I can't think of a successful boycott. I believe the largest attempt I witnessed was against BP when they just sank an old oil platform, including all sorts of toxins and petrochemicals.
I think that made a single-digit dent in their revenue.
Politics and law enforcement are far better tools to get corporations to behave. They solve the coordination problem, they can far easier track changing and long chains of ownership, and they allow you to delegate the research work to someone you trust.
One are outcomes dubiously tied to boycotts - did Sea World change their orca problem to protect revenues, or because they feared legal intervention?
The second is indirect outcomes, where the bad actor and the boycott-ee are different. If you threaten a purchaser over a supplier, or a supplier over a purchaser, they can hope to change behavior with no major loss of revenue. It's a very different situation than changing the actual bad behavior.
(And in many of these cases the bad behavior was unchanged, some external company just dissociated from it.)
There do seem to be some solid successes there, for instance with product safety, food source sustainability, or sweatshop labor. But even there, I'm curious whether the threat of boycott was a primary influence compared to the other activist campaigns around it.
> One are outcomes dubiously tied to boycotts - did Sea World change their orca problem to protect revenues, or because they feared legal intervention?
They feared legal intervention due to the public attention drawn by the boycott.
Affecting revenue of a targeted actor directly is not the only mechanism by which boycotts are intended to have an effect.
I agree that revenue hits are not the only (and usually not the primary) effect of boycotts.
But what I'm questioning is "due to the public attention drawn by the boycott." Was the consumer boycott actually a major reason SeaWorld feared legal action?
When Blackfish came out, a lot of musicians cancelled planned SeaWorld concerts, which had a visible and immediate revenue impact. Share prices dropped 33%, even though revenue only dropped ~1%; presumably shareholders feared the possibility of legal action. And a range of state and federal Congressmen introduced bills on regarding orca captivity, explicitly citing Blackfish as a motivator.
Boycotts are certainly correlated with major corporate and legal changes, but I'm skeptical that they're a significant cause. Examples like SeaWorld make me think that boycotts and policy changes have common causes (e.g. Blackfish), but the boycotts aren't themselves very impactful.
The Chicago Tribune had a clever bit about the gun-seller boycotts, arguing that boycotts only matter as a way to keep the topic in the news, and it basically doesn't matter whether people actually participate. That's basically my guess, also.
The biggest influence was Salesforce's threat to leave after just acquiring Indianapolis based ExactTarget. Benioff was very persuasive along with NCAA, GenCon and most of the Indiana business community.
There has been research into the effectiveness of consumer boycotts. They can be really effective especially against brands.
Nike boycott in the 1990s was really effective. The company’s sales fell in short them, but the damage to the brand was even more significant. Nike had to work a decade to repair the 'child labor' reputation and adopt the global sustainable idea.
On the other hand consumer boycotts against products without brand or network externalities have less effect. They suffer from free rider effect. Boycot is essentially subsidizing the consumption of those who use the boycotted product.
Boycotts aren't going to be effective against companies that make basic commodities, because those companies don't interact directly with their consumers. Facebook deals directly with its users and advertising clients. I think consumer-facing companies are a lot more careful to maintain good PR and avoid boycotts in the first place.
> Boycotts aren't going to be effective against companies that make basic commodities, because those companies don't interact directly with their consumers.
It's hard to identify cause and effect, but the large UK/European consumer boycott of South Africa in the 1980s may have had some effect, and there are US Federal laws against boycotting Israel (BDS), so i guess someone fears it is effective in some way.
This is precisely the opposite of true. Boycotts almost never have any effect; the impossible coordination problem they impose is why we need governments and regulation instead.
Boycotts, kind of like protests, show to the government that people care. Specifically, it shows the people care enough to actually take action that takes effort.
That is a rather high level of caring.
So, it seems to me that boycots (and protests) are important for convincing regulators something is an issue.
While occasionally boycotts have encouraged changes, it typically only happens when other companies get involved.
Consumers "voting with their wallet" very seldom accomplishes much, except giving people a sense of having "done something".
That said, if companies and advertisers start publicly pulling support (like we see here, and the Mozilla story), it can start to raise internal flags, and (occasionally) lead to change.
While I get somewhat nervous about bureaucrats that don't understand technology writing overly broad laws, I do have to agree that legislation is often the most effective driver of change.
In the case of Facebook, users are the product. If they lose 20% of their users, the usefulness of their product diminishes.
Social media companies would literally vanish if all the users stopped using them. What would actual users stand to lose? Event scheduling seems to be the main reason I read on here why people stay. There are soo many ways to do that - it would not be a hardship on users if they view the social gain of #deletefacebook.
Well, the shops were lacklusting so everyone decided "let's not go there". Most of those were in locations that would be convenient too, you didn't even need to go out of your way to go to a Target. People still decided not to shop there. That's pretty much voting with your wallet.
What other word would you use if a chunk of the population intentionally goes out of their way to walk to a store further away, just to not enter Target?
> While occasionally boycotts have encouraged changes, it typically only happens when other companies get involved.
The other companies getting involved are a result of the boycott and the attention driven by it, so that's just a mechanism of the effect of boycott's, not an indication that they lack effect.
And even if they are weak, that doesn't mean they aren't one of the most effective mechanisms consumers, as such, have to effect change: that would only be rebutted by the presence of demonstrably more effective methods available to consumers.
> While I get somewhat nervous about bureaucrats that don't understand technology writing overly broad laws, I do have to agree that legislation is often the most effective driver of change.
Outside of direct democracy systems (including limited direct democracies, like representative systems where citizens retain the power of initiative), legislation isn't a power of the people generally, but a power that the people can indirectly influence by other means. And citizen influence campaigns against government (especially when there are entrenched interests opposed) are not notably more efficacious than boycotts against businesses. (Indeed, boycotts against businesses are often resorted to -- and sometimes successful in producing legislative changes -- after conventional citizen activism directed at legislative change without boycotts fails.)
Only in cases where the benefits gained and the detriments caused by the consumption are more or less in proportion. In many (most) cases, the benefits are internalized by the consumer and the burdens externalized. In all those cases 'vote with your wallet' has no effect beyond personal handicapping and feel good.
Actively pursuing/supporting regulation to curb the behavior is (nearly) always the better option.
Strongly disagree. Boycotts are almost never effective. What is effective is legislative changes, marching in the streets, and the occasional turned over car.
I deleted Facebook after the Beacon fiasco, but I think I'm gonna go ahead and move off google today. Mainly just gmail.
I wonder if there will be a backlash against cloud services more generally? Could we see people return to buying their own servers and hiring network engineers again? Everyone I talk to is so concerned about where their data lives now, I could see it happening.
How does this work? You start changing all your account logins? How do you preserve history? Does FastMail import this? (actually just realized this would be a totally different email address, so might be moot)
I've considered it but there are a lot more variables I'm concerned about than delivery.
This is why you should have your own domain for email. Your email address is important and should remain constant regardless of who is providing your email service.
I like this idea, and do it for a domain or two but am not currently using it for private email. Are you just talking about using a domain registrar and using an email redirect? Is there a better way to do it? I can see wanting to grab the common TLD's, just to make sure you are easy to get in touch with. I'm thinking of com, net, org, and info.
I can speak to what I did, and I recommend people at least start doing this immediately, even if they don't intend to switch email providers. Buy a domain name of your own, make an email address at it, and forward it to your current email provider. Every time you log into a website, make sure to update your email address to your new one.
Now, you're no longer tied to one company! When I decided to switch to FastMail, eighteen months later, I repointed the domain, and the vast majority of my email started flowing to the new service automatically! As a side bonus, if your email provider ever decides to ban your account (as Google has been known to do for spurious reasons), you can repoint your domain somewhere else, and you won't have to worry about losing access to all your other accounts and online assets.
You can use an IMAP email client to transfer your old mail, of course, and then I occasionally check my old mail account for stragglers. I chose not to auto-forward it so I'd clearly see what was or wasn't routing through my old Gmail account. I used to check it as often as I check FastMail. Then every couple days. Now I check my old Gmail account every week or two.
I switched from gmail to zoho mail some years ago, when I frist got my own domain. Slowly moved logins etc. over time, but using my domain for all personal communication. Then at some point I switched to Fastmail, and as I owned the domain, did not have to do anything. Then a couple years ago I switched to gandi's mail because dollars became so costly that $30 was too much for me as a uni student. Today I do not have a use for my gmail, but I let it linger around because I need one for my android devices anyways. I was quite hopeful that Ubuntu Phone would be my next phone OS, but it let me down unfortunately. When I will be able to get rid of android, I'll remove my google account altogether.
For email I highly recommend FastMail. It is $30 a year and their spam filters are better than Gmail's. They also have a sleek web interface. The annual fee also includes good looking calendar and document storage features, but I have only dabbled with using those so I do not know how good they are.
Notes from a happy user with no relationship to the company.
My experience is from a couple years ago, but the app was not all that good. No trouble though, as K-9 mail is a quite nice OSS mail client for Android, it's probably the only mobile app that I've used and am nearly satisfied with the experience.
Can't recommend mailcow[1] enough! Took me a couple of hours setting up and moving 6 domains and 31 mailboxes after having to leave a shady provider quickly.
It includes everything like automatic certs, SPF, DKIM and has imapsync with a simple admin interface built in. Also comes with SOGo for webmail.
When I left Gmail a couple of years ago, I switched to https://posteo.de and have been extremely happy so far. They are very serious about security and privacy (you can pay anonymously by sending cash in an envelope) but they are also open about their limitations. They are for example not offering Protonmail-style "end-to-end encryption" because that is essentally security theater (since the email provider controls the code that implements e2e, they can basically do anything they want). Based in Germany.
Not parent but I have heard really god things about https://www.openmailbox.org/.
It is not free if you want to use an external mail client (but paying for services with money is what we should want).
Unfortunately, AFAIK there is no way to check that if he hasn't tooted. Also, bear in mind it might not be him..might be a fake account, but then I'd suspect it would have been used more.
