How is that not the question? Do you believe Facebook violated their users privacy rights? Do you believe in accountability? Then the question is why not delete facebook?
If you hold facebook accountable, then you send a message: users DO value privacy, and any platform that abuses the privilege may find themselves with far fewer users and a less profitable product. Don't hold them accountable, and you'll get a sorry note from Zuckerberg, and he'll violate it later when you aren't looking.
In fact, this article raises another question: how much does the EFF value privacy? Apparently violators just need to say "I'm sorry" and continue what they were doing, and the EFF will argue on their behalf that the benefits of their service outweigh the cost of your lost privacy.
If you look beyond just Facebook, these are issues that will continue to crop up no matter what platform you use. The EFF also makes the claim that there are people for whom deleting Facebook is not a viable or tenable option, and maybe they're right, maybe the tools for them to drop Facebook altogether just don't exist. In that case, they should still have an expectation of privacy and data portability.
Facebook's practices are a societal problem, but theirs aren't the only ones, and services that have the same exact problems are probably being developed right now or will be developed within the next few years.
So my takeaway from this, reading the EFF's post is 1. we should be looking beyond hashtag campaigns targeted at one specific corporation and 2. if for whatever reason #DeleteFacebook is not a viable option, then you should still have your privacy protected and 3. the subtext to point two reads to me as: if you can #DeleteFacebook, you should, but we're not in the business of telling you what services to use winkwinknudgenudge.
If the EFF wants to write an article arguing that privacy violations are widespread, and therefore viable privacy-respecting options aren't available.. then I'm all ears.
Here's what the EFF says about Facebook: "Deleting Facebook is not a choice that most of its 2 billion users can feasibly make. ... Without viable general alternatives, Facebook’s massive user base and associated network effects mean that the costs of leaving it may not outweigh the benefits."
Imagine that, a service a little over a decade old is now a dependency for life. It's not "feasible" to leave. Apparently privacy violations must be weighed against the size of the user base and network effects.
Last I checked, phones still worked. Messaging still worked. All of the solution that existed a decade ago are still there. You CAN leave.
I look forward to the EFF proposing a legal solution to privacy such as GDPR in the US. They haven't done that, and in the meantime, there should be consequences for Facebook. The EFF shouldn't be arguing for the lack of consequences for this specific privacy violation, without proposing a solution to the problem across the industry.
I am much more in your court than you think, yet somehow Facebook has become a way to make and break relationships and/or businesses for people who are not us. I'm not going to pretend to know what all the individual edge cases are spread out across 2 billion people preventing some of them from leaving, but I'm not going to dismiss the notion simply because I don't personally have that problem and I generally expect the people I associate with to not have that kind of problem.
There absolutely should be consequences for Facebook specifically, I vehemently agree with you! I don't think even the EFF is saying there shouldn't be, just that it is not part of their mission to advocate one way or another on that matter. That said, I think, and I think what the EFF is saying here, is that it is unproductive to contain the conversation solely to Facebook. Facebook is the problem right now, and probably not the only one, and definitely not the last one to be developed with that business model. Whatever services we use, there needs to be a baseline for what we should be able to expect in terms of privacy and data portability, a baseline that favors the users of the platform.
Personally, I think #DeleteFacebook does matter, and I think people honestly should, but now is the time to be thinking about the long term. GDPR-like laws are one possibility, and as a society we should be figuring out if we want to go that route, or a different route altogether.
EFF is not saying that people should not leave Facebook. It is saying that currently for most of its 2 billion users, leaving Facebook is too difficult, they wont do that and if they did that they would loose too much.
Your argument is phone and messaging which does not replaces Facebook for most of those people. Phone being completely irrelevant. Just because those people are not exactly like you, dont have same needs, same usage patterns and similar social groups around them as you have, does not mean they don't exist. Nor it means that EFF should not use them as an argument.
So you are arguing that in the information age the only way to communicate for some people is facebook? why can’t phone, sms or email work?
on the othe hand, how hard is to tap someones land phone and listen in to their conversations, yet people still used it a lot before so i think expectations of privacy in public space is just a fantasy... If you really cares about privacy you wouls not use facebook, and you would look for encrypted communication channels, most people don’t care however...
This is just what the revealed preferences of Facebook users suggest. My friend count did not decrease the slightest since the recent Facebook attention. Close to nobody quits.
The article channels the concern with Facebook away from the specific brand and towards the universal problem that emerges in our current digital economy. Which I think is vastly more productive.
There is another perspective regarding "deleting FB is not viable option". When you encounter a case in your real life, when you are unable to stop using "something" even if it clearly hurts you, it is typically called addiction. Maybe it ia time that people revise if it is really not a viable choice.
Let me give you my example, I am not a FB user. Never was. Do I have problem finding events? Do I have less real friends? Is my quality of life any worse becoase of that? I have hard time going to all events that interest me, I am forced to prioritise meeting my real friends due to lack of time, I still chat with them using email, sms, phone, messanging. I dont see anything that FB could change here to better, only to worse, by alienating those real life friendships that I am having now (by adding endless noise of social network - I am having over 400 phone numbers in my phone, I don't want to get all the possible news about their life, it is impossible to handle).
Social networks don't help you having real friends, for those you need to keep feal life contacts, they help you to loose them, by giving you fake feeling that you have "bytefriends" and dispersing your attention from those you care the most to buch of insignificant acquaintances.
It is cool that your life is so highly social, but mine never was. At times I was extremely socially isolated and Facebook actually did helped a lot. I do have and often had problem finding events, my childhood friends left the town or are busy etc etc.
