I'm not a famous icon for an industry but I never signed up for Facebook. I'm really enjoying not getting anymore looks of confusion or hostility when I say I don't use it. And the occasional 'I told you so' is pretty sweet too.
I just wish the public at large, or these icons leave, would acknowledge the more general problem beyond the simple partisan politics driving the flight from Facebook. Centralization is always bad. Walled gardens are always bad. The create the incentives and pressures will inevitably lead to the problems people blame Facebook for.
But nope. These same people deleting their facebook accounts are still using gmail, still using Apple's app store, and switching to using Discord or Slack or the like to talk and organize.
>But nope. These same people deleting their facebook accounts are still using gmail, still using Apple's app store, and switching to using Discord or Slack or the like to talk and organize.
I get what you're saying: Google still reads everything sent/received through gmail, Apple still provides very little transparency over the appstore etc
That all said, I still use these services because they actually provide usefulness to me. Gmail has been my persistent email provider for a decade now. If I didn't want a free email service, I could get a domain name that looks professional enough and set up my own email server, but I can't be bothered to maintain it when I don't use email that much. I could stop using the Play Store, unlock my bootloader, get a custom ROM with privacy built in, compile FOSS apps and all but it's far too convenient for me to search for an app's name and hit download. I've weighed up the tradeoffs between privacy, security and convenience and with the services you've mentioned, convenience outweighs the negatives.
However with Facebook I just don't see the point anymore. To begin with I was fine with the lack of privacy. I knew that anything I post would be analysed by a FB server and a profile built up on me for targeted ads, which was a valid tradeoff for a free service that gave a lot of functionality: pages were great for seeing what bands were doing, private groups were great for shit-talking with people, events were and still are one of the best features FB introduced, and I could see an unfiltered stream of posts from friends which was essentially uncensored. Now there's better services for all of those features (except for events). Facebook is a cluttered mess of spaghetti code which slows down any device it touches and has features nobody uses than features they do. Messenger is completely useless to me since not only is the app a mess, but the privacy implications of having all my messages read by Facebook are too severe. I never check my news feed anymore since FB started filtering what people see. In the end, all I use it for nowadays is events and a couple of private groups. And then of course there's the increased the level of snooping they do on your private life, to the point where severe world changing incidents like Cambridge Analytica are inevitable.
I spent a few days of last week writing a script to purge everything I've liked, commented, and posted on Facebook. I would have left it at that if I only had issues with Facebook's lack of privacy of its users, but since I just have no use for the service anymore I'm going to be deleting my account also.
It's a shame, because Facebook could have been an incredibly useful and reasonable service if they didn't expand as rapidly as they did. But it is no longer useful to me at all, and a lot of people I've spoken to about this say the same: it's no longer a website with any novel purpose, but one they keep using because everyone else is on it and there's nowhere else to go.
Not specific ad targeting (what ever that means). Every other use I am sure is full speed ahead. Machine learning, group ad targeting, prediction algorithms for google assistant, etc. I have used gmail for a long time and recently my employer switched over. Got me really thinking about alternative ecosystems but still have not made any big changes.
Just an aside: I’ve seen several people lately get a lot more interested in leaving Facebook when they realize they can stay on Messenger while deactivating their Facebook account.
I'd say the difference is how essential your user account is to the service. You might say you're "leaving Youtube". You'd definitely say you're "leaving Gmail".
Which touches on the point that saying that you're "leaving Google" is unclear because there's a huge family of products and services that you might mean.
For all the reports of people leaving and constant breaking scandals, unfortunately, the actual damage to Facebook still seems to be negligible. They've been confidently informing investors that their stock price is ok and membership is rosy.
If Facebook comes through all this rather unscathed then it reinforces that these big companies just don't need to care. It also says much about the values the stock-market supports.
I honestly don't know why Facebook (the tool in this problem) is getting more flack for this then the candidates who used the tool to do the damage.
Can we do the same thing for gun companies, how about death in general? It wasn't X's fault, he used a remington (tool) to kill someone but really it's Remington's fault, their CEO should go to jail..
Next we'll start blame Amazon for being the company that transporting the problem.
You might be right to believe that Facebook's PR team is weak or that Experian's practices are bad, but the Experian comparison isn't stunning. Experian's name recognition is nowhere near as strong as Facebook's and it makes the potential loot for journos less interesting.
A large part of a solid PR team’s job is to cultivate relationships with journalists so when situations like these arise, they feel compelled to cover the issue in a more nuanced and educated manner. I don’t mean to say the PR team has to strive to spread lies or dishonesty, but rather be able to get your company somewhat fair coverage. I don’t think that is happening.
I’ll go a step further and argue that for a company like Facebook, you should have a dozen folks whose job is to simply come in everyday and think about the possible attack vectors from the PR side. And then you work backwards from the worst case scenarios of each to begin addressing the issue from various sides (engineering, BD, Corp dev etc), ideally long before it plays out.