Even though they will have technical and business procedures in place to ensure compliance with the 'right to be forgotten' for EU citizens behind the scenes - and therefore any user globally - I would be very surprised if they offered this outside the EU (unless forced to by the likes of the EFF but I doubt enough people care). It would directly reduce the attraction to advertisers, and impact their bottom line.
I just downloaded all the data that FB has on me. It's quite surprising to see every single message and wall post I have made and others have made to me.
One thing I realized is that even if I delete my account, facebook will still store my communication with other people in case they request to download their information too. So I'm not sure if it would ever get deleted unless both parties delete their accounts? For my info to truly get deleted, all of my contacts would have to delete their accounts too.
In EU, are they not obliged to keep some data? Imagine the case: commit a crime using FB, delete your profile. I cannot imagine the judge/police would not get some exploitable data...
I don't think keeping public data about Musk/Tesla/SpaceX, probably managed by multiple people, gives FB any sort of important information to Facebook.
I think the theory is FB gets to keep data on who liked/followed/interacted with the page/content, which is still valuable data to mine for profiling the users. A true removal of an account should result in all interactions with the account and its content being removed as well, which I really doubt is the case.
Can anybody who lives in the valley speak to whether people really hate Zuckerberg enough over there to the point where this seems like a rational thing to do? I live out in Mass and while the 'scandal' has definitely been front page news, for a company to do this (especially with a well-known entrepreneur) would be decidedly odd.
I don't have the privileged information to know if it is true, but this feels more like a gut reaction then a cost benefit analysis action. Musk is known to be pretty polarized in his tech ethics opinions.
Cambridge Analytica isn't the first incidence where Facebook was used for political purposes. Obama Campaign Manager Jim Messina explains their use of it in 2013:
I live in the valley, have several friends at Facebook, etc. I don't know anybody who hates Zuckerberg. I don't hate him. But I am very upset with Facebook-the-company and Facebook-the-system. What bothers me most is that, to the best that I can tell, Facebook-the-company and especially Facebook-the-system just _do not care_ about me or you as individuals.
Talking about Facebook on Twitter seems to be the height of irony...
(I hate Twitter, although if you ask me to substantiate why, I would probably come up with the oft-repeated talking points of echo chamber, Russian bots, rage mobs, etc, etc.)
If we were to compare reasons why we dislike Twitter, I expect that we'd have a lot to agree on. I tried to leave Twitter too, but found that I couldn't because I still get too much value from Twitter. I still hope that someday the winds will shift to a system that brings me the joy I got from Twitter between 2008 and 2016.
LOL... that comment is hilarious because it touches one key truth about Vietnamese culture...
When you ask a Vietnamese person if they can do something, they ALWAYS say they can, even if they have no clue what it is. Especially Vietnamese men. We have this weird need to always pretend like we know everything.
It's similar to the TV sitcom stereotype of how all men think they can fix a leaking pipe, even if they have no clue how to do it.
First it used to be excitement, then "love to hate" with increased utility but ads, but then your parents and other family started joining and it became a chore and "meh".
The dilution of your newsfeed and privacy issues highlighted meant you got more for your money from Instagram/Snapchat/Whatsapp and you got better responses from tweeting your issues with @company. Most folks I knew at this point either claimed they didn't use FB regularly (ie, they probably still did but maybe only by habit) or just for FB messenger.
All the while the slow drip drip of privacy issues eroded trust.
So we're at the point where if you haven't dropped, the utility can be elsewhere and there's no love lost if you drop FB. FB is in Uber-territory here, some don't mind - but you no longer get weird looks when you tell someone you shut down your FB account. In fact, it's often a good conversation starter.
Elon and SpaceX have enough existing 'juice' or brand cachet or whatever to get away with a move like this and maybe even get a PR boost from it. My local Girl Scouts chapter, Jeep club, etc... not so much. They're married to Facebook as infrastructure.
would it not be better for the #deletefacebook movement to delete all data and post a single protest message instead? Future users clicking through to the SpaceX or Tesla pages from links on the net won't know why they did this.
> would it not be better for the #deletefacebook movement to [not #deletefacebook]
No, no it wouldn't. The movement doesn't work if literally nobody does it. The point of the movement is not to preserve Facebook pages for all future visitors! The point is to have those links go nowhere. Future visitors will find out why there isn't a page if they care to, and that only fuels the movement.
Edit: Since I'm not allowed to reply any more (banned on HN again for probably "low-quality posts"??), here is my reply to the comment below.
> but you know that actually deleting a page simply sets a isDeleted=true flag in a database right?
You act like deleting the content on Facebook doesn't just also set the same flag. I'm not sure what you're trying to achieve with that.
#deletefacebook is about Deleting Facebook. If you try to make it about something else you clearly aren't getting it. Delete Facebook means Delete Facebook. Get off it. Break the links. Make everything go away.
It does not mean to continue to use Facebook as a platform to deliver a message, as you keep saying. It means, Delete Facebook.
Edit #2:
Another reply below that I am banned from replying directly to, so here it is.
> the point of deleting facebook isn't to delete facebook - it's to try to harm facebook.
Is this satire or what? The point of deleting facebook is to delete facebook! That's it! There's nothing else!
> My suggestion does more harm.
No it does not. Leaving Facebook accounts open is telling the world you approve. It doesn't matter what message you put there. You are still giving them money and telling everyone you know that Facebook should get their money too and their time and their attention by going to Facebook to read a message that you posted.
The point of deleting Facebook is deleting Facebook.
Edit #3, another response to a comment I'm banned from replying to:
> People aren't deleting facebook just for the sake of it, there's a meaning and purpose behind the movement.
You want them to not delete facebook at all. You want Facebook's 2B+ active users to stay on the platform and not delete their accounts. This is not getting behind the movement, this is a distraction meant to stop people from actually following the movement.
You seem to think that the most successful way for the movement to succeed is for literally nobody to participate. That doesn't make any sense. The way for this to work is not your way, it is the total breakage of all those links, the total removal of Facebook's content and accounts from the internet.
You will not get very far trying to convince #deletefacebook people that really, truly, they shouldn't delete their accounts, they should keep the convenience there and make sure everybody knows that facebook.com is where you go to learn about boycotting Facebook. You want everyone to go to facebook.com to learn more about some social movement. You are not going to win this - #deletefacebook isn't some half-arsed little game where nobody deletes anything. It's a movement whereby people are saying "Don't go to facebook.com for any reason, there's nothing there any more".
Edit #4: This comment and thread are a mess to read. Why does HN not let me reply? Is this format of conversation really better than just letting me participate like everyone else?
but you know that actually deleting a page simply sets a isDeleted=true flag in a database right? It's not removing your data from facebook, it's denying other users' access to your data in protest. Deleting everything on your account does the same thing, plus you can leave an anti-facebook message on your account to spread the message. It's the equivalent of sticking a new message over a billboard instead of just burning the thing down - it's more clearly attributable to an act of protest and you can tell people why they should boycott facebook at the same time.
you seem to be suggesting that having a completely blank profile (plus a protest message) somehow has a different effect on facebook's ability to use your profile to their advantage - it doesn't. The only real difference is that if you blank off your profile you can try to spread the message - either way you've left facebook and won't provide them with any more data, interaction, etc. Change your password to something randomised if you're worried you might be tempted back.
And saying "delete facebook means delete facebook" has literally no meaning at all. An act of protest has an aim, the point of deleting facebook isn't to delete facebook - it's to try to harm facebook. My suggestion does more harm.
> Is this satire or what? The point of deleting facebook is to delete facebook! That's it! There's nothing else!
Circular logic is no logic at all. I'm trying to point at the purpose of the movement. People aren't deleting facebook just for the sake of it, there's a meaning and purpose behind the movement. But if we can't get past the idea that a movement has a purpose, there's nothing more to talk about.
I think I see your point - if enough people delete their accounts, it will make the Facebook user experience poor enough to sow further discontent. That makes perfect sense if enough people #deletefacebook to fundamentally impact the social graph. We'll have to wait to see if that happens. Either way, I support the movement - Facebook has had a damaging impact on social cohesion and mental health for too long, its downfall can't come soon enough.
> #deletefacebook is about Deleting Facebook. If you try to make it about something else you clearly aren't getting it. Delete Facebook means Delete Facebook. Get off it. Break the links. Make everything go away.
From the perspective of Facebook, this is like an immune response. Those "infected" with #deletefacebook drop of and fail to spread the mimetic contagion to other users.
The best thing, from a #deletefacebook perspective, is to clear you profile of information and replace it with protest messages (including profile pic). Spread the message, explain why you think Facebook is bad and why you're going to delete your profile. Then, in a week or a month or whatever, circle back and actually delete it.
Facebook pages are in and of themselves avenues for marketing. Stop being so damn cynical about every single thing people do. It is possible, believe it or not, for people to have personal values and beliefs that extend beyond the ceaseless desire for money.
I think the OP above is being practical as opposed to cynical. TBH, most of the demographic that followed him on FB also have insta and twitter. Most of the people i know in my age group (college age - 24) don't even use FB anymore. Theres a little joke that as soon as your parents start to use the platform its time to jump ship. On top of that, its created articles like this - which has led to even more publicity. I also wasn't aware that any of these FB pages existed but i follow them all on insta and twitter.
My thoughts exactly, practicality as opposed to cynicism.
Also, what are his personal values? Who knows? Why does he bore the underground with abandon even when he acknowledges that the environmental impacts are not completely know. One study says autonomous vehicles can be as effective for congestion easing as his underground tunnels.
His transportation is the next level of dependency he is creating and we are turning a blind eye to. As these corporations' services get too essential (through lobbying), there won't be any choice to #delete_boring.
I respect him for what he has achieved, but too much celebrity worship is something we should all be watchful of.
I believe that future cities shouldn’t require roads. The amount of space wasted on roads and parking can be used for better things.
And if anyone hasn’t noticed (this gets brought up all the time), Musk is commercializing everything needed for colonization of the moon/Mars. Electric motors, solar energy, underground infrastructure, and space travel.
> Stop being so damn cynical [...] people to have personal values and beliefs that extend beyond the ceaseless desire for money.
