyone and no one knows you, but most people use Facebook: if you insist that people that don't initially know you should use your favorite communication medium rather than Facebook to interact with you online, it might be harder to get things started. This isn't to say that you should use Facebook: I never used it and discourage people from using it. This is to argue that you should be conscious that not using Facebook may come at a personal disadvantage. I personally still think that it is more important to stick to my principles and make an insignificant effort to improve things by not being on Facebook, but I can understand that other people might think differently (though I disapprove their choice).
    - holri 13y ago
      If you are not going to be happy if you are not honest to your beliefs.
      - gtirloni 13y ago
        Not true. You can be really honest to your beliefs and have a miserable life specifically because of that. I have deleted by FB account twice and then I was spending lots of time explaining why, getting weird looks from people and being left out of comments (e.g. people would post something to FB and be laughing about it later but never explain about what.. really impolite of them but what can I do? engage in more arguments). So yeah, be honest to your beliefs, just don't expect that will translate to happiness (unless you really work on telling yourself none of that unpleasant situations are really bad). We are human beings, how we interact with others matter (even if I didn't want any of that).
        holri 13y ago
        Well for me, sharing my beliefs with friends makes me happy. If someone does not share or respects my beliefs, then there is no sharing and understanding each other which is the essence of a friendship. No matter how strange your beliefs are, you will always find people that think similar. The world is very diverse. It seems that FB even changes the fundamental meaning of a friend. Which is a shame and a lack of social culture.
- dfc 13y ago
  What data "leaks" that a moderately sophisticated/equipped adversary could not easily learn via other means? In 45 seconds I was able to learn your name, basic age/location, and email from this post, your hn profile and github profile. Another 45 seconds and I found your google+ and twitter accounts, with better location data, education history and employer.
  - sophacles 13y ago
    Most people aren't moderately sophisticated/equipped adversaries. They are just people you think have no business knowing about (parts of) your life.
    - jamesaguilar 13y ago
      Anybody who could or would actually harm you with the knowledge can easily acquire it is the GP's point, I think. A Facebook account, ipso facto, adds no additional risk.
  - walid 13y ago
    Its not what people can know about you, but rather how much of what they know is controlled by you. You can put out there all the info you want to make public, but if you change your mind, facebook will still keep your data.
    - dfc 13y ago
      He was in control of the data and then he relinquished control of the data when he shared it with facebook (and google, twitter, github and HN). Trusting facebook to prevent Eve from accessing to your data is not the same thing as controlling Eve's access to your data.
  - eblume 13y ago
    Everything you mentioned is actually data I've purposely made available, EXCEPT for the twitter account, which continues to vex me. I haven't tried to delete that recently; I'll try again soon. (I can't remember what happened the last time...)
roc 13y ago
What kind of friends are they, that don't notice and/or care to invite people except through Facebook? Also, birthdays? Aren't those the sorts of things you find out about once per friend and then add to your own contacts? I've never had a Facebook account, but that's not a problem I've ever experienced. Granted, I don't automatically know the birthday of every single person I meet or even get a number/email from. But I would go so far as to call that a feature, and because of that, the birthday notifications I do get are worth getting.
- novum 13y ago
  I don't think there's any malicious intent. In my demographic, (almost) all events are set up through FB because your friend graph, mass-invites, and guest lists are built in. My flatmate's boyfriend is fond of throwing large house parties with hundreds of invitees, then hiring a doorman to check names off against the FB RSVP list. If you're not on it, you're not admitted. My closest friends remember me and send me invites via email, but I can't fault them for forgetting now and then.
  - BWStearns 13y ago
    Since killing my account (because they kept resetting my privacy settings to public... bastards) I've outsourced my Facebook Birthday/Party monitoring to my girlfriend.
    - k3n 13y ago
      Not to be totally pessimistic, but that's probably potentially even more dangerous than trusting all that data to Facebook...
    - cbr 13y ago
      It's risky to own lots of stock in your employer because you losing your job would be more likely to come at a time when your investments were worth less. It's risky to let your SO handle too much of your social life for similar reasons. I'm very close to my wife and can't imagine getting a divorce, but I think it's healthy that we manage our own social calendars.
personlurking 13y ago
I've been where you are, it sucks. In fact, I don't really have friends because 1) I have moved around a lot since 2000 and 2) I stopped caring that FB ruled my friendships (in the way you mention). There are definitely people I'd be friends with, if they lived in my city, but since they don't, they only keep in contact via FB, which I don't use socially. I only have it for news feeds from Pages.
hannibal5 13y ago