I cant feasibly go to events and prioritizing real life meetings/parties without prioritizing away job, my kids and learning of new stuff.
Not everyone is like you. Not everyone has tons of free time when he can move anywhere freely, not everyone makes friends super easily and have large amount of acquaintances wherever he goes. And not everyone has tons of people around who happen to share similar interests or personalities. It was like that during college, but as I grown older it was increasingly less so. And I guess I am not alone, because this forum has highly upvoted "it is hard to make friends or not be lonely" article highly upvoted approximately once a month.
To me, Facebook did a lot of service that I could not replace by phone or message.
But there is still the same problem, for you it is the same as it was before, you have a large amount of contacts, same as my phonebook. With age come lots of work, having a family makes it even worse and it is normal, that at the end you are having only a few of them. This is nothing special and observed over decades. But what the FB does is creating a false sense of friendship, and since you don't have much time (and with aging you are having it even less), instead of focusing to a few people you really like, go for a beer with them, actually bond or find another friend, it makes everyone a "phonebook" entry. At the end you finish with not having a single real friend in your live, but you rather spend a lot of time on chatting with irelevant people. Same as here but with a twist - FB gives you a false feeling that your social life is ok, while here you know that you only chat with strangers. It encorages you not to do anything to find friends, to bond, instead of helping people bond, it is actually preventing them - which is great for FB business, the more time you spend there, the more they earn. And to make it even worse, due to the FB it is becoming even harder to find frinds, as its users (not all) are off the grid for normal, real life, socializing. Actually you made me think about it: all of my real life friends are very modest in using FB or they don't use it at all. To me it looks like that what people like you are considering as a solution (FB) is actually a problem.
(I was downvoted, I seriously don't understand why, it would be great if people who are doing it would rather write what is so wrong, I am seriously having issues understanding it)
my opinion is that you were downvoted cos people really want to use Facebook for whatever reason and when you say they don’t need it they start shaking... so yes, it is an addiction.
and also, i see internet as public space, YOU are responsible what you leave behind, if someone comes up to you in a real world and ask you your birthday how would you react? yet you do it on the internet and people will give that and their CC card number without problems and then complain... So, yeah this is not just Facebook fault...
Facebook made my life better, but that does not matter to you, because my life without Facebook would revert back to bad which you are completely cool with. That is the core of your argument.
> But what the FB does is creating a false sense of friendship,
That is something you made up. You
>, instead of focusing to a few people you really like,
I am focusing on poeple I really like and Facebook made it easier for me to do so.
> go for a beer with them, actually bond or find another friend,
That assumes many free evenings and physical proximity with similar people. That assumes that going regularly for beer as an easily available option that does not costs other things that are important - work time, children time and other duties time.
> At the end you finish with not having a single real friend in your live, but you rather spend a lot of time on chatting with irelevant people.
That is life. That is also infinitely better then being alone. Having close friends physically present around me with a lot of time on both sides might be even better, but that is not here not there. You ignore the actual choice "shallow or nothing at all" and talk about made up choice "shallow or best friend".
I guess that you have zero idea what it is like to be socially isolated. That is happy for you, but people unlike you exist. Your response to them is just a bunch of condescension.
> FB gives you a false feeling that your social life is ok, while here you know that you only chat with strangers.
Again, you made that up. You dont know what feeling I or other people have, so you project cluelessness into them. People are not off the grid because of Facebook, people were off the grid all the time. Both those with and without Facebook, due to how life is lived.
That is why it became successful in the first place, too many people found what it provides helpful.
I did not downvoted you, but I guess it happened because you built your argument of projecting worst possible motivation on people who are not like you.
Unfortunately, I didn't made it up and if you surf a bit around psychological studys it is proven fact, if you believe the science, this is just one of researches:
Yeah I believe it is really helpful for a very narrow group, let me compare it to hearing aid, people that have hearing disabilities, are having a life much better in using hearing aid devices, while it will impair hearing of anyone hearing well. To paraphrase it, what people are doing today is using hearing aid as they are too lazy to listen (To avoid confusion: I am talking in general! The majority of gaussian bell curve!) and this is turning society into bunch of half deaf people. I am sometimes having problem with, people not understanding that, socialization is a very basic skill that has to be learned and trained.
FB is like junk food, it tastes well, it is simple to obtain, it doesn't need a lot of effort to cook, but in general it harms you. And due to the fact that most of people don't care, population is getting fat, it suffer from bunch of cardiovascular diseases, but getting healthy food is progressively harder and expensier. As most of people are not using it. I don't think anyone needs to be rocket scientist to understand that.
I don't have problems if downvotes someone who actually takes part in debate :) but drive by shooting annoys me a lot.
I upvoted you, as a counter-weight. I don't necessarily agree 100% with you, but I think downvotes shouldn't be used to express disagreement - and your comment was a valuable expression of opinion.
