Ask HN: Anybody else quitting Facebook over privacy concerns?

You have every right to pull out of Facebook if you disagree with what they're doing, but thinking it has to conform to what your vision of what the web's "basic paradigm" is is just silly. Blogging and commenting changed things before this social stuff took it further. The web is always changing.

Saying people need to learn about the origins of the web before they can use it is arrogant and I don't see how it could affect how anyone views what's happening with this Facebook stuff.

Regardless though, "social by default" is rhetoric. When you launch a site Facebook isn't going to be able to hijack it and start inserting social features without your permission.

In general, I think the concerns are overblown. Facebook is basically the Twitter that my family uses, and that's why I use it.

I'm 23, signed up for Facebook my freshman year of college (when it was only college students and had ~40 schools). I use Facebook frequently but will no longer be doing so. Good riddance if you ask me.

I'm 36, all of my friends and I use facebook at least daily. Photos, events, links, news, feed, chat, all of it. I'd say for the majority of us, it is our main form of communication.

Don't forget PG-13, it was us 30+ year olds who built much of the foundation which made Facebook possible. We're thankful to the 40+ who developed the technology and environment for us to do that.

Understand the concept of 'Standing on the shoulders of Giants', and you'll have more respect for those who made what you build and dream of today possible.

Along the way, you'll hopefully realize age has very little to do with anything. As much as I am appreciative of what Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreessen have created, I am equally in awe of what Zuckerberg has been able to envision.

By the sound of your reasoning, if you were older, I'm pretty sure you would of signed up for an AOL account and would still have it today because you are a 'real' AOL user.

You know how you can't leave it because all your photos, connections, status messages, groups and all that won't come with you? That's called data portability. Facebook doesn't have it, and has no incentive to provide it.

That's exactly why you shouldn't use it today, because in 20 years, ideally you'll be able to choose which social provider you host your data at on the open web. The decentralized model works beautifully for the web and is democratizing because of it. The social web should be the same way.

I agree that 'older' people don't use facebook the same way as younger people. If you've been using FB since your were in your teens, it's a part of your life. It's going to take a generation, but our society will adjust to the lack of privacy in trade for the tools it provides.

Unfortunately, no one is going to listen to you when you're insulting your audience.

I'm under 30 and just quit.

I'm 26.

Closer to 20 than I am to 30, have 700+ 'friends' chronicling most of the people I met in college (and then some), tons of wall chatter between friends and family over the years, almost 900 photos tagged of me (though I don't let anyone else see those) and a few hundred pictures I've posted myself. I use it almost daily to share interesting links / photos / news stories I read throughout the day, and to keep in touch with people since I've moved

I'm seriously considering account deletion because Facebook is making me uncomfortable. In the past, I've tried to give them the benefit of the doubt -- like when they responded to user feedback and killed beacon. I thought "Gee, maybe they aren't Evil, just a little misguided."

Now, I think they're Evil. The only thing they learned from the Beacon disaster was that they can't roll out all of the privacy erosion at once; you have to do it slowly, so nobody realizes it, or a least their anger never really reaches critical mass. Taking a hint from the government perhaps.

So I'm "hip," as you kids say. But here I am, weighing the benefits of simple and wide-reaching communication against a provider that keeps proving it's willing to sell my information without much warning.

Don't worry about being downvoted with a throwaway account. The people downvoting are most likely over 30, paranoid as fuck, and have no hand in creating today's internet. These are the same people that gave me -4 for saying "Yahoo is a rotting carcass on the landscape of the web". I get a kick out of these people, and offending them, because they are sooooo out of touch.

Don't get too comfortable with your ageist sentiments. Time will get you too.

Ok, so younger people use Facebook differently from how older people use it (or, from your point of view, think they use it). Could you explain some of the ways in which these usage patterns differ? What about Facebook do you understand that is hard for people over 30 to get, and that makes talk of "quitting" Facebook naive?

Is there a sharp division at 30 between people who get it and don't get it, or is there a gray area between, say, 20 and 30, where people sort-of get it? Why do you suppose that is? Why 30?

Also, please be nice.

"Your opinion on Facebook is about as insightful as an 80-yr-old's opinion about the internet."

What about a 66-yr-old's? I wonder if Vint Cerf would have an insightful opinion. Or Bob Kahn - he's over 70.

Maybe Marc Andreessen could beg a real Facebook user to explain these things to him before he sits in the Facebook board meetings. He's almost 40, after all - his opinion might be worthless.

Early adopter here too. I fully enjoyed the linked university concept - before universities started to engage more in their online departments, facebook was the only way outside of email or class to connect to a classmate about the course in question. I was deeply disappointed when they removed the university/courses currently taking, feature.