Growing number of my friends are in FB with fake names and identities. It's more complicated when you add new friends or they want to add you, but otherwise it's ok for keeping touch with close friends. Yes, its against FB user agreement but fuck that.
- Peroni 13y ago
  I'm (real life) friends with a handful of minor celebrities. Most of them have a 'public' profile for PR and every single one of them has a 'private' profile under a pseudonym using generic, non-descript images as their profile pic. It's pretty common.
- pnathan 13y ago
  Pretty sure that a sufficiently deeply filled out social graph can be leveraged to figure out who Foo Bar is, even if he has no info about himself.
  - jamestc 13y ago
    Oh, I absolutely guarantee it. Your FB search history, other people's FB search history (of your real name and of your fake name), which pages you view in correlation with what e-mail contacts you might have, the schools the people you talk to went to, etc. Luckily there's no online record of relationship history or it'd be an open and close case.
- kaybe 13y ago
  And when I travel and try to add new people to my friend list, to verify it's me logging in, facebook shows me pictures of food and cats and asks me to identify my friends that have tagged everything but themselves. Plus I'm remembering a hundred fake names, because nobody uses their real name. I'm the same, I do it too and think it's very neccessary, but it can interfere with FB procedures in funny ways. But then again, all this isn't new information. I have never really trusted a webpage with relevant stuff. ECHELON is old news, and servers can be hacked. The level of trust some people put into the net amazes me.
- pjbrunet 13y ago
rickdale 13y ago
I had my account around the same times as you did. And deleted for various reasons. When I deleted my account people were up in arms, "Why would you get rid of facebook?" And I am more the type of "why would you want it?" Now I miss out on all sorts of stuff like new babies and marriages, but at least it means really catching up with people when we do get together. Facebook is what I was into when I was growing up on AOL, then it would have been cool. But is it really beneficial to be linked with everyone you have ever met? On the Saprano's they said something like 'nostalgia is every mans weakness'. In my eyes facebook breads nostalgia, thus I keep away.
- gtirloni 13y ago
  I was deleted my account only to recreated it months later due to social pressure (yeah, I'm weak). When I logged back in, FB was suggesting I add all my old friends... I was immediately angry because it seemed FB hadn't really deleted my account so they still had all that data. Then it downed on me that they didn't have to keep my data... all my other friends were sharing so much information about me that I didn't even have to do it. FB knew my college friends, girlfriend, parents, etc.. It is really hard to go off the grid. Does anyone know if I job change, city change plus a name change would help? :)
AJ007 13y ago
This is how I've dealt with FB's negligent, frequent, and non consensual behavior: 1) No one can post on my wall 2) No one can tag me in pictures, post or places. 3) My profile picture excludes my face. 4) I post little to nothing. 5) I only friend a narrow group of people. Being an offline friend of mine for years is not enough. 6) People who make weird comments are unfriended quickly. 7) The list goes on, but it can be summarized as do as little on FB as possible. My best friends, most of my girlfriends, my family -- I am not friends with on FB! You can have a FB account and maintain some basic degree of privacy. It probably is not the way Mark Zuckerberg intends it. The more he does to interfere with my usage patterns, the less I use FB (and I hold him ultimately responsible for the UX.) I expect to continue to lose control over my account in the future. The more this occurs, the less I'll use it. Strangely, over the past year I have begun to really enjoy and understand using Twitter.
- jmandzik 13y ago
  The last sentence resonates with me. My twitter account was started in 08 and largely unused until this year. I'm surprised how much I like it after it clicked for me one day. Twitter works (for me) by keeping the number of people I follow low and keeping the signal to noise high.
- inthewind 13y ago
  Sounds like you are a Facebook leech! Community involves active participation! You just have to learn to ignore some posts - gloss over them. If you swapped Facebook out for say a private email list - would you be more inclined to participate? And if that is the case - why don't people just use mailing lists?
  - inthewind 13y ago
    Downvote me then without reason. The arrogance! ;)
- junto 13y ago
  You sound like me. I have now recently deleted my Facebook account. I recently realised that I was not participating, only lurking, mainly because I no longer trust Facebook with my data (I've spoken previously about soft-deletes archiving versus physical deletes). I also no longer trust the NSA Facebook relationship post-PRISM. If there are more people like me, then I truly fear for Facebook's long term success. (Disclaimer: I still own Facebook stock).
smutticus 13y ago
Most of my friends are on FB as well whereas I'm not. They almost always tell me when something is going on. Sometimes they forget, but then they apologize. Try to focus on getting a core group of friends that you maintain regular contact with. Call them, email them, sms them. Use communication forms other than FB to get at them and eventually you'll train them to include you. If not then get some new friends. Join a table top gaming club. There seems to be a resurgence of table op gaming going on that's really exciting. And it's a great way to meet people.