(After I wrote it I have started to think about your answer as rethorical. If this doesn't fit, I would be really satisfied if people who do fit would have a chance to read it)
It is not about popularity, you can always find people that have something in common with you. You found them on FB, right? Just don't use FB for excuse for not even try and you will find out that you don't need it. I am a geek as you (probably) are, but there are a lot of other geeks too. If we would live in a same city, what is stopping us to go for a beer and play board games (which I love) and laughing at people who don't have a clue what we are doing. Screw the "how you look" prejustice (which FB is actually imposing - before FB came out, people cared much less about the look, this whole "lets be preaty" and "how interesting life I have"(which is a lie in most of cases) mania is by large its fault). The point of bonding is to interact in person, not hide behind a chat. And after a while (of hiding) you are completely spaced out in regard of social interaction. As far as I am concerned, todays pop culture is completely f* up and something to laugh at, why taking THEIR social norms on yourself? You can be popular too, due to your math knowlidge (yeah, stereotypes, I know), board games, whatever. Just find right group and BOND. In real life, stop poking your nose with rubber gloves, take them off and expirience the REAL expirience ;)
Come on, I bet there was a guy (and girl, they are faking their interests to be """popular""", wait until they are 30+, you will see a huge change in their behaviour) in your class, in your neibhourhood, who has similar interests as you do, just say fuc* off, to anxiety, to media, to pop oriented morons (I am sorry, but I really despise this part of culture, which is faking their natural behaviour just to fit... somewhere) and bond with people, what do you have to loose - except of years of training of social interactions that FB is taking away from you?
I like how you are totally convinced that everyone has tons of free time and no real world duties and responsibilities. And how you see socializing primary as social status thing or that self-imposed-geek-isolation is your only reference for someone who is lonely.
And like how there could not be no reason in for girls to change behavior when their life situation changes then that they were "faking". Makes me really not want to be in real-world group of geeks with you. That sort of bullshit is why I am avoiding local tech meetups.
I'm doing some research on alternatives to facebook. Social networks with different business models. Hopefully will have a spreadsheet with descriptions and info in the next few days.
As a user the value is not in the technology, but in the 'other users', yes, the old 'network effect'. So the essential question is ho to get overnight adoption of one of those alternatives by all your friends, which means, by extension, everyone.
Since this is unlikely, regulating Facebook into a privacy respecting business, hard and erring on the safe side, is the true alternative.
The annoying thing about Facebook from a Danish perspective is that everyone uses it to plan social events. There are a lot of articles on how you’ll get a richer social life and still get invited, but the truth is that you become a bit of a hassle for everyone else.
They have to text you the details outside of Facebook, or alternatively, have to adopt a new platform because of you.
Of course I still think you should delete Facebook. With all this recent controversy they had a chance to right the wrong, instead they chose to double down on exploiting their user base - not only in the legal department but also by quickly running their facial recognition stuff before the GDPR goes into effect.
On the plus side, the more people leave, the less Facebook will lose its justification because right now, the sole reason to be on Facebook is that it’s where everyone is.
Yes. Yet I often struggle with the UI. E.g. on mobile, when searching for events, you have to swipe a menu to the right and click "events", which is not obvious. Also getting a list of RSVP'd events is not trivial.
One of the reasons why I left Facebook was because I was tired of invites. I got tired of getting harassing messages from people upset I hadn't yet logged in to Facebook to RSVP yes/no/maybe to events I had zero interest in. No, I don't want to go to your child's birthday party. Leave me alone.
I never understand this problem, I'm friend with people I'm actually friend with and the ones that annoys me I just unfriend or unfollow. What's hard about that?
I just attended an event I had two lucky ways of knowing about:
1) Find out through Facebook as if I'm friended to "the right people" like it's 1987 [my "usual network" would never have heard of these people, not even a little bit]
2) Find out through an acquaintance live and in person by them randomly inviting me simply because I was around the right place at the right time like it's 1987
I'm not on Facebook, even if I was it's still 1987. Perhaps this is "the discovery problem", but even so in "current year" it still exists if only in ever-smaller measures. Choose your intensity of flavour, I guess.
My solution was to keep my account, but use uBlock to remove the news feed. This allows me to use Facebook to reply to events and messages, but avoid the rest.
It's not optimal, but as others said, getting out completely can make you a bit of a hassle to others.
I totally agree. I deleted my facebook about 5 years ago and I now find myself extremely isolated socially. Friends made the effort for a little while, but eventually I'm sure I was just forgotten by the more distant friends and my social circle has dwindled to almost nothing. This doesn't really bother me though, it's sort of a natural filter whereby "low value" relationships are weeded out.
Probably more significant is the impact of not being able to make new friends in the same way. The communities that surround my hobbies seem to be concentrated on facebook. When I make new friends at the face-to-face events the friendship doesn't transition to anything more significant because there's no followup connection on social media. This seems to be one of the modern ways that friendships are built - meet IRL, connect via social network and then always have a connection of some sort which allows the relationship to grow if nurtured. In my case I don't see or talk to these people until the next physical meetup and so I'm "out of sight, out of mind". It seems to me that other newcomers join the group IRL and on social media and are quickly integrated, but I'm just some guy that occasionally shows up.
I feel like most Facebook events are 'invite everyone.' Whether or not your friendship level is greater than mere acquaintance or working at the same place or studying at the same school.
I don't have Facebook and I have no issues making friends-because I get up and go out and talk to people. Sure they may not invite me to X events-but when I see them we talk, we have a good time, and we go on with our lives.
> meet IRL, connect via social network and then always have a connection of some sort which allows the relationship to grow if nurtured.
I think part of this is "they're just not that into you." Not in a relationship sense-they think you are a fine person. But people have family, work, other, older friends. The vast majority of "social network connections" went just as far for me as some of my in person encounters-that is, went nowhere. But a few did. People don't have the time to be friends with everyone so they simply outsource it to facebook. Sometimes they do things that are interesting and a friendship grows from it-most times, not, in my experience.
> This seems to be one of the modern ways that friendships are built - meet IRL, connect via social network and then always have a connection of some sort which allows the relationship to grow if nurtured. In my case I don't see or talk to these people until the next physical meetup and so I'm "out of sight, out of mind".