They do, but a great deal of stuff out there, if not determined wholly by profit, is at least heavily influenced or constrained by it or similar considerations. Social media is full of self-promoters and curated personas with spurious motives. What curated personas like these publish is in the best case constrained by profit, but in practice done to enhance the brand. Elon Musk is a brand. The deletion of his Facebook pages is at best irrelevant, but most likely just a cheap and easy way to enhance his celebrity or dissociate himself from Facebook. Why else delete them, and delete them now? The recent media brouhaha is largely a nothingburger in the greater context. You think Elon didn't know what many people have known about the use of data extracted from social media?
In today's society having tons of money is the best possible approximation of not needing money at all, which makes having values beyond it (and following them) a lot easier.
Not that I'm criticizing Musk as I respect him as much as I have low consideration for Zuckerberg, but if Tesla was a startup struggling to stay afloat it probably would have changed something.
"Also having values that extend beyond money is, ironically, a lot easier when you have plenty of money."
In general, yes. But I believe that neither Musk, nor Zuck have "plenty of money". Not when one of them ones to go to mars and the other one control the worlds communication. As you need really much money for both.
He took a dare to prove he is "the man", give me a break. It's an amazing PR move (and a pretty funny one too), but this isn't about "personal values"; it's about the same as the flamethrower and the Roadster launch, Elon being Elon, and showing everyone he is Elon. What's better than being a playful billionaire who is in full control of his companies? Everyone knowing he is a playful billionaire who is in full control of his companies lol.
If it were about "personal values" he would've released a statement condemning the events and deleted his and his companies instagram accounts too. Instagram is the hot place to build "cool" brand value right now though, so I doubt he will. Facebook pages are useful for a number of reasons, but not essential to the way Tesla and SpaceX make money.
> That’s a quick turnaround, since Musk seems only to have found out these pages existed about 20 minutes prior to his taking them all offline.
From the article. Guess you missed that part. I don't think our boy hatched an evil master marketing plan in 20 minutes. Sounds more like a reaction based on principles.
Quite honestly, both companies have enough exposure through the media that losing their Facebook pages is unlikely to make much of a difference. (Especially for a company like SpaceX, which was mostly reaching individuals who weren't in any position to do business with them.)
I would assume a company that size could potentially have at least one person who's full time job (or sizable portion of their job if social was a low priority) was to maintain those pages.
That makes sense if Tesla & SpaceX was an indie hacker startup nobody has heard of. Do you really think Governments will start ordering SpaceX rockets because of this news? Why will someone buy a Tesla because the company deleted their FB page? For what is worth they will lose some Tesla customers they would have reached through Facebook. There is a reason why all the major companies in the world spend tons of money on their FB page. FB page helps companies land more customers.
Please mention the reason as well why this comment is getting downvoted. Downvoting without reason will never help me to figure out why my logic is flawed.
Also for me. Though in the opposite direction than I assume for you. Unless he also trows away his iPhone and changes his start page from Google to Duck Duck Go, it's a pretty irrational move that I'm surprised to see from Musk.
I don't have principles of extricating my self from all logging.
I'm pointing out the hypocritical in seeing a big problem on sharing data with Facebook while having no issue with sharing data with Apple, Google, Twitter etc.
Apple isn't packaging and selling your data. They don't even look at it. iCloud is about the same as Amazon S3 -- it's just a storage system. They aren't doing analytics on your data to sell you things.
Facebook does also not sell your data. Facebook sell your eyeballs. They do however give away your data for free to 3rd party developers as does Apple, Google and many other.
Facebook has been shown to be completely careless with securing your data - this wasn't even a data breach, the functionality to get all the data was a part of their API. Apple on the other hand has been very publically proactive about protecting your data.
I feel like this is more a reaction to the complete lack of responsibility Facebook had for keeping your data secure rather than the collection of data in the first place.
1) It has been like this for 10 years and it has been documented in plain sight. Also in this time frame user data has been progressively better protected. Data is better protected on Facebook now than it has even been. So why this outcry in 2018?
2) How does Apple protect 3rd party apps from collecting data? iOS apps even has the option of tracking your location - something that FB apps never had as far as I recall.
1) The perspective of "I have nothing to hide, I have no issue sharing all my data with FaceBook" has been very prevalent for a long time, as the consequences of that happening on a large scale are not obvious at a glance. It's a nuanced topic with too many variables. It takes a large enough event that can be (correctly or not) attributed to this in order to gain peoples attention. Foreign adversary potentially using this information and tooling to influence domestic elections is a large enough event to result in that coming to the public eye.
2) Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp all have "Always" permissions options for Location Services on iOS. Instagram has "While using" or "Never" only. Wouldn't expect this to be substantially different on Android.
1) It's irrational. Facebook as an advertising platform is likely much more effective than what you will gain by crunching the limited data collected through apps. Googles advertising platform has other data points than Facebook but is equally potent in targeted marketing. However the biggest irrational hypocrisy in this shitstorm is that TV ads has always been known to be very effective in influencing elections yet no one has tweeted #deletetv.
2) Since Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp are all 3rd party apps on Apple's platform, you just proved my point. Though I'm not sure you intented to?
You have to explicitly grant location permissions for every app individually, plus the iPhone warns you if an app is using your location in the background, plus gives you the option to only give the app your location while it's open.
So exactly like with Facebook apps, where you also grant permission for every app individually and have granular control over which data if any at all can be shared?
The feature where your iPhone is notifying which app is using your location is a recent feature in iOS. Remember than the current criticism of Facebook is related to how Facebook was doing things years ago. So we should also compare with early versions of iOS to be fair.
There is a very big difference in the privacy problems posed by Facebook compared to Tesla. Equating the two is a clear false equivalence.
Edit: I'm no longer allowed to post on HN. I guess my posts are considered low-quality and not welcome here. Here is my response to the comment below, regardless. Thanks for continually banning me, downvoters.
--
> Why does that bother you?
Because you exclusively use logical fallacies in these posts to make points that make no logical sense.
> whether Tesla will start caring about privacy as well
This implies Tesla does not care about privacy. That simply is not true. If you have a concern, voice it in some logical manner, not in some accusatory already-made-up-your-mind tone about how so-and-so doesn't care about your privacy.
--
Edit 2: Does Elon really babble on Twitter about people's speeds and driving locations? I don't think so. And surely if you drive a car then you know that the people in the city/state/federal government offices and other tracking corporations also know where you go at all times anyway. Having a Tesla and driving it does not meaningfully invade your privacy in any fashion more than driving any other car does.
I didn't "equate" them, but asked a question regarding whether Tesla will start caring about privacy as well. Why does that bother you? You seem to be angry about it.
> Having a Tesla and driving it does not meaningfully invade your privacy in any fashion more…
They track you by the millisecond versus a few times a day, perhaps you are not aware of the details:
Basically Tesla uses your driving metrics against you when they choose to, but will not release the information to help you. It has been a lose-lose situation for the consumer. I'd heard they might give the ability to disable it, but details are hard to find to nonexistent.
I think it's worth bringing up, one of the reasons I didn't buy a Tesla was because I didn't want the CEO immediately blabbing all over twitter about exactly how fast I was driving or how many times I left my lane if there happened to be some sort of accident.
They seem to take the same attitude as Facebook, mainly: we own all your data and you have zero rights to anything in the car.
As far as I can tell, yes that's exactly what's happening.
The HN crowd has, of course, hated Facebook for a long time now for a variety of reasons completely unrelated to that, but that was the incident that seems to have triggered all this.
The problem here is just adding anonymized (so international traveling bands aren't stopped at customs) tour schedules to something like bandcamp won't do. Music is generally served on some type of forum, that's how it grows and permeates. For me, the ever-aging metal/punk/hardcore scenes are fairly present on facebook- the older crowd stays because they have jobs to worry about and are technophobic/terrible at computers (mostly). The younger crowd is the innovative one, and tries new things. Currently a bunch of friends are all leaving facebook and I'm a crotchity old 30-something being like "well ralph where the fuck am I going to find your tour schedule?"
There's been every sort of private forum for these things city by city and the problem is basically the drama that comes with it, that's why people like facebook because the architecture of conversations is so spread out you can avoid something that would otherwise get someone trolling.
I guess its something to really respect about the service is its ability to have so many people with such public opinions online and friends with each other. That's what you need for stuff like music related tours/bands/etc, professional circles where all sorts of people come together, school programs (me.. night school MBA), etc.
Facebook can be an essential promotional tool for many. If you're rich or an already successful company, then you can handle the loss by not being on Facebook. But if you're poor or just starting up a new venture, then it is harder to afford not being on Facebook.
I'm poor and starting a new venture. I don't have FB. If my success depends on me/my company having FB presence, then my business sucks.
How this idea of FB being the "place to be" got so much traction is beyond me.
From my personal interactions, and with my personal perspective of how Facebook has publicly conducted itself over the years, having worked at Facebook would immediately raise red flags in my mind about the philosophical perspective of the potential employee for having worked 'at will' at the company. Context certainly matters, but it would be become a point of conversation. Not all that different from a health-professional being wary of hiring someone who used to work for a tobacco company.
To me it would indicate the possibility that the person might not want to understand the wider implications of their work, might understand those implications but not care about them so long as they are personally or socially enriched, or might just agree with the duplicitous nature of the company. There are of course circumstances to account for, and everyone's reasons are different - but the above rationalizations would raise red flags for me - especially in my industry where thinking about wider implications of our work is absolutely critical.
I am not the GP but I totally agree and the same goes for NSA employees. They have proven they are okay with violating the privacy rights of a billion people.
LinkedIn is rather more important. It's still the largest professional database we have and a kind of rolodex.
Having worked for and still working part-time for a major, as in top 5, vc firm, investors will definitely look for you on LinkedIn early on to ensure that you're a legit person with a good job history and a network.
This is even more important, when they are hiring for themselves.
There are so many grifters in tech, that investors and people hiring for leadership positions in startups feel the need to be able to draw a connection between your network and theirs.