by novum 13y ago

eblume 13y ago

As a fellow 20-something in SF, I feel your pain. I recently made a FB account that I keep absolutely bare except for my friends to invite me to things. It still results in 'leak' that I'm not fond of, but the alternate choice is to continue to be left in the dust.

holri 13y ago
People that don't understand that I do not like FB are not my friends.
- a3_nm 13y ago
  I used to think this, but the truth is more complex. Facebook makes it easy for a lot of people to manage very large number of friends. If you're not using Facebook but most people around you are using it, even though your close friends would probably care enough about you to communicate with you through some other means, you will probably be missing out on a large number of distant acquaintances. The usual counter-argument to this is that it isn't worth it to care about such relationships anyway, and that you should only be concerned about close friends. It is true that close friends are important, but it might not be true that the optimal strategy is to care only about them. It may be useful to keeping distant connections with old friends in case you ever run into them again, or to have a large distant social circle with diverse backgrounds and physical locations to get more diverse recommendations, opinions, help, etc. More dramatically, say you arrive in a new city where you don't know anyone and no one knows you, but most people use Facebook: if you insist that people that don't initially know you should use your favorite communication medium rather than Facebook to interact with you online, it might be harder to get things started. This isn't to say that you should use Facebook: I never used it and discourage people from using it. This is to argue that you should be conscious that not using Facebook may come at a personal disadvantage. I personally still think that it is more important to stick to my principles and make an insignificant effort to improve things by not being on Facebook, but I can understand that other people might think differently (though I disapprove their choice).
  - holri 13y ago
    If you are not going to be happy if you are not honest to your beliefs.
    - gtirloni 13y ago
      Not true. You can be really honest to your beliefs and have a miserable life specifically because of that. I have deleted by FB account twice and then I was spending lots of time explaining why, getting weird looks from people and being left out of comments (e.g. people would post something to FB and be laughing about it later but never explain about what.. really impolite of them but what can I do? engage in more arguments). So yeah, be honest to your beliefs, just don't expect that will translate to happiness (unless you really work on telling yourself none of that unpleasant situations are really bad). We are human beings, how we interact with others matter (even if I didn't want any of that).
      - holri 13y ago
        Well for me, sharing my beliefs with friends makes me happy. If someone does not share or respects my beliefs, then there is no sharing and understanding each other which is the essence of a friendship. No matter how strange your beliefs are, you will always find people that think similar. The world is very diverse. It seems that FB even changes the fundamental meaning of a friend. Which is a shame and a lack of social culture.
dfc 13y ago
What data "leaks" that a moderately sophisticated/equipped adversary could not easily learn via other means? In 45 seconds I was able to learn your name, basic age/location, and email from this post, your hn profile and github profile. Another 45 seconds and I found your google+ and twitter accounts, with better location data, education history and employer.
- sophacles 13y ago
  Most people aren't moderately sophisticated/equipped adversaries. They are just people you think have no business knowing about (parts of) your life.
  - jamesaguilar 13y ago
    Anybody who could or would actually harm you with the knowledge can easily acquire it is the GP's point, I think. A Facebook account, ipso facto, adds no additional risk.
- walid 13y ago
  Its not what people can know about you, but rather how much of what they know is controlled by you. You can put out there all the info you want to make public, but if you change your mind, facebook will still keep your data.
  - dfc 13y ago
    He was in control of the data and then he relinquished control of the data when he shared it with facebook (and google, twitter, github and HN). Trusting facebook to prevent Eve from accessing to your data is not the same thing as controlling Eve's access to your data.
- eblume 13y ago
  Everything you mentioned is actually data I've purposely made available, EXCEPT for the twitter account, which continues to vex me. I haven't tried to delete that recently; I'll try again soon. (I can't remember what happened the last time...)