I don’t think that this phenomenon is attributable to Facebook. I.e., Facebook doesn’t necessarily steer you toward meaningful interactions, and even without Facebook you can nurture a friendship using SMS, email, and so on. Developing friendships takes more effort than a typical Facebook interaction allows (“liking” a pic of someone’s food or whatnot).
I also deleted my account several years ago, and I've since made the conscious decision to let relationships fade if the only thing that would keep them alive were passive 'keeping up' via Facebook. But that suits my needs - I'm really not interested in what hundreds of people I've met are doing on vacation or thinking about politics or eating over the holidays.
My wife, on the other hand, lives for this stuff. She is much, much closer emotionally to people she went through earlier stages of life with and she routinely moans and shrieks about the things I mentioned above. And this suits here needs, because she cares about that sort of information.
That said, even if we grant Facebook a monopoly on 'keeping up with old friends', every other 'social vertical' that currently relies upon Facebook for connection, networking, and event planning represents a startup opportunity with massive market potential. Big one: mommy groups.
Same experience in the UK. I shut down facebook for a while a couple of years ago. Net result? I found myself getting invited to fewer social events. Basically, you make yourself a PITA for all your friends and acquaintances[1]. As much as I dislike facebook, for now, leaving really isn't a viable option.
[1] Granted, this may be age group specific. My friends tend to be 30-40-somethings, or late 20s at the youngest. Not so surprising, given I'm in my early 40s.
The question is: what signal do we want to send ?
Please go on (FB or every over ones sitting on privacy, past or future companies), or the game is over.
Perhaps, with the actual attention of the medias, it’s the right time to make a point, whatever it is.
honest question: aside from the attempted collection of data on non-users of the system, why are people angry about this? to me, anger implies being surprised here. but at the same time, usage of the system implies being smart enough to understand the risks inherent in making your information public, so there really should be no surprise, and therefore, no anger. being angry at this really is just an admission of ignorance and/or stupidity. it's kinda like people being surprised when snowden told them the government was spying on them, except dumber because you're willingly giving up your information here...
No anger. Only demanding responsible handling of users' information. If Facebook or any other social platform doesn't deliver, users could go elsewhere.
I also think that there is not much honesty in your question, by the way.
> We are here to hold Facebook accountable no matter who’s using it, and to push it and other tech companies to do better for users.
In other words, regardless of whether something is necessary or not, if users are using it, EFF would be watching.
And I don't even think Facebook is "necessary" as assumed. Hence, I find it irrelevant to go meta and discuss my assumed understanding or consideration, or lack thereof, of others feeling.
I found the generalization above regarding computer literacy of "most people" unfounded and very troubling. This comment also handwaves the inconvenience caused to users who were promised access to the information they need across their devices.
One, we are in a market failure. Unilateral withdrawal is difficult. Two, even if I withdraw, I am still subjected to Facebook’s surveillance and negative effects on my democracy. The latter is what pisses me off. (The cluelessness of Facebook’s management and culture, in respect of this problem, coming in at a close second.)
> For democracy, i ap pretty sure same tactics are used in any media channel
Facebook's uniqueness, in reach, magnitude of damage, and negligence, has been qualitatively demonstrated, by its actions and employees' defenses of said actions, over the past months.
What I really like about this is what the "hashtag" #DeleteFacebook says about us and our time right now.
Firstly, it speaks of how ignorant we all are, as a public mass, of how the world actually works, even the reality of an "obvious" situation we aspire to be commenting about. Because you cannot actually "delete facebook". Neither can you "delete" the entire service as if it is some "app" on your phone, or old-skool word document on your laptop, nor can you delete the data it knows about you. Even if FB actually deleted the data they had about you, you can't make their AI's "unlearn" everything they got from you, and you can't make their 3rd-parties delete your data as well ( no matter what you well-intentioned t&cs-ninnies might say to counter this, I just don't believe you that there's anyway to make these things happen ). So you can't Delete Facebook. The first rule of Facebook is: Facebook is eternal.
Secondly, even if you go ahead and delete your account, your protest is impotent. Your victory is symbolic. Your effort at self determination will be undone. Because it's sort of like people saying they were going to leave California ( or the US ) if Trump got elected. So you can do it, but it won't change anything. It will probably end up severely disrupting / hurting your life. And in the end, you most likely won't do it. What this reveals about our ignorance is how powerless we actually are, and how ignorant we are of what Facebook has become. It has become a utility. It is ( mostly ) essential. Even if you do not use it, other services assume you do, and your access to those is gatekept by your ( non-existant ) FB account. And if you do use it, or use Messenger, or Whatsapp, then it is a good way to stay in touch with people you know. And if you really use it then of course you know why you need it. Second rule of Facebook is: Facebook is necessary.
So the third thing I like about this is, how ignorant this hash tag reveals us to be with regard to the way to deal with Facebook. It's not about individual actions. It's about the collective. FB has begun to impinge upon the collective. It has become a utility. And it exists forever, despite the actions of individuals. When it goes rabid / stray, what is needed is collective actions to bring it back under control of the commons. Within the bounds of the common good. Only regulation can subdue Facebook to the useful and the good. Not protest. The third rule of Facebook is: It's a utility, stupid. Regulate it.
Facebook is not a utility by it self, it is a web site, if you start regulating it what stops the government to regulate pretty much anything on the internet?