Moreover, if investors are interested in your venture, they'll want you to create a profile and assembles a network. It's part of having visibility for your venture and a certain amount of legitimacy in the community. A company is people, and their leaders need an online presence outside of Github and fora.
I'm sure people will jump in with all kinds of anecdotal counter-examples, but this is what I've seen in a few years working for Sand Hill.
I honestly would decline funding from investors that expected me to waste time on LinkedIn. Unless you are selling to HR, it's a pointless circle jerk.
LinkedIn is great for their intended use case of documenting and presenting your professional relationships for potential job offers. But LinkedIn doesn't connect you with potential customers.
>If my success depends on me/my company having FB presence, then my business sucks.
And then...
>How this idea of FB being the "place to be" got so much traction is beyond me.
If FB is "the place to be" as you say it is, then it is a valuable marketing resource and your first comment doesn't follow. I don't see how it's any different than advertising on TV in the early days. All of a sudden a new medium for reaching an even larger number of people popped onto the scene, so people used it heavily.
You may not like FB, but you can't dispute the fact that you are able to reach a lot of people for little to no cost using it. You can't then go on to say that a business "sucks" because it relies on FB for marketing.
>but you can't dispute the fact that you are able to reach a lot of people
They are a website!!!!!
The internet is larger than FB. Listen, I'm not denying how popular FB is, all I'm saying is that you can figure it out how to do business without depending on their platform. That's all.
Ninja Edit: I'm not saying "it's the place to be" I'm saying that other folks believe that. I disagree.
Imagine you're a small coffeeshop that just needs to list your hours and location on the internet and maybe make some announcements. What are your options?
- Google Maps
- Facebook Page
- Yelp Page
- Instagram (maaaybe)
You most likely already have a Facebook account, so setting up a Facebook page would be the easiest.
One could argue that having hours and location online is so important for businesses that you do not necessarily have to chose the tool that is the easiest to setup.
But there is the genuine problem of discovery. Better hope your blog appears at the top of google search. Anyway, the vast majority of people for which facebook is basically their homepage of the internet won't know your site exists.
Sorry for this dumb question, I never used facebook, but what is the difference between your own webpage and a page on facebook? How do those facebook users automatically know that you exist when you are on facebook. They still would have to find you somehow?
Facebook's discovery is enhanced because they have more information about you, and so can correlate you and your friends information with information about the page to more effectively match you to that particular page.
For example, you are likely to like an event/business/venue your friends already liked, so facebook can suggest that business to you. Or you see in your feed that your friends checked into a certain event/business/venue, resulting in you being exposed to that.
All this happens without you even performing a search. And if you do perform a search, the top search result will most likely be correct, because it used you and your friends' information.
Hard to comment without being anecdotal, but I exclusively look for business hours on Google maps or Yelp. If I'm searching for a type of business ("hm, is there a bakery near me that's alf-decent?") then I use Yelp. "How busy is <restaurant x> right now?" then I'd use Google Maps. Yelp and Google both link to a businesses' website meaning I don't ever expect to log onto Facebook to check for basic business info. Facebook definitely does have some benefits for businesses such as notifying of promotions and such, but I honestly don't think I've ever thought of FB as the first stop to get business info. It's like a last resort to check for a FB page for me.
Yes, that's my personal experience as well. However, I've also contributed to Google Maps (and OpenStreetMaps) for missing locations that weren't entirely new.
I don't have any data, but I would not be surprised if a significant number of Google Map locations were created by patrons of a venue and not its owners/employees. Facebook Pages, on the otherhand, I see being set up and and maintained by an owner.
That's correct, Maps crowd-sources data if no owner enters stuff. You can even see "Is this your business?" sometimes if the owners haven't bothered to do it. Which, I mean, fair enough.
FB is among the last places I'd look, and would not be impressed by that being the only web presence for a small business. Seriously, seeing such induces an involuntary "ugh".
Putting up a website is trivial & cheap, and looks a whole lot more professional than one on FB. As a customer, I'd look for it by a Google search, and go to the "official" site. Put the hours there, and an easy link to a popular mapping site.
Frankly, having followed social media since dialup BBS days, I find Facebook a surprisingly crufty/poorly-made site. A core design has been hacked up to wedge in whatever new features. A new site could easily provide a next-gen UI, better putting common content together, better assembling a feed, saner advertising, and pointedly avoiding "censorship" ... only thing needed is that "tipping point" for migration.
I agree with you, but the reality is that domain registrations lapse, the niece/nephew who set up the initial web site went away to college, passwords are forgotten.
All these responses about setting up your own web site are similar to BrandonM's infamous Dropbox advice in the context of small retail shop owners.
Do you even know what you are talking about? Here, let me give you an example to open up your mind.
Imagine, you are a kids jacket retailer and have a Shopify store. Yes, these exists and are popular. How do you get users to your store? Yes, you use Facebook. Do you know how you Facebook here? You create a group with VIP members and offer them an exclusive discount over new jackets. This builds loyalty and provides word of mouth marketing. Next you create a page and try to post different images/videos of kids in your exclusive jackets and build followers who will like/share your post and thus get you free organic distribution. Next, you use fb ads and target your specific demographics (say women 25-40 yrs old who are interested in kids) to get users in.
This is a real thing. One of my best friends has a multimillion dollar business a yr on kids jackets and all she uses for marketing is facebook and she swears by it.
Well, if the real money is in teaching people how to make money, then teaching people how to make money involves teaching people how to teach people how to make money, and thus recursed.
Depends on the business. Entertainment venue? Live music/special events/etc? Almost every spot in my town seems to use Facebook to advertise these events, and NOTHING ELSE.
I don't like it... but it's what people do. It's the only reason I have a facebook.
Also easier if you've got a non-consumer or big-ticket product. If I'm selling a new brand of bath soap, I obviously want a Facebook page. If I'm selling rockets, or cars, or laser eye surgery, hopefully it's a less important pathway.
(The Solar City page is gone too, which seems like a bit more of a sacrifice - someone might actually look them up on FB.)
This is key; Facebook is incredibly important for a small business.
I started a firearms business, and being unable to use Facebook had a huge effect on how I was able to grow my business - making the same decision for political reasons is simply not an option for many small businesses who are just barely getting by.
Are you referring to Facebook like pages? They've been essentially pointless for a while now, since you only get onto your followers feeds if you "boost" a post, money that for a "poor" or "just starting up" new venture is better spent elsewhere.
What they did was genius - encourage everyone to make their Facebook following central to their online marketing strategy, then lock them out unless they cough up.
> since you only get onto your followers feeds if you "boost" a post,
Actually most people and new ventures on Facebook get plenty of buzz without paying a cent. This is done by relying on your friends and getting happy customers to repost stuff from your page, thereby reaching new audiences organically.
I've been told by people who do this sort of thing that an algorithm change in the last 6 mos. or so has made organic buzz much harder to get going on FB without paying.
To a small extent. Yes, they make you pay to "promote" a post higher in a user's timeline who simply liked your page.
But I'm talking more about organic buzz, whereby for instance your friend shares something from a page or talks favorably about it. There is no option to pay to promote those shared posts. The priority of those shared post depends more on how good of a relationship you have with your friend and how much engagement facebook thinks it will get form it.
On the contrary, in my experience when you’re starting up a new venture you should be laser focused on real customers, not engaging the peanut gallery.
But at the same time if you relied on exactly one platform to build out your business, you are taking a huge risk. The issue you are facing is the platform version of "What if your key employee gets run over by a bus?". On the other hand, if you wouldn't be thrown out of business by the metaphorical bus running over FB, then you have only made your business stronger, so best to start planning now.
I never had the impression that Musk cared much about privacy but I seem to be wrong. Or perhaps it has more to do with the current POTUS and his impact in the environment. Either way, I am happy for his decision.
If you're deleting Facebook and not getting rid of messenger you're missing the point. Messenger is more invasive in many ways, even if it doesn't track your web activity as much.
Invasiveness of Messenger is much more bearable because it lets me communicate with my Facebook friends, which I see as much more important benefit compared to a time sink newsfeed.
Also, using Messenger Lite (Android only) is a vastly better experience than the main Messenger app.
SlimSocial also supports Messenger and is a good alternative to the Facebook app in general. You still have the same privacy issues regarding data on Facebook's servers, but at least this app lacks the client-side analytics.
I also use messenger to communicate with friends, but i think im going to make the effort to convince them to move to a privacy focused and non data mining platform, such as telegram.
The thing you are missing is that many of us have friends all over the world. And international SMS quickly gets expensive. (Also, most people are not on signal / your-favorite-messaging-app) ...
Because SMS only supports text, but not any form of multimedia. Granted you can use MMS but that's really expensive and only does photo and video. Also, SMS has no encryption or sender authentication, not even any way to prevent MITM sniffing or spoofing (which is why online banking SMS verification is unsafe as hell).
To give my personal answer for it, there's no other cross-platform messaging service that everyone uses.
There are other chat services sure, but the Facebook has by far the most number of people I know on it. Also, not everyone I know exchange numbers. There's no usernames, etc on Facebook so its easy to find people too.
Weird, I know, but guess generations are changing. Apparently now Snapchat has become the main form of 'communication' for many millennial with their friends. So looks like I'm falling behind.
It's funny, because for me the primary benefit of Facebook is events. Keeping track of events with calendar invites is much more clunky and higher friction. Messenger is just walled-garden email and I could live without it, but I have no idea how to do community events as well as I can with Facebook.
And it's funny because contrary to the "Facebook as hypnotist" narrative (which is real) Facebook is a really fantastic tool for getting people together talking face to face and even working together on things.
FB is evil because it can be loosely coupled with trump, not because of any merit. We all knew this data was collected and out there.
You do you, everyone on the internet is actively trading privacy for functionality. Don't stop using a service that benefits you because the current news and/or political cycle is hyping an issue.
Don't want to be preachy, but if you've found something that works for you, forget all these haters, this is all manufactured by someone that shorted FB, I promise.
It just depends on what you use it for. A lot of my friends have cheap phone plans with low network minutes/texts but unlimited wifi. Facebook Messenger becomes a cheap phone in this case. There's alternatives, but I'd have to convince everyone I know to swap to them...not gonna happen.