roc 13y ago

What kind of friends are they, that don't notice and/or care to invite people except through Facebook? Also, birthdays? Aren't those the sorts of things you find out about once per friend and then add to your own contacts? I've never had a Facebook account, but that's not a problem I've ever experienced. Granted, I don't automatically know the birthday of every single person I meet or even get a number/email from. But I would go so far as to call that a feature, and because of that, the birthday notifications I do get are worth getting.

novum 13y ago
I don't think there's any malicious intent. In my demographic, (almost) all events are set up through FB because your friend graph, mass-invites, and guest lists are built in. My flatmate's boyfriend is fond of throwing large house parties with hundreds of invitees, then hiring a doorman to check names off against the FB RSVP list. If you're not on it, you're not admitted. My closest friends remember me and send me invites via email, but I can't fault them for forgetting now and then.
- BWStearns 13y ago
  Since killing my account (because they kept resetting my privacy settings to public... bastards) I've outsourced my Facebook Birthday/Party monitoring to my girlfriend.
  - k3n 13y ago
    Not to be totally pessimistic, but that's probably potentially even more dangerous than trusting all that data to Facebook...
  - cbr 13y ago
    It's risky to own lots of stock in your employer because you losing your job would be more likely to come at a time when your investments were worth less. It's risky to let your SO handle too much of your social life for similar reasons. I'm very close to my wife and can't imagine getting a divorce, but I think it's healthy that we manage our own social calendars.

personlurking 13y ago

I've been where you are, it sucks. In fact, I don't really have friends because 1) I have moved around a lot since 2000 and 2) I stopped caring that FB ruled my friendships (in the way you mention). There are definitely people I'd be friends with, if they lived in my city, but since they don't, they only keep in contact via FB, which I don't use socially. I only have it for news feeds from Pages.

hannibal5 13y ago

Growing number of my friends are in FB with fake names and identities. It's more complicated when you add new friends or they want to add you, but otherwise it's ok for keeping touch with close friends. Yes, its against FB user agreement but fuck that.

Peroni 13y ago
I'm (real life) friends with a handful of minor celebrities. Most of them have a 'public' profile for PR and every single one of them has a 'private' profile under a pseudonym using generic, non-descript images as their profile pic. It's pretty common.
pnathan 13y ago
Pretty sure that a sufficiently deeply filled out social graph can be leveraged to figure out who Foo Bar is, even if he has no info about himself.
- jamestc 13y ago
  Oh, I absolutely guarantee it. Your FB search history, other people's FB search history (of your real name and of your fake name), which pages you view in correlation with what e-mail contacts you might have, the schools the people you talk to went to, etc. Luckily there's no online record of relationship history or it'd be an open and close case.
kaybe 13y ago
And when I travel and try to add new people to my friend list, to verify it's me logging in, facebook shows me pictures of food and cats and asks me to identify my friends that have tagged everything but themselves. Plus I'm remembering a hundred fake names, because nobody uses their real name. I'm the same, I do it too and think it's very neccessary, but it can interfere with FB procedures in funny ways. But then again, all this isn't new information. I have never really trusted a webpage with relevant stuff. ECHELON is old news, and servers can be hacked. The level of trust some people put into the net amazes me.
pjbrunet 13y ago