That's true. Once we start regulating FB we will never be able to stop regulating everything. Soon, tentacles of regulation will be everywhere. Even our thoughts will be regulated. Ok, let's not regulate it then. Good point.
But also, can't we say, if you start allowing FB to grow and operated un regulated what's to stop pretty much anything on the internet to do the same?
> Facebook and other companies must respect user privacy by default and by design.
That would be really nice, but before that happens a major cultural shift would have to take place and I can't see that on the horizon anywhere. Until then, the only language those companies understand is losing users, or not gaining them in the first place. And that's only the part where we consciously decide whether we're users or not. It still doesn't touch the part where our data is grabbed beyond our influence.
The public needs to demand anything like respect for user privacy by putting pressure on the company. For that, the public needs to be aware of the issue. And for awareness a discussion needs to be kept alive. Like we do here in this post. So posting and commenting in HN matters.
I was participating this year in a big street protest calling for police to keep investigating the prime minister for corruption.
The pressure lead to public exposure and accelerated investigation immediately.
Deletion is too extreme for most people. Facebook is a monopoly for users and in an oligopoly for advertisers. This is a market failure [1].
More reasonable: escalating partial dis-engagement. Here's what I did, sequentially, over the years:
1. Turn off notifications for the Facebook app on your phone;
2. Turn off notifications for the Facebook Messenger,
Instagram, et cetera apps on your phone;
3. Delete the Facebook app from your phone;
4. Delete the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps from your phone; and finally
5. Log out of Facebook on your desktop.
It took me 2 years to go through from step 1 to step 5. It has made me happier and more productive. I still have a Facebook account. But the friction of grabbing my laptop and logging in forces me to consider "is this what I want to do? Or am I thoughtlessly reaching for the crack pipe?"
Turning off messenger notifications seems drastic and unnecessary (it's real people contacting you). It's like turning off sms notifications of call notifications, I do it whenever I need to concentrate , but not by default.
The problem are apps that notifies us about useless or non direct communication stuff.
> Turning off messenger notifications seems drastic and unnecessary
In my experience, it has been neither. My friends effortlessly filter what I need to hear into iMessages, e-mails, phone calls and face-to-face shares.
Human communication is as easy to hack as it is fluid and resilient.
This is only if you consider that every message is urgent and must be seen immediately, which is rarely the case.
I turned of notifications because they were too distracting, and that only made things better. I still chat with my friends, but I do so only when I pick up my phone voluntarily.
People get also use to the fact that they don’t get an immediate reply when they write you, and they stop expecting it. Interactions are more relaxed.
They probably mean turning off all non-visual notifications. In other words, your phone doesn't buzz or make a sound, but when you look at the screen, you see there's a message. That way, you don't ignore people, but if something really requires a quick answer, they'll have to call you.
I just make it clear that I don't have messenger on my phone- text me directly for that. There are occasional misses, but mostly people are ok with it. It's the FOMO that keeps it installed.
I check FB messenger stuff from my browser.
FB also works well on the phone's browser- so that's another way to go. But somewhere along the way they quit letting you use Messenger in the phone browser. That was the sniff-test failure that let me know Messenger is probably not good for me. FB wants it too much.
Facebook seems to have a dark pattern that will always show a notification on messenger. Even when there are no messages. Plus that app just has terrible UI anyways. Personally I actually use sms but can't ever imagine using Facebook messenger on a regular basis.
Nobody really uses SMS anymore, unless it is Android <-> iPhone messaging, and if the the users aren’t already connected via one of many other IM apps.
As an iOS user, I only use sms for friends who use android but don’t use whatsapp or another end-to-end encrypted platform. IE, it’s just a fallback for me.
I think this is country specific. Whatsapp is used heavily in Europe and parts of Asia.
If I didn't have friends in other countries I'd just be using Facebook Messenger and iMessage as well. In the US it's predominantly Facebook Messenger.
I had a whole week of Facebook Messenger annoying me with requests to let it access my contacts, my photos, my location, or how such-and-such a person might be a good candidate to “friend” on Facebook. Not one useful message from anyone: all the people I need to hear from use SMS or email or even iMessage. Everyone else’s messages are still there in the Facebook web interface.
So I deleted Messenger from my devices. I haven’t missed it at all in a year.
Is anyone else in the strange position of never using Facebook, and not really knowing anyone else who uses it?
Neither my dad nor my mom use it, nor the rest of my family. I've never used it. I'm starting to wonder if I'm the only one so thoroughly insulated from Facebook addiction.
I wouldn't say i'm insulated, but some of my friends and i dont have a facebook account.
Sometimes there are funny reactions when you apply for a new Job and they cant find a single piece of my private information online. when i meet new people some react as if i wouldn't exist without a facebook account. makes for some funny conversations :D
My mom posts. Some cousins and close friends do (but just a handful, and 2/3 of the posts come from about 5 people). My wife doesn't have an account at all. Among the people that don't post often, most of them do reply to messages if I send them something.
I had the Facebook app for a brief period when it was first released and decided that it was poison. So I'm maybe not as thoroughly insulated as you, but it sounds odd to hear everyone talking about how much of a necessity Facebook is for them.
About 2 years ago I unfollowed all my friends. When I login there's nothing to see now. I feel that I've switched it from a push to a pull service and am much happier using it.
i did that over the last few months. It really lowers that addictive quality. right now my feed is all yardsale groups and pages. I've been logging in less and less, and dont miss it at all.
This is my strategy as well! Although I did this in single sitting when facebook message notifications started popping into my android phones main UI. I was already irritated by my constant habit of opening facebook and that was the last straw.