To give you an example, google PR for a long time has been super aware of getting caught in a media tsunami charging it for being a monopoly. My hunch is that every public speaker representing google has been made aware of this and is provided guidance. For example, you won’t find google engineers talking at big data conferences even joking about world domination. Instead, in public, google underplays its larger ambition to err on the side of caution.
IMO Facebook got caught up in the media Trump hysteria over the "hacked elections" narrative and at that point they were SOL. PR in that context is ineffective, because Facebook's message would be going against deep-set beliefs of the authors and convincing them otherwise would obviously introduce cognitive dissonance. (ie if the only way you can comprehend reality is that the elections were manipulated, then facebook must be culpable in this malfeasance). Scott Adams has a bunch of articles on how cognitive dissonance tends to impact judgement.
That's honestly my best take on the situation, otherwise it's rather difficult to explain articles like the one below, that talks about the very same facebook issue with a completely opposite bias:
To me it's more about people waking up and realizing exactly how much and what data is collected on them. Private messages, texts, things facebook has no business having etc.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 64.4 ms ] threadI just wish the public at large, or these icons leave, would acknowledge the more general problem beyond the simple partisan politics driving the flight from Facebook. Centralization is always bad. Walled gardens are always bad. The create the incentives and pressures will inevitably lead to the problems people blame Facebook for.
But nope. These same people deleting their facebook accounts are still using gmail, still using Apple's app store, and switching to using Discord or Slack or the like to talk and organize.
I get what you're saying: Google still reads everything sent/received through gmail, Apple still provides very little transparency over the appstore etc
That all said, I still use these services because they actually provide usefulness to me. Gmail has been my persistent email provider for a decade now. If I didn't want a free email service, I could get a domain name that looks professional enough and set up my own email server, but I can't be bothered to maintain it when I don't use email that much. I could stop using the Play Store, unlock my bootloader, get a custom ROM with privacy built in, compile FOSS apps and all but it's far too convenient for me to search for an app's name and hit download. I've weighed up the tradeoffs between privacy, security and convenience and with the services you've mentioned, convenience outweighs the negatives.
However with Facebook I just don't see the point anymore. To begin with I was fine with the lack of privacy. I knew that anything I post would be analysed by a FB server and a profile built up on me for targeted ads, which was a valid tradeoff for a free service that gave a lot of functionality: pages were great for seeing what bands were doing, private groups were great for shit-talking with people, events were and still are one of the best features FB introduced, and I could see an unfiltered stream of posts from friends which was essentially uncensored. Now there's better services for all of those features (except for events). Facebook is a cluttered mess of spaghetti code which slows down any device it touches and has features nobody uses than features they do. Messenger is completely useless to me since not only is the app a mess, but the privacy implications of having all my messages read by Facebook are too severe. I never check my news feed anymore since FB started filtering what people see. In the end, all I use it for nowadays is events and a couple of private groups. And then of course there's the increased the level of snooping they do on your private life, to the point where severe world changing incidents like Cambridge Analytica are inevitable.
I spent a few days of last week writing a script to purge everything I've liked, commented, and posted on Facebook. I would have left it at that if I only had issues with Facebook's lack of privacy of its users, but since I just have no use for the service anymore I'm going to be deleting my account also.
It's a shame, because Facebook could have been an incredibly useful and reasonable service if they didn't expand as rapidly as they did. But it is no longer useful to me at all, and a lot of people I've spoken to about this say the same: it's no longer a website with any novel purpose, but one they keep using because everyone else is on it and there's nowhere else to go.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/23/15862492/google-gmail-adv...
Obviously they're still in that system and at least being parsed for spam filtering, but not for targeting.
Which touches on the point that saying that you're "leaving Google" is unclear because there's a huge family of products and services that you might mean.
If Facebook comes through all this rather unscathed then it reinforces that these big companies just don't need to care. It also says much about the values the stock-market supports.
Can we do the same thing for gun companies, how about death in general? It wasn't X's fault, he used a remington (tool) to kill someone but really it's Remington's fault, their CEO should go to jail..
Next we'll start blame Amazon for being the company that transporting the problem.
The disproportionate attack on Facebook versus, for example, Experian is stunning.
I’ll go a step further and argue that for a company like Facebook, you should have a dozen folks whose job is to simply come in everyday and think about the possible attack vectors from the PR side. And then you work backwards from the worst case scenarios of each to begin addressing the issue from various sides (engineering, BD, Corp dev etc), ideally long before it plays out.
To give you an example, google PR for a long time has been super aware of getting caught in a media tsunami charging it for being a monopoly. My hunch is that every public speaker representing google has been made aware of this and is provided guidance. For example, you won’t find google engineers talking at big data conferences even joking about world domination. Instead, in public, google underplays its larger ambition to err on the side of caution.
That's honestly my best take on the situation, otherwise it's rather difficult to explain articles like the one below, that talks about the very same facebook issue with a completely opposite bias:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-...