Meetup.com maybe? But I agree, I use Facebook Events a lot. It comes back to that issue of "everyone is here and using it, so this is where events are posted".
Until you realize that FB has no API to get events out of FB. FB might be useful but it's the same usefulness as having an email thread with a calendar invite. They don't let you export your event data in any meaningful way to keep you on the platform.
It's not just about events automatically appearing. First of all, I'm not sure of a way to do that without individually exporting events, maybe if I setup FB emails for events, I could get GMail to auto-add them, but I don't use GMail so it would take more setup to ingest invites automatically. But even then, there's no way to RSVP inside the calendar invite itself. The interface is opaque, they let you read their data, but not interact with it in a programmatic way despite it being _your_ friend network and _your_ event.
If Facebook decides you should be allowed to talk face to face and work together, that is. One of the big problems with Facebook events is that the algorithm filters them out pretty aggressively unless the creator pays to promote them.
If I have messenger (edit: Messenger Lite) on my phone, is it tracking my location the same as the facebook app would? I usually have location services turned off but I don't imagine that makes much difference.
...and does it actually delete your data from Facebook's servers? I.e. all their records of your messaging history, all your photos, their ability to make a future third party face-recognize you on the street, their knowledge of who you find attractive, what party you are likely to vote for, what crimes you are likely to commit, what you like to spend money on and so on and so forth?
I don't think so. I've kept my account primarily because I assume they'd have a shadow account on me. Just because you don't have a FB account doesn't mean they don't have data on you.
I've kept an account partly for that reason. I'm wondering how much GDPR might change that though. Can anyone with more expertise on the matter weigh in?
Assuming I could be relatively certain that my data will be deleted, I'd probably keep a bare account but delete most of what they have.
I would expect that much of your data would remain, though specific portions would be anonymized. I would guess that photos, the contents of posts, etc. would vanish (eventually), but the account id and metadata, connections to other accounts, events, and the like, would remain in perpetuity.
What happens to your Spotify account if you delete/deactivate your facebook account? I made the mistake of linking the 2 when I first joined Spotify in my haste to listen to music.
Looking through my email archives, I see I had to contact Spotify support via email and ask them to delete the Spotify account I'd created via FB, so that I could signup again via an email login.
However! Spotify support were great, they offered to migrate all my playlists from the old account over to the new account. No guarantees they could do that now with everyone deleting their FB accounts at once, but I was really impressed with the friendliness of their service. They pretty much created a customer for life out of me from that support experience.
You will need to call Spotify. I was not able to cancel my Spotify subscription anymore after I deleted Facebook. So I had to call and they had to manually transfer all my playlists to a new account
You're not the only one - for years Spotify ONLY let you sign in with Facebook. And you aren't allowed to unlink them either. I had to just start a new Spotify account and Los everything.
I use Lyft, and I have never used Facebook to log into ANYTHING. So I don't know if they support dropping an existing Facebook login, but they certainly support other authentication methods. (Mine is username-password.)
> Earlier I had “deactivated” my account thinking it would get deleted, but then I learned I have to visit this page to actually delete it.
Thank you for pointing this out. I, too, was under the impression that "Deactivate" was the delete option, especially considering they place a "Delete" segment right above it but make it sound as if that is about handling your account after death. Some definite dark patterns in the UI right there.
It's both a dark pattern and a connivence - there are a bunch of people who will deactivate their account and then start it up again. Having the data there to just... rehydrate the account makes that re-onboarding much more seamless.
But yeah, there's a sneaking dark side to how they use that feature.
I thought my account was deleted for years. I randomly started getting FB emails about a month ago. A few days ago I was emailed about being tagged in a dead friends picture. Bye Zuck, I hate you at a personal level.
Maybe (though it's vague enough to mean anything), but it's definitely of the Musk does it, you can too variety.
Those alternatives never went anywhere for the past 14 years. Musk is late to the game, what's his wiki prove?
The "I've got new respect for Musk" mantra (actually stated in this thread) when he's doing what other people have been doing for a decade, only difference is, he's rich, is very follow the crowd for something which prides itself on individuality like HN.
I think that the message ModernMech is trying to convey is the following:
-if you want to read the news for Tesla, go to their website
-you don't need to be spied on 24/7 and having that "intelligence" coming back to bite you
-you don't need a constant spy to follow you around to any page with a "like" button
-you don't need to waste 60mins in cat videos and party photos on a party you were not invited, if your actual need to see the news about the new Tesla XYZ car
Signal advantages: tptacek thinks the crypto is good.
Signal disadvantage: It wont work with limited permissions on your phone according to some people on HN.
Telegram advantage: somewhat more userfriendly. Larger userbase. Works even if you limit its permissions.
Telegram disadvantage: every cryptographer seems to think their crypto is bad. Uncertainty wrt their relations with Russian government. (I think they are enemies but some think they are very good friends or blackmailed into cooperation.)
Imho threema is the best client overall. Very fast, very reliable, great UI, good crypto. Designed for company usage. Security whise however I guess Signal has the upper hand.
Secure Scuttlebutt is pretty amazing. I've seen a few demos of people who run a private social network app, Patchwork. Definitely something to look out for.
Note, if your account is already deactivated when you try to delete it you will again be asked for your password despite being already logged in. You will also be asked to complete a CAPTCHA. This will invariably result in the error message:
"Incorrect email/password combination"[1]
This is despite being logged in to FB with the same password.
The fix is to change your password, log out and log back in with the changed password. You will then be able to delete your account without issue.
Maybe the author could add this information to their post?
People have been asking on the FB help forum for years about how to resolve this error. FB refuses to answer anyone asking for help with this error. I'm guessing their failure to mention this or address this is quite intentional.
Oh and the audio versions of the CAPTCHAs are all completely unintelligible gibberish. I'm guessing this is intentional as well.
I had disabled my account a week ago, not realizing there was a separate delete option, then deleted it a couple days ago. I didn't run into this issue; I signed into my "disabled" account first, then went to the delete link and it worked.
Interesting... completely unrelated to the recent issues, a few months ago, I wanted to log in to Facebook from a mobile browser so I could follow a link without installing the app.
I also ran into a challenging captcha and a page saying my account had been “locked”, but I was still able to log in.
After logging in, I received a phone call from Palo Alto. When I let the call go to voicemail, it left a message consisting only of a recorded voice saying “goodbye”. Perhaps this was some poorly-implemented two-factor auth, but in context, I felt like Facebook was intentionally making the experience of using a mobile browser unpleasant to encourage use of the app.
Sounds like the delete your account page has similar “issues”.
From my experience optimizing signup funnels, it made me wonder if somebody is doing that work in reverse here. Are they getting a bonus based on what percentage of people abandon the account deletion process?
Maybe I’m just being paranoid, and optimizing those flows is simply not a high priority. But for a tech-focused company that tends to operate at a pretty high level, it felt like they are actively making things more difficult. Like this was the shittiest experience bright minds could come up with.
That's really weird. I didn't do any of the stuff you said lead up to the call but I also got a voicemail from Palo Alto that just said "Goodbye" I joked with my friends it was that California was about to fall off the US. Wonder if it is related to facebook or something.
I definitely got it within a few minutes of logging into Facebook from a mobile browser, which is not something I normally do... maybe someone was trying to log into your account?
Oh dear, a bug! I wonder if it's a bug like the one that raided your linked contacts and wiped out people's email addresses and replaced them with a @facebook.com email. Or the multiple 'glitches' that would reset your privacy settings to more public.
Or the glitch that makes your input disappear if you try to use the site in desktop mode on a mobile phone. Malicious bugs are at this point an obvious FB tactic for plausible deniability in bad UX directed at users with certain behavior.
Or, not malicious at all, simply a bug. The 'delete user' functionality is going to be rarely used, so it gets hardly any QA test coverage, compared to the news feed page functionality used by many hundreds of millions of people.
>Or the multiple 'glitches' that would reset your privacy settings to more public.
I didn't know this was a real thing. I was getting ready to delete my account a couple days ago but I wanted to set all the privacy settings to be as strict as possible before I did it.
Sure enough, somehow all of the advertising and data retention settings were on the most open option possible, despite restricting them when I made the account and when I would occasionally check my privacy settings
Bye FB, and while I'm at it, so long LinkedIn. Good riddance.
For too many years I kept a page at popular social networks even if they added negative value for me. I don't know, what if someone place a page there impersonating me? Well, I don't care anymore.
For anyone staying because of Facebook Messenger, it's not obvious but you can tie Messenger to your phone number instead of having a Facebook account.
It still requires you to create a new account (that has an account key you can automically store in Google Drive) but it works.
The downsides are that messenger.com doesn't support this so you can only access messenger on your phone and that Facebook still has an idea of who you are.
Does FB put in writing somewhere that deleting your account will result in all your data, including inferences and profiling data derived from data you and others have provided will be actually purged from their systems? Or do they just delete what little personal data you may have provided directly, but could still reconstitute virtually everything about you, whether anonymized or re-linked upon request or payment by a third party?
Search for "deleted" in https://www.facebook.com/full_data_use_policy. The bit you'd be worried about is: Keep in mind that information that others have shared about you is not part of your account and will not be deleted when you delete your account.
It's not obvious to me that other people's comments should be deleted or modified because they mention you. What if they mention you again after you've left?
We could call it.... Spacebooks. I could surf my Spacebooks feed, while eating at Spacedonalds, before heading to the Spaceradioshack to get parts for my Spaceship before heading to Spacemars.
Ha ha.. this reminds me of a politician who once said "If you can't eat their food, drink their booze, screw their women, take their money and then vote against them you've got no business being up here." Brian Acton for President!
He remained there for three years. A founder that didn't agree to stay on for a respectful period would get dinged on the price. He probably didn't want to do that to co-founders.
I've lived in America all my life, but since I signed up for Facebook 10 years ago my hometown/current city has always been listed as a place in Portugal. For a long time all my adds were served in Portuguese, but that changed years ago to English. My guess is they know where you really are.