I think the word is awkward sounding because it rests on the assumption that markets always lead to efficiency, and that the creation of a monopoly is therefore a bug
I think that the idea is that the market should've provided competent competition to Facebook, and it hasn't. Real competition would give people choices.
This is different than saying that Facebook is a failure. As a business, they're obviously tremendously successful.
I skipped step 5 but instead I un-followed & unsubscribed from most of my friends (so when I login, there is basically nothing to see)... I can still manually search for them...
Since facebook is addictive, I’ve replaced the facebook newsfeed with an extension so that I can only effectively use messenger and visit user profiles. It limits my facebook usage to only intentional things, and preserves it for the few cases where I have to use the platform for something.
I feel like Messenger is fine since it’s not a facebook exclusive feature (instant messenging).
We need an API to interact with Facebook, so that other tools can shield us from it and help us migrate away.
Facebook will never build this API, but perhaps someone can use DOM traversing as the underlying mechanism for an open source service that provides the API.
For me, the answer is to not put your personality on FB. Just put on the platitudes of your life, and like the platitudes of your friends' lives. "Look my kid did this". "Isn't the weather great today". "Glad you weren't hurt in that disaster".
I log in most days, but all I do is ack my friends. When I put something on, it's some BS that lets them ack me. I don't think it takes me more than a few seconds to scroll through and hit like.
Next to that there's the occasional "I'm in town" which is a call for a face-to-face.
I wonder if there are any other tools out there that are capable of mining valuable data (for the personal user) from the "Download my Facebook" .zip file dump .. it seems like this is a data format that is ripe for exploitation by other apps/services in the effort of freeing Facebooks' grip over peoples faces.
Has anyone looked into the data that Facebook provide, to see what potential apps/services could be built on it? It seems really ripe for exploitation, to me .. but I have yet to download the .zip and inspect its contents. Off to do that now...
Everyone is using facebook ... because everyone is using facebook. The more people delete it, the weaker will the network effect be.
I would say that as a person who understands technology and the ramifications of facebook, you have a moral duty to not use it. And you have a duty of educating people about facebook.
You can't stop it alone (no single person can - even shooting Zuck would probably not stop facebook) but you can stop voting for it, just like you probably aren't voting for alt right/nazi parties in your local elections.
I think "Social Media" is a complete abomination and should be burned to the ground and the earth salted that nothing may grow there.
But! Facebook has some really useful features.
I used to engage quite a lot with the social features of Facebook, but now I only use it for a few of things: 1. Facebook Marketplace has now become more useful than Gumtree which used to dominate the local secondhand goods market; 2. Events; 3. Facebook Messenger.
I couldn't give a flip about reading anyone's opinion, posting my own, or looking at your photos.
But what I don't get is, the elephant in the room: why haven't the FBI raided Facebook HQ and seized control of all their data centres: it should obvious to everyone that minors have used Messenger to share lewd pictures and videos with each other, and we all now know that Facebook doesn't actually delete anything because they let download all your data and that data includes pictures and videos you've "removed / delete", and even ones you took with the Messenger app but didn't send!
Zuckerberg is literally sitting on a mountain of child porn!
> As a social media user, you should have the right to leave a platform that you are not satisfied with... Furthermore, if users decide to leave a platform, they should be able to easily, efficiently, and freely take their uploaded information away and move it to a different one in a usable format.
Data is not the one thing stopping people leaving facebook... friends are.
This force stopping people leaving is the same one that drove social media into a monopoly - there is no cross platform protocol. Platforms do not communicate with each other like email clients. In this scenario the very nature of communication encourages people gather into a single large group for convenience (if it wasn't facebook it would have been another).
The abuse of a company in such a position is inevitable.
The _question_ is not going to be how can we make a protocol now (it's too late, facebook doesn't care), the question is how long will it take for enough people to become disgusted enough to switch to something more open where protocols could be developed, or where the platform is open source anyway and corporate forces are not an issue.
> the question is how long will it take for enough people to become disgusted enough to switch to something more open where protocols could be developed, or where the platform is open source anyway and corporate forces are not an issue.
There are some other options:
- Phone makers create a "message center", a central place where emails and feeds are shown. Facebook must now adhere to these standards, and they lose their "gatekeeper" position.
- Someone develops an API to interact with facebook on behalf of a user. This API performs a live export of friends, feeds, etc, so that other applications can use them. After a while, people will use those applications instead of facebook itself, and are ready to leave facebook.
Yes good ideas. Hhonestly I thought we'd have it by now. I've been waiting to have my social account outside of Facebook that could connect with contacts who "live" inside its walls.
Why is everyone so happy to be with one company? Why are they happy to allow one company to manage their social connections and notifications for life?
Social connection technology shouldn't be tethered to one company, everyone huddled under its "protective" wing. That is typical early 21st century thinking. It's eco-system lock-in mentality, which works against users in the end.
I heard a journalist recently call Facebook the "modern day telephone" (Leigh Sales, ABC), which is a stupid thing to say. Facebook is not the technology, it's a service that uses modern technologies.
Imagine if there was only one phone company or ISP everyone in the world used. Not a great scenario for competition, innovation, safety, privacy and open standards evolution. We need those new protocols and ways to connect by easily talking between social media platforms.