rickdale 13y ago

I had my account around the same times as you did. And deleted for various reasons. When I deleted my account people were up in arms, "Why would you get rid of facebook?" And I am more the type of "why would you want it?" Now I miss out on all sorts of stuff like new babies and marriages, but at least it means really catching up with people when we do get together. Facebook is what I was into when I was growing up on AOL, then it would have been cool. But is it really beneficial to be linked with everyone you have ever met? On the Saprano's they said something like 'nostalgia is every mans weakness'. In my eyes facebook breads nostalgia, thus I keep away.

gtirloni 13y ago
I was deleted my account only to recreated it months later due to social pressure (yeah, I'm weak). When I logged back in, FB was suggesting I add all my old friends... I was immediately angry because it seemed FB hadn't really deleted my account so they still had all that data. Then it downed on me that they didn't have to keep my data... all my other friends were sharing so much information about me that I didn't even have to do it. FB knew my college friends, girlfriend, parents, etc.. It is really hard to go off the grid. Does anyone know if I job change, city change plus a name change would help? :)

AJ007 13y ago

This is how I've dealt with FB's negligent, frequent, and non consensual behavior: 1) No one can post on my wall 2) No one can tag me in pictures, post or places. 3) My profile picture excludes my face. 4) I post little to nothing. 5) I only friend a narrow group of people. Being an offline friend of mine for years is not enough. 6) People who make weird comments are unfriended quickly. 7) The list goes on, but it can be summarized as do as little on FB as possible. My best friends, most of my girlfriends, my family -- I am not friends with on FB! You can have a FB account and maintain some basic degree of privacy. It probably is not the way Mark Zuckerberg intends it. The more he does to interfere with my usage patterns, the less I use FB (and I hold him ultimately responsible for the UX.) I expect to continue to lose control over my account in the future. The more this occurs, the less I'll use it. Strangely, over the past year I have begun to really enjoy and understand using Twitter.

jmandzik 13y ago
The last sentence resonates with me. My twitter account was started in 08 and largely unused until this year. I'm surprised how much I like it after it clicked for me one day. Twitter works (for me) by keeping the number of people I follow low and keeping the signal to noise high.
inthewind 13y ago
Sounds like you are a Facebook leech! Community involves active participation! You just have to learn to ignore some posts - gloss over them. If you swapped Facebook out for say a private email list - would you be more inclined to participate? And if that is the case - why don't people just use mailing lists?
- inthewind 13y ago
  Downvote me then without reason. The arrogance! ;)
junto 13y ago
You sound like me. I have now recently deleted my Facebook account. I recently realised that I was not participating, only lurking, mainly because I no longer trust Facebook with my data (I've spoken previously about soft-deletes archiving versus physical deletes). I also no longer trust the NSA Facebook relationship post-PRISM. If there are more people like me, then I truly fear for Facebook's long term success. (Disclaimer: I still own Facebook stock).

smutticus 13y ago

Most of my friends are on FB as well whereas I'm not. They almost always tell me when something is going on. Sometimes they forget, but then they apologize. Try to focus on getting a core group of friends that you maintain regular contact with. Call them, email them, sms them. Use communication forms other than FB to get at them and eventually you'll train them to include you. If not then get some new friends. Join a table top gaming club. There seems to be a resurgence of table op gaming going on that's really exciting. And it's a great way to meet people.