Knowing it enough to be sure under European privacy rules, especially the new GDPR ones, is another. I doubt one person's data is worth the risk Facebook would take by keeping it.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 332 ms ] threadI think that made a single-digit dent in their revenue.
Politics and law enforcement are far better tools to get corporations to behave. They solve the coordination problem, they can far easier track changing and long chains of ownership, and they allow you to delegate the research work to someone you trust.
One are outcomes dubiously tied to boycotts - did Sea World change their orca problem to protect revenues, or because they feared legal intervention?
The second is indirect outcomes, where the bad actor and the boycott-ee are different. If you threaten a purchaser over a supplier, or a supplier over a purchaser, they can hope to change behavior with no major loss of revenue. It's a very different situation than changing the actual bad behavior. (And in many of these cases the bad behavior was unchanged, some external company just dissociated from it.)
There do seem to be some solid successes there, for instance with product safety, food source sustainability, or sweatshop labor. But even there, I'm curious whether the threat of boycott was a primary influence compared to the other activist campaigns around it.
They feared legal intervention due to the public attention drawn by the boycott.
Affecting revenue of a targeted actor directly is not the only mechanism by which boycotts are intended to have an effect.
But what I'm questioning is "due to the public attention drawn by the boycott." Was the consumer boycott actually a major reason SeaWorld feared legal action?
When Blackfish came out, a lot of musicians cancelled planned SeaWorld concerts, which had a visible and immediate revenue impact. Share prices dropped 33%, even though revenue only dropped ~1%; presumably shareholders feared the possibility of legal action. And a range of state and federal Congressmen introduced bills on regarding orca captivity, explicitly citing Blackfish as a motivator.
Boycotts are certainly correlated with major corporate and legal changes, but I'm skeptical that they're a significant cause. Examples like SeaWorld make me think that boycotts and policy changes have common causes (e.g. Blackfish), but the boycotts aren't themselves very impactful.
The Chicago Tribune had a clever bit about the gun-seller boycotts, arguing that boycotts only matter as a way to keep the topic in the news, and it basically doesn't matter whether people actually participate. That's basically my guess, also.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/g00/news/opinion/zorn/ct-persp...
Wikipedia also has a longer list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_boycotts
The bus boycott in Alabama by MLK and others.
Boycotts can be an effective tool.
Learn some history, my man.
Nike boycott in the 1990s was really effective. The company’s sales fell in short them, but the damage to the brand was even more significant. Nike had to work a decade to repair the 'child labor' reputation and adopt the global sustainable idea.
On the other hand consumer boycotts against products without brand or network externalities have less effect. They suffer from free rider effect. Boycot is essentially subsidizing the consumption of those who use the boycotted product.
The grape boycott would suggest otherwise.
So, it seems to me that boycots (and protests) are important for convincing regulators something is an issue.
While occasionally boycotts have encouraged changes, it typically only happens when other companies get involved.
Consumers "voting with their wallet" very seldom accomplishes much, except giving people a sense of having "done something".
That said, if companies and advertisers start publicly pulling support (like we see here, and the Mozilla story), it can start to raise internal flags, and (occasionally) lead to change.
While I get somewhat nervous about bureaucrats that don't understand technology writing overly broad laws, I do have to agree that legislation is often the most effective driver of change.
Social media companies would literally vanish if all the users stopped using them. What would actual users stand to lose? Event scheduling seems to be the main reason I read on here why people stay. There are soo many ways to do that - it would not be a hardship on users if they view the social gain of #deletefacebook.
Target/Sears vanished in Canada because enough of us did vote with the wallets.
Facebook is just another company, with the difference that a lot of powerfull people now wants them gone.
Pretty sure target didn't shut down in Canada over boycotts.
http://fortune.com/2015/01/15/target-canada-fail/
The other companies getting involved are a result of the boycott and the attention driven by it, so that's just a mechanism of the effect of boycott's, not an indication that they lack effect.
And even if they are weak, that doesn't mean they aren't one of the most effective mechanisms consumers, as such, have to effect change: that would only be rebutted by the presence of demonstrably more effective methods available to consumers.
> While I get somewhat nervous about bureaucrats that don't understand technology writing overly broad laws, I do have to agree that legislation is often the most effective driver of change.
Outside of direct democracy systems (including limited direct democracies, like representative systems where citizens retain the power of initiative), legislation isn't a power of the people generally, but a power that the people can indirectly influence by other means. And citizen influence campaigns against government (especially when there are entrenched interests opposed) are not notably more efficacious than boycotts against businesses. (Indeed, boycotts against businesses are often resorted to -- and sometimes successful in producing legislative changes -- after conventional citizen activism directed at legislative change without boycotts fails.)
Boycotts might not acheive much, but there is a much broader class of consuemers voting with their wallet and we usually just call it market forces.
The point still stands. Voting with your wallet doesn't work for any meaningful interpretation of the word "voting".
I wonder if there will be a backlash against cloud services more generally? Could we see people return to buying their own servers and hiring network engineers again? Everyone I talk to is so concerned about where their data lives now, I could see it happening.
I moved off Gmail 6-7 months ago - I picked FastMail.
I've considered it but there are a lot more variables I'm concerned about than delivery.
https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity
Now, you're no longer tied to one company! When I decided to switch to FastMail, eighteen months later, I repointed the domain, and the vast majority of my email started flowing to the new service automatically! As a side bonus, if your email provider ever decides to ban your account (as Google has been known to do for spurious reasons), you can repoint your domain somewhere else, and you won't have to worry about losing access to all your other accounts and online assets.
You can use an IMAP email client to transfer your old mail, of course, and then I occasionally check my old mail account for stragglers. I chose not to auto-forward it so I'd clearly see what was or wasn't routing through my old Gmail account. I used to check it as often as I check FastMail. Then every couple days. Now I check my old Gmail account every week or two.
Notes from a happy user with no relationship to the company.
Or $50 / year if you want a custom domain.
It includes everything like automatic certs, SPF, DKIM and has imapsync with a simple admin interface built in. Also comes with SOGo for webmail.
[1] https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized
It's a self-hosted email system built from pre-existing components (Postfix, Dovecot, etc).
So step 1: find a hosting solution that isn't on spam blacklists.
Only if you can trust the provider not to 'double dip' and sell your data anyway.
Elon ought to boot up a social media company.
https://mastodon.social/users/elonmusk/followers
GPRD couldn't come at a worse time for them...
One thing I realized is that even if I delete my account, facebook will still store my communication with other people in case they request to download their information too. So I'm not sure if it would ever get deleted unless both parties delete their accounts? For my info to truly get deleted, all of my contacts would have to delete their accounts too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon
Facebook just made it real using your data.
A friend who commented on a lot of my posts deleted his facebook two or three years ago now.
All of his posts are missing which is confusing with other people responding to his opinions or jokes.
Where can one do this?
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-da...
For example:
"the prevention, investigation, detection or prosecution of criminal offences;"
I was lucky enough to see this coming a mile away, I deleted mine 5+ years ago.
Faceobook has my pictures/contact list/private messages/thoughts from when I was in highschool and some college, but it isn't accurate any more.
Assuming average speed, this means it came at 0.0000228m/h!
I haven't seen many people here (in the valley) delete FB recently.
https://youtu.be/mZmcyHpG31A
I have a thread on Twitter that goes into more detail here: https://twitter.com/jf/status/976250584213803008
(I hate Twitter, although if you ask me to substantiate why, I would probably come up with the oft-repeated talking points of echo chamber, Russian bots, rage mobs, etc, etc.)
If we were to compare reasons why we dislike Twitter, I expect that we'd have a lot to agree on. I tried to leave Twitter too, but found that I couldn't because I still get too much value from Twitter. I still hope that someday the winds will shift to a system that brings me the joy I got from Twitter between 2008 and 2016.
When you ask a Vietnamese person if they can do something, they ALWAYS say they can, even if they have no clue what it is. Especially Vietnamese men. We have this weird need to always pretend like we know everything.
It's similar to the TV sitcom stereotype of how all men think they can fix a leaking pipe, even if they have no clue how to do it.
Good stuff... I'll see you around jf.
The dilution of your newsfeed and privacy issues highlighted meant you got more for your money from Instagram/Snapchat/Whatsapp and you got better responses from tweeting your issues with @company. Most folks I knew at this point either claimed they didn't use FB regularly (ie, they probably still did but maybe only by habit) or just for FB messenger.
All the while the slow drip drip of privacy issues eroded trust.
So we're at the point where if you haven't dropped, the utility can be elsewhere and there's no love lost if you drop FB. FB is in Uber-territory here, some don't mind - but you no longer get weird looks when you tell someone you shut down your FB account. In fact, it's often a good conversation starter.
This is the best one-phrase summary of the decay and toxicity of Facebook I have ever seen!
Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
No, no it wouldn't. The movement doesn't work if literally nobody does it. The point of the movement is not to preserve Facebook pages for all future visitors! The point is to have those links go nowhere. Future visitors will find out why there isn't a page if they care to, and that only fuels the movement.
Edit: Since I'm not allowed to reply any more (banned on HN again for probably "low-quality posts"??), here is my reply to the comment below.
> but you know that actually deleting a page simply sets a isDeleted=true flag in a database right?
You act like deleting the content on Facebook doesn't just also set the same flag. I'm not sure what you're trying to achieve with that.
#deletefacebook is about Deleting Facebook. If you try to make it about something else you clearly aren't getting it. Delete Facebook means Delete Facebook. Get off it. Break the links. Make everything go away.
It does not mean to continue to use Facebook as a platform to deliver a message, as you keep saying. It means, Delete Facebook.
Edit #2:
Another reply below that I am banned from replying directly to, so here it is.
> the point of deleting facebook isn't to delete facebook - it's to try to harm facebook.
Is this satire or what? The point of deleting facebook is to delete facebook! That's it! There's nothing else!
> My suggestion does more harm.
No it does not. Leaving Facebook accounts open is telling the world you approve. It doesn't matter what message you put there. You are still giving them money and telling everyone you know that Facebook should get their money too and their time and their attention by going to Facebook to read a message that you posted.