Zuckerberg revealed his true colors years ago. I had a facebook for a moment in perhaps 2005-06. I deleted it. I have never regretted that, quite the contrary. I have enjoyed a life free of social media, and free of its trappings and influences. I watch my friends get sucked into "comparing mind," scroll through streams of advertorials and recieve the corresponding subliminal stressers, and constantly have their mindfulness interrupted by notifications. I think the general concept of social media is great, and a necessary thing for the world at large. I think facebook is evil, and it blows my mind that people still continue to use this platform (And similar ones) even though the company sells users out again and again. This era goes way beyond "jump! how high?"
I think the thought of deletion is pretty much just one of the problems.
I managed to delete my Facebook profile a few months ago, but the amount of pressure I often receive from people so that I create a new account is what impresses me the most -- not from the personal level, since I already made up my mind, but from the point that most of the people think Facebook is just an essential, irreplaceable tool which everyone MUST have. I'm glad this did not yet affect my work or study, but this "disease" seems to have already infected most of my family and friends.
Now personally, I think people fool themselves most of the time to find what seems to be a reasonable answer to why they use Facebook: be it networking, be it a way to communicate with family and friends, be it a way to stay "in touch" with the news (and that also opens up for the whole fake news discussion, but oh well). I'm not saying those are not legitimate reasons to have a Facebook account (these are actually the primary services that it claims to offer), but I really wish people could see that there are other means to that. Some don't even involve having any social media accounts.
126 comments
[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 244 ms ] threadIf you hold facebook accountable, then you send a message: users DO value privacy, and any platform that abuses the privilege may find themselves with far fewer users and a less profitable product. Don't hold them accountable, and you'll get a sorry note from Zuckerberg, and he'll violate it later when you aren't looking.
In fact, this article raises another question: how much does the EFF value privacy? Apparently violators just need to say "I'm sorry" and continue what they were doing, and the EFF will argue on their behalf that the benefits of their service outweigh the cost of your lost privacy.
Facebook's practices are a societal problem, but theirs aren't the only ones, and services that have the same exact problems are probably being developed right now or will be developed within the next few years.
So my takeaway from this, reading the EFF's post is 1. we should be looking beyond hashtag campaigns targeted at one specific corporation and 2. if for whatever reason #DeleteFacebook is not a viable option, then you should still have your privacy protected and 3. the subtext to point two reads to me as: if you can #DeleteFacebook, you should, but we're not in the business of telling you what services to use wink wink nudge nudge.
Here's what the EFF says about Facebook: "Deleting Facebook is not a choice that most of its 2 billion users can feasibly make. ... Without viable general alternatives, Facebook’s massive user base and associated network effects mean that the costs of leaving it may not outweigh the benefits."
Imagine that, a service a little over a decade old is now a dependency for life. It's not "feasible" to leave. Apparently privacy violations must be weighed against the size of the user base and network effects.
Last I checked, phones still worked. Messaging still worked. All of the solution that existed a decade ago are still there. You CAN leave.
I look forward to the EFF proposing a legal solution to privacy such as GDPR in the US. They haven't done that, and in the meantime, there should be consequences for Facebook. The EFF shouldn't be arguing for the lack of consequences for this specific privacy violation, without proposing a solution to the problem across the industry.
There absolutely should be consequences for Facebook specifically, I vehemently agree with you! I don't think even the EFF is saying there shouldn't be, just that it is not part of their mission to advocate one way or another on that matter. That said, I think, and I think what the EFF is saying here, is that it is unproductive to contain the conversation solely to Facebook. Facebook is the problem right now, and probably not the only one, and definitely not the last one to be developed with that business model. Whatever services we use, there needs to be a baseline for what we should be able to expect in terms of privacy and data portability, a baseline that favors the users of the platform.
Personally, I think #DeleteFacebook does matter, and I think people honestly should, but now is the time to be thinking about the long term. GDPR-like laws are one possibility, and as a society we should be figuring out if we want to go that route, or a different route altogether.
Your argument is phone and messaging which does not replaces Facebook for most of those people. Phone being completely irrelevant. Just because those people are not exactly like you, dont have same needs, same usage patterns and similar social groups around them as you have, does not mean they don't exist. Nor it means that EFF should not use them as an argument.
on the othe hand, how hard is to tap someones land phone and listen in to their conversations, yet people still used it a lot before so i think expectations of privacy in public space is just a fantasy... If you really cares about privacy you wouls not use facebook, and you would look for encrypted communication channels, most people don’t care however...
The article channels the concern with Facebook away from the specific brand and towards the universal problem that emerges in our current digital economy. Which I think is vastly more productive.
Let me give you my example, I am not a FB user. Never was. Do I have problem finding events? Do I have less real friends? Is my quality of life any worse becoase of that? I have hard time going to all events that interest me, I am forced to prioritise meeting my real friends due to lack of time, I still chat with them using email, sms, phone, messanging. I dont see anything that FB could change here to better, only to worse, by alienating those real life friendships that I am having now (by adding endless noise of social network - I am having over 400 phone numbers in my phone, I don't want to get all the possible news about their life, it is impossible to handle).
Social networks don't help you having real friends, for those you need to keep feal life contacts, they help you to loose them, by giving you fake feeling that you have "bytefriends" and dispersing your attention from those you care the most to buch of insignificant acquaintances.
I cant feasibly go to events and prioritizing real life meetings/parties without prioritizing away job, my kids and learning of new stuff.
Not everyone is like you. Not everyone has tons of free time when he can move anywhere freely, not everyone makes friends super easily and have large amount of acquaintances wherever he goes. And not everyone has tons of people around who happen to share similar interests or personalities. It was like that during college, but as I grown older it was increasingly less so. And I guess I am not alone, because this forum has highly upvoted "it is hard to make friends or not be lonely" article highly upvoted approximately once a month.