The problem with Facebook was never what you posted about yourself. The more nefarious thing was that other people, in theory your friends but more like people you know for whatever reason, could post information that was linked directly to your tangibly real identity.

In the era of the freeform Wall this was pretty silly stuff, but by the time it expanded to picture tagging and the news feed it started to get quite a bit out of your control. You could opt out of some of these things, but doing so generally made you seem a little asocial.

The real diabolical thing about Facebook was that it combined general social anxiety with on-by-default feature rollouts to coerce its userbase into feeding more and more personal info to the datamine. Expect it to only get worse as the userbase grows to epic proportions... they are sitting on a Scientology-scale vault containing the personal details of people's lives.

I am in a similar situation. My school was among the first couple of expansions, if I recall. They pretty much lost me when they stopped requiring a dot edu email address to sign up. I had kept a completely unmaintained presence there since then, but I deactivated my account last night thanks to Open Graph.

I found.. you don't. But that's not such a bad thing, because if you're associating with people who you wouldn't otherwise keep in touch with except for some stupid Web site, are they people worth keeping around?

Yes, but I believe there's a "feature" that allows your friends to share your photos and other content without your permission. This is separate from the "feature" that was just helpfully introduced that allows other websites to identify you or whatever the hell it was.

Seriously, I'm finding this Facebook thing more and more of a bother. It's great for connecting with old friends and keeping in touch with family, but if I have to be on edge all the time keeping an eye on the thing to make sure it doesn't breach my privacy then it's just pointless. Everything that affects privacy should be opt-in, not out. But FB can't resist the siren call of those billions of pieces of personally identifiable information they are sitting on.

My big beef is that it becomes a hassle to have to go in and opt-out every time Zuckerberg decides to opt me in to some new information-sharing service that I don't want to be a part of. So yes, you can disable it, but the trend seems to be to make it a convoluted process to disable these things, followed by new "features" in a few months that force me to jump through a few more hoops. It's just become more of a headache than it's worth.

I may be out of the prime facebook demographic by several years but even I understand the significance of this for a huge number of facebook users. A lot of people view facebook as something in the same genre of livejournal or blogger, a tool that allows you to keep in touch with friends but that is nevertheless still fairly public and limited. However, a huge number of people have taken facebook far more into their private lives. They use it as a replacement for email, for example. These people's entire digital lives are in facebook. Every sordid detail of their personal relationships. Every little bit of letting off steam about coworkers and bosses. Every piece of personal information from their home address and phone number to the sex toys they bought last week. For these people facebook's privacy settings are critically important.

To put yourself in their shoes imagine if your email provider or phone company made an announcement that they were making a change to their privacy settings. If you thought that there was a serious chance of your email, text messages, or phone conversations accidentally becoming public because you failed to tick the right checkbox somewhere you might demonstrate just the slightest bit of consternation at that prospect.

For myself I've been lucky since I hardly use facebook, and then only grudgingly (more out of a hatred for the UI than anything else), but for many of it's heaviest users facebook does not appear to be operating in, let alone even considering, their best interests.

Becuase it's not just what you put on there, it's what others put on there about you.

Plus - do you really want _anyone_ who feels like it to be able to find out stuff about you? Insurance companies, potential employers, the tax man, debt collectors and so on?

Or how about a scorned ex-gf/bf, someone you've had a dispute with etc etc.?

Basically, it makes you vulnerable.

Real URL: http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_ac...

If you want an alternative that will never disrespect privacy, you will need to make it distributed. This is because the only way to control your data is to lock it up on your machine, or encrypt it.

I wonder if there are standards (protocols) related to distributed "social network".

I believe that you are violating Facebook's ToS if you use a pseudonym. Just sayin'.

(As though a name our parents give us is more "real" than one of our own choosing. There is no such thing as identity.)

There are a few issues with the "I have very little to hide" attitude. One problem is that the information you provide may not be what you want to hide, but the information that could be inferred from it may be problematic for you.

For instance, what if some financial institution computes a credit score based on the profiles of the people you are connected with and makes you pay more for a loan because you have some friends with a bad credit rating?

What if health insurance providers sift through your data to find out about your lifestyle and adjust rates accordingly?

What if a potential employer or their HR service provider computes some kind of loyalty/reliability/risk score based on lifestyle data you provide?

What if none of that is possible based on your current facebook data but when facebook gets acquired in the future their datasets are combined with other data about you?

All of the conclusions drawn from such analyses may be completely wrong. But they are nonetheless information about you and they may have an effect on your life. Was that the kind of information you were thinking of when you said "I have very little to hide"?

I'd go win might not. Last time I checked elgg does not scale well and the code is really REALLY awful as in not optimized and not conducive to customization. It is kind of a toy IMO