The point of deleting Facebook is deleting Facebook.
Edit #3, another response to a comment I'm banned from replying to:
> People aren't deleting facebook just for the sake of it, there's a meaning and purpose behind the movement.
You want them to not delete facebook at all. You want Facebook's 2B+ active users to stay on the platform and not delete their accounts. This is not getting behind the movement, this is a distraction meant to stop people from actually following the movement.
You seem to think that the most successful way for the movement to succeed is for literally nobody to participate. That doesn't make any sense. The way for this to work is not your way, it is the total breakage of all those links, the total removal of Facebook's content and accounts from the internet.
You will not get very far trying to convince #deletefacebook people that really, truly, they shouldn't delete their accounts, they should keep the convenience there and make sure everybody knows that facebook.com is where you go to learn about boycotting Facebook. You want everyone to go to facebook.com to learn more about some social movement. You are not going to win this - #deletefacebook isn't some half-arsed little game where nobody deletes anything. It's a movement whereby people are saying "Don't go to facebook.com for any reason, there's nothing there any more".
Edit #4: This comment and thread are a mess to read. Why does HN not let me reply? Is this format of conversation really better than just letting me participate like everyone else?
And saying "delete facebook means delete facebook" has literally no meaning at all. An act of protest has an aim, the point of deleting facebook isn't to delete facebook - it's to try to harm facebook. My suggestion does more harm.
Circular logic is no logic at all. I'm trying to point at the purpose of the movement. People aren't deleting facebook just for the sake of it, there's a meaning and purpose behind the movement. But if we can't get past the idea that a movement has a purpose, there's nothing more to talk about.
From the perspective of Facebook, this is like an immune response. Those "infected" with #deletefacebook drop of and fail to spread the mimetic contagion to other users.
The best thing, from a #deletefacebook perspective, is to clear you profile of information and replace it with protest messages (including profile pic). Spread the message, explain why you think Facebook is bad and why you're going to delete your profile. Then, in a week or a month or whatever, circle back and actually delete it.
Also, what are his personal values? Who knows? Why does he bore the underground with abandon even when he acknowledges that the environmental impacts are not completely know. One study says autonomous vehicles can be as effective for congestion easing as his underground tunnels.
His transportation is the next level of dependency he is creating and we are turning a blind eye to. As these corporations' services get too essential (through lobbying), there won't be any choice to #delete_boring.
I respect him for what he has achieved, but too much celebrity worship is something we should all be watchful of.
And if anyone hasn’t noticed (this gets brought up all the time), Musk is commercializing everything needed for colonization of the moon/Mars. Electric motors, solar energy, underground infrastructure, and space travel.
The best trick is to make people believe this when the opposite is more true.
They do, but a great deal of stuff out there, if not determined wholly by profit, is at least heavily influenced or constrained by it or similar considerations. Social media is full of self-promoters and curated personas with spurious motives. What curated personas like these publish is in the best case constrained by profit, but in practice done to enhance the brand. Elon Musk is a brand. The deletion of his Facebook pages is at best irrelevant, but most likely just a cheap and easy way to enhance his celebrity or dissociate himself from Facebook. Why else delete them, and delete them now? The recent media brouhaha is largely a nothingburger in the greater context. You think Elon didn't know what many people have known about the use of data extracted from social media?
Also having values that extend beyond money is, ironically, a lot easier when you have plenty of money.
Not that I'm criticizing Musk as I respect him as much as I have low consideration for Zuckerberg, but if Tesla was a startup struggling to stay afloat it probably would have changed something.
In general, yes. But I believe that neither Musk, nor Zuck have "plenty of money". Not when one of them ones to go to mars and the other one control the worlds communication. As you need really much money for both.
He took a dare to prove he is "the man", give me a break. It's an amazing PR move (and a pretty funny one too), but this isn't about "personal values"; it's about the same as the flamethrower and the Roadster launch, Elon being Elon, and showing everyone he is Elon. What's better than being a playful billionaire who is in full control of his companies? Everyone knowing he is a playful billionaire who is in full control of his companies lol.
If it were about "personal values" he would've released a statement condemning the events and deleted his and his companies instagram accounts too. Instagram is the hot place to build "cool" brand value right now though, so I doubt he will. Facebook pages are useful for a number of reasons, but not essential to the way Tesla and SpaceX make money.
From the article. Guess you missed that part. I don't think our boy hatched an evil master marketing plan in 20 minutes. Sounds more like a reaction based on principles.
I really can't tell anymore, but I'm certainly entertained.
Also for me. Though in the opposite direction than I assume for you. Unless he also trows away his iPhone and changes his start page from Google to Duck Duck Go, it's a pretty irrational move that I'm surprised to see from Musk.
I'm pointing out the hypocritical in seeing a big problem on sharing data with Facebook while having no issue with sharing data with Apple, Google, Twitter etc.
https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/
I feel like this is more a reaction to the complete lack of responsibility Facebook had for keeping your data secure rather than the collection of data in the first place.
2) How does Apple protect 3rd party apps from collecting data? iOS apps even has the option of tracking your location - something that FB apps never had as far as I recall.
2) Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp all have "Always" permissions options for Location Services on iOS. Instagram has "While using" or "Never" only. Wouldn't expect this to be substantially different on Android.
2) Since Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp are all 3rd party apps on Apple's platform, you just proved my point. Though I'm not sure you intented to?
The feature where your iPhone is notifying which app is using your location is a recent feature in iOS. Remember than the current criticism of Facebook is related to how Facebook was doing things years ago. So we should also compare with early versions of iOS to be fair.
Edit: I'm no longer allowed to post on HN. I guess my posts are considered low-quality and not welcome here. Here is my response to the comment below, regardless. Thanks for continually banning me, downvoters.
--
> Why does that bother you?
Because you exclusively use logical fallacies in these posts to make points that make no logical sense.
> whether Tesla will start caring about privacy as well
This implies Tesla does not care about privacy. That simply is not true. If you have a concern, voice it in some logical manner, not in some accusatory already-made-up-your-mind tone about how so-and-so doesn't care about your privacy.
--
Edit 2: Does Elon really babble on Twitter about people's speeds and driving locations? I don't think so. And surely if you drive a car then you know that the people in the city/state/federal government offices and other tracking corporations also know where you go at all times anyway. Having a Tesla and driving it does not meaningfully invade your privacy in any fashion more than driving any other car does.
> Having a Tesla and driving it does not meaningfully invade your privacy in any fashion more…
They track you by the millisecond versus a few times a day, perhaps you are not aware of the details:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/03/the-custo...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/02/19/the-big-...
Basically Tesla uses your driving metrics against you when they choose to, but will not release the information to help you. It has been a lose-lose situation for the consumer. I'd heard they might give the ability to disable it, but details are hard to find to nonexistent.
They seem to take the same attitude as Facebook, mainly: we own all your data and you have zero rights to anything in the car.
The HN crowd has, of course, hated Facebook for a long time now for a variety of reasons completely unrelated to that, but that was the incident that seems to have triggered all this.
* seeing what events in the area my friends are going to, helps me know what's happening around me and going there
* facebook groups for some friends / professional organizations
* following bands / band tours so I can get updates about them
Don't really care about anything else on there. Can I keep just the good parts somehow?
There's been every sort of private forum for these things city by city and the problem is basically the drama that comes with it, that's why people like facebook because the architecture of conversations is so spread out you can avoid something that would otherwise get someone trolling.
I guess its something to really respect about the service is its ability to have so many people with such public opinions online and friends with each other. That's what you need for stuff like music related tours/bands/etc, professional circles where all sorts of people come together, school programs (me.. night school MBA), etc.
Also notable is that typical Tesla customers probably don't rely on Facebook anyway so this should not have consequences.
Similarly, I'll be far less likely to hire one who has Facebook on their resume.
Could you explain why? I don’t see an obvious reason to avoid ex-Facebook employees
To me it would indicate the possibility that the person might not want to understand the wider implications of their work, might understand those implications but not care about them so long as they are personally or socially enriched, or might just agree with the duplicitous nature of the company. There are of course circumstances to account for, and everyone's reasons are different - but the above rationalizations would raise red flags for me - especially in my industry where thinking about wider implications of our work is absolutely critical.
Having worked for and still working part-time for a major, as in top 5, vc firm, investors will definitely look for you on LinkedIn early on to ensure that you're a legit person with a good job history and a network.
This is even more important, when they are hiring for themselves.
There are so many grifters in tech, that investors and people hiring for leadership positions in startups feel the need to be able to draw a connection between your network and theirs.
Moreover, if investors are interested in your venture, they'll want you to create a profile and assembles a network. It's part of having visibility for your venture and a certain amount of legitimacy in the community. A company is people, and their leaders need an online presence outside of Github and fora.
I'm sure people will jump in with all kinds of anecdotal counter-examples, but this is what I've seen in a few years working for Sand Hill.
And then...
>How this idea of FB being the "place to be" got so much traction is beyond me.
If FB is "the place to be" as you say it is, then it is a valuable marketing resource and your first comment doesn't follow. I don't see how it's any different than advertising on TV in the early days. All of a sudden a new medium for reaching an even larger number of people popped onto the scene, so people used it heavily.
You may not like FB, but you can't dispute the fact that you are able to reach a lot of people for little to no cost using it. You can't then go on to say that a business "sucks" because it relies on FB for marketing.
They are a website!!!!!
The internet is larger than FB. Listen, I'm not denying how popular FB is, all I'm saying is that you can figure it out how to do business without depending on their platform. That's all.
Ninja Edit: I'm not saying "it's the place to be" I'm saying that other folks believe that. I disagree.
- Google Maps
- Facebook Page
- Yelp Page
- Instagram (maaaybe)
You most likely already have a Facebook account, so setting up a Facebook page would be the easiest.
If you travel abroad, you'll notice that Google Maps/Facebook/Foursquare are all the internet presence a lot of cafes and restaurants have.
And I wouldn't be surprised if the Google Maps info was created by a patron and not the owner themself.
-A self-hosted site or a VPS.
For example, you are likely to like an event/business/venue your friends already liked, so facebook can suggest that business to you. Or you see in your feed that your friends checked into a certain event/business/venue, resulting in you being exposed to that.
All this happens without you even performing a search. And if you do perform a search, the top search result will most likely be correct, because it used you and your friends' information.
I don't have any data, but I would not be surprised if a significant number of Google Map locations were created by patrons of a venue and not its owners/employees. Facebook Pages, on the otherhand, I see being set up and and maintained by an owner.
Putting up a website is trivial & cheap, and looks a whole lot more professional than one on FB. As a customer, I'd look for it by a Google search, and go to the "official" site. Put the hours there, and an easy link to a popular mapping site.
Frankly, having followed social media since dialup BBS days, I find Facebook a surprisingly crufty/poorly-made site. A core design has been hacked up to wedge in whatever new features. A new site could easily provide a next-gen UI, better putting common content together, better assembling a feed, saner advertising, and pointedly avoiding "censorship" ... only thing needed is that "tipping point" for migration.
All these responses about setting up your own web site are similar to BrandonM's infamous Dropbox advice in the context of small retail shop owners.
FB is yet another (large) marketing/engagement channel. Do you get more/better customers from FB? Perhaps/perhaps not.
Imagine, you are a kids jacket retailer and have a Shopify store. Yes, these exists and are popular. How do you get users to your store? Yes, you use Facebook. Do you know how you Facebook here? You create a group with VIP members and offer them an exclusive discount over new jackets. This builds loyalty and provides word of mouth marketing. Next you create a page and try to post different images/videos of kids in your exclusive jackets and build followers who will like/share your post and thus get you free organic distribution. Next, you use fb ads and target your specific demographics (say women 25-40 yrs old who are interested in kids) to get users in.
This is a real thing. One of my best friends has a multimillion dollar business a yr on kids jackets and all she uses for marketing is facebook and she swears by it.
Source: https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/117-the-worlds-most-ex...
This is a pyramid scheme.
I don't like it... but it's what people do. It's the only reason I have a facebook.
Also easier if you've got a non-consumer or big-ticket product. If I'm selling a new brand of bath soap, I obviously want a Facebook page. If I'm selling rockets, or cars, or laser eye surgery, hopefully it's a less important pathway.
(The Solar City page is gone too, which seems like a bit more of a sacrifice - someone might actually look them up on FB.)
I started a firearms business, and being unable to use Facebook had a huge effect on how I was able to grow my business - making the same decision for political reasons is simply not an option for many small businesses who are just barely getting by.
What they did was genius - encourage everyone to make their Facebook following central to their online marketing strategy, then lock them out unless they cough up.
Actually most people and new ventures on Facebook get plenty of buzz without paying a cent. This is done by relying on your friends and getting happy customers to repost stuff from your page, thereby reaching new audiences organically.
But I'm talking more about organic buzz, whereby for instance your friend shares something from a page or talks favorably about it. There is no option to pay to promote those shared posts. The priority of those shared post depends more on how good of a relationship you have with your friend and how much engagement facebook thinks it will get form it.
Who is winning when the restaurant I’m sitting in has a “Zagat Rated” sticker in their window?
Who is winning when a hotel in Phuket has a “TripAdvisor recommended” sign outside in the sidewalk?
I feel like any attempt I’ve made to use Facebook to promote my endeavors ultimately just benefited Facebook.
Just to be clear, Facebook owns instagram.
And Twitter isn't categorically different from Facebook.
Earlier I had “deactivated” my account thinking it would get deleted, but then I learned I have to visit this page to actually delete it.
Also, using Messenger Lite (Android only) is a vastly better experience than the main Messenger app.
Also it is quite old fashioned and painfully limited wrt/attachments.
And expensive for thise with families/friends abroad.
There are other chat services sure, but the Facebook has by far the most number of people I know on it. Also, not everyone I know exchange numbers. There's no usernames, etc on Facebook so its easy to find people too.
Weird, I know, but guess generations are changing. Apparently now Snapchat has become the main form of 'communication' for many millennial with their friends. So looks like I'm falling behind.
And it's funny because contrary to the "Facebook as hypnotist" narrative (which is real) Facebook is a really fantastic tool for getting people together talking face to face and even working together on things.
You do you, everyone on the internet is actively trading privacy for functionality. Don't stop using a service that benefits you because the current news and/or political cycle is hyping an issue.
Don't want to be preachy, but if you've found something that works for you, forget all these haters, this is all manufactured by someone that shorted FB, I promise.
Meetup.com maybe? But I agree, I use Facebook Events a lot. It comes back to that issue of "everyone is here and using it, so this is where events are posted".
(I bet that's a stupid question)
I also don't know if turning off location services actually disables the ability of apps to get your location.
Assuming I could be relatively certain that my data will be deleted, I'd probably keep a bare account but delete most of what they have.
You will need to contact Spotify support if you deactivated Facebook prior to disconnecting from Spotify.
However! Spotify support were great, they offered to migrate all my playlists from the old account over to the new account. No guarantees they could do that now with everyone deleting their FB accounts at once, but I was really impressed with the friendliness of their service. They pretty much created a customer for life out of me from that support experience.
Until recently I thought Lyft made Facebook login mandatory, I'm not sure if that's still the case.
Thank you for pointing this out. I, too, was under the impression that "Deactivate" was the delete option, especially considering they place a "Delete" segment right above it but make it sound as if that is about handling your account after death. Some definite dark patterns in the UI right there.
But yeah, there's a sneaking dark side to how they use that feature.
Instead, we should first model what the future of social networking should look like:
https://hackernoon.com/a-new-kind-of-social-network-emotiona...
Then I am curious to hear people's thoughts on:
- Mastodon
- Secure Scuttlebutt
- Steemit
etc.
It's safe to do it now. I got you covered:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk
http://www.spacex.com/
https://www.tesla.com/
Is it not "safe" to do something until the guy people worship does something? Have respect for yourself.
Those alternatives never went anywhere for the past 14 years. Musk is late to the game, what's his wiki prove?
The "I've got new respect for Musk" mantra (actually stated in this thread) when he's doing what other people have been doing for a decade, only difference is, he's rich, is very follow the crowd for something which prides itself on individuality like HN.
-if you want to read the news for Tesla, go to their website -you don't need to be spied on 24/7 and having that "intelligence" coming back to bite you -you don't need a constant spy to follow you around to any page with a "like" button -you don't need to waste 60mins in cat videos and party photos on a party you were not invited, if your actual need to see the news about the new Tesla XYZ car
None of them are very good...?
Others use Signal.
Signal advantages: tptacek thinks the crypto is good.
Signal disadvantage: It wont work with limited permissions on your phone according to some people on HN.
Telegram advantage: somewhat more userfriendly. Larger userbase. Works even if you limit its permissions.
Telegram disadvantage: every cryptographer seems to think their crypto is bad. Uncertainty wrt their relations with Russian government. (I think they are enemies but some think they are very good friends or blackmailed into cooperation.)
And some friends and me use Threema. Very old fashioned: you pay some money and get a product. But I wouldn't want to switch.
I used to like WhatsApp, another app with an old-fashioned business model ...
They both audit their crypto:
Threema audit: https://threema.ch/es/faq/code_audit
Signal audit: https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1013.pdf
I'm curious as to what those limited permissions are? I assume this refers to iOS, because in my experience, Android is not as restrictive of apps.
> This holiday season, don't ask for everything all at once (especially during installation). Signal now supports dynamic permissions.
"Incorrect email/password combination"[1]
This is despite being logged in to FB with the same password.
The fix is to change your password, log out and log back in with the changed password. You will then be able to delete your account without issue.
Maybe the author could add this information to their post?
People have been asking on the FB help forum for years about how to resolve this error. FB refuses to answer anyone asking for help with this error. I'm guessing their failure to mention this or address this is quite intentional.
Oh and the audio versions of the CAPTCHAs are all completely unintelligible gibberish. I'm guessing this is intentional as well.
[1] https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=4018056...
We typed it very carefully. Tried copying from notepad, the same copying used to reset the password.
It indeed felt like Hotel California, as someone below compared.
I also ran into a challenging captcha and a page saying my account had been “locked”, but I was still able to log in. After logging in, I received a phone call from Palo Alto. When I let the call go to voicemail, it left a message consisting only of a recorded voice saying “goodbye”. Perhaps this was some poorly-implemented two-factor auth, but in context, I felt like Facebook was intentionally making the experience of using a mobile browser unpleasant to encourage use of the app.
Sounds like the delete your account page has similar “issues”.
From my experience optimizing signup funnels, it made me wonder if somebody is doing that work in reverse here. Are they getting a bonus based on what percentage of people abandon the account deletion process?
Maybe I’m just being paranoid, and optimizing those flows is simply not a high priority. But for a tech-focused company that tends to operate at a pretty high level, it felt like they are actively making things more difficult. Like this was the shittiest experience bright minds could come up with.
I didn't know this was a real thing. I was getting ready to delete my account a couple days ago but I wanted to set all the privacy settings to be as strict as possible before I did it.
Sure enough, somehow all of the advertising and data retention settings were on the most open option possible, despite restricting them when I made the account and when I would occasionally check my privacy settings
For too many years I kept a page at popular social networks even if they added negative value for me. I don't know, what if someone place a page there impersonating me? Well, I don't care anymore.
> You can checkout any time you like, but you can never leave!"
It still requires you to create a new account (that has an account key you can automically store in Google Drive) but it works.
The downsides are that messenger.com doesn't support this so you can only access messenger on your phone and that Facebook still has an idea of who you are.
Elon Musk: "What’s Facebook?" -https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/976231995846963201
https://www.facebook.com/apple
Apple also has an account with no posts on Twitter: https://twitter.com/apple
https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/02/the-invisible-apple-tweet/
I wonder if Facebook lets them do something similar.
Knowing it enough to be sure under European privacy rules, especially the new GDPR ones, is another. I doubt one person's data is worth the risk Facebook would take by keeping it.
That's about the only FB related item I care about.
https://www.facebook.com/help/131112897028467/