To me, Facebook did a lot of service that I could not replace by phone or message.
(I was downvoted, I seriously don't understand why, it would be great if people who are doing it would rather write what is so wrong, I am seriously having issues understanding it)
and also, i see internet as public space, YOU are responsible what you leave behind, if someone comes up to you in a real world and ask you your birthday how would you react? yet you do it on the internet and people will give that and their CC card number without problems and then complain... So, yeah this is not just Facebook fault...
> But what the FB does is creating a false sense of friendship,
That is something you made up. You
>, instead of focusing to a few people you really like,
I am focusing on poeple I really like and Facebook made it easier for me to do so.
> go for a beer with them, actually bond or find another friend,
That assumes many free evenings and physical proximity with similar people. That assumes that going regularly for beer as an easily available option that does not costs other things that are important - work time, children time and other duties time.
> At the end you finish with not having a single real friend in your live, but you rather spend a lot of time on chatting with irelevant people.
That is life. That is also infinitely better then being alone. Having close friends physically present around me with a lot of time on both sides might be even better, but that is not here not there. You ignore the actual choice "shallow or nothing at all" and talk about made up choice "shallow or best friend".
I guess that you have zero idea what it is like to be socially isolated. That is happy for you, but people unlike you exist. Your response to them is just a bunch of condescension.
> FB gives you a false feeling that your social life is ok, while here you know that you only chat with strangers.
Again, you made that up. You dont know what feeling I or other people have, so you project cluelessness into them. People are not off the grid because of Facebook, people were off the grid all the time. Both those with and without Facebook, due to how life is lived.
That is why it became successful in the first place, too many people found what it provides helpful.
I did not downvoted you, but I guess it happened because you built your argument of projecting worst possible motivation on people who are not like you.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
Yeah I believe it is really helpful for a very narrow group, let me compare it to hearing aid, people that have hearing disabilities, are having a life much better in using hearing aid devices, while it will impair hearing of anyone hearing well. To paraphrase it, what people are doing today is using hearing aid as they are too lazy to listen (To avoid confusion: I am talking in general! The majority of gaussian bell curve!) and this is turning society into bunch of half deaf people. I am sometimes having problem with, people not understanding that, socialization is a very basic skill that has to be learned and trained.
FB is like junk food, it tastes well, it is simple to obtain, it doesn't need a lot of effort to cook, but in general it harms you. And due to the fact that most of people don't care, population is getting fat, it suffer from bunch of cardiovascular diseases, but getting healthy food is progressively harder and expensier. As most of people are not using it. I don't think anyone needs to be rocket scientist to understand that.
I don't have problems if downvotes someone who actually takes part in debate :) but drive by shooting annoys me a lot.
It is not about popularity, you can always find people that have something in common with you. You found them on FB, right? Just don't use FB for excuse for not even try and you will find out that you don't need it. I am a geek as you (probably) are, but there are a lot of other geeks too. If we would live in a same city, what is stopping us to go for a beer and play board games (which I love) and laughing at people who don't have a clue what we are doing. Screw the "how you look" prejustice (which FB is actually imposing - before FB came out, people cared much less about the look, this whole "lets be preaty" and "how interesting life I have"(which is a lie in most of cases) mania is by large its fault). The point of bonding is to interact in person, not hide behind a chat. And after a while (of hiding) you are completely spaced out in regard of social interaction. As far as I am concerned, todays pop culture is completely f* up and something to laugh at, why taking THEIR social norms on yourself? You can be popular too, due to your math knowlidge (yeah, stereotypes, I know), board games, whatever. Just find right group and BOND. In real life, stop poking your nose with rubber gloves, take them off and expirience the REAL expirience ;)
Come on, I bet there was a guy (and girl, they are faking their interests to be """popular""", wait until they are 30+, you will see a huge change in their behaviour) in your class, in your neibhourhood, who has similar interests as you do, just say fuc* off, to anxiety, to media, to pop oriented morons (I am sorry, but I really despise this part of culture, which is faking their natural behaviour just to fit... somewhere) and bond with people, what do you have to loose - except of years of training of social interactions that FB is taking away from you?
And like how there could not be no reason in for girls to change behavior when their life situation changes then that they were "faking". Makes me really not want to be in real-world group of geeks with you. That sort of bullshit is why I am avoiding local tech meetups.
They have to text you the details outside of Facebook, or alternatively, have to adopt a new platform because of you.
Of course I still think you should delete Facebook. With all this recent controversy they had a chance to right the wrong, instead they chose to double down on exploiting their user base - not only in the legal department but also by quickly running their facial recognition stuff before the GDPR goes into effect.
On the plus side, the more people leave, the less Facebook will lose its justification because right now, the sole reason to be on Facebook is that it’s where everyone is.
Could someone explain what this means? Is Facebook’s facial recognition illegal under GDPR?
1) Find out through Facebook as if I'm friended to "the right people" like it's 1987 [my "usual network" would never have heard of these people, not even a little bit]
2) Find out through an acquaintance live and in person by them randomly inviting me simply because I was around the right place at the right time like it's 1987
I'm not on Facebook, even if I was it's still 1987. Perhaps this is "the discovery problem", but even so in "current year" it still exists if only in ever-smaller measures. Choose your intensity of flavour, I guess.
It's not optimal, but as others said, getting out completely can make you a bit of a hassle to others.
Probably more significant is the impact of not being able to make new friends in the same way. The communities that surround my hobbies seem to be concentrated on facebook. When I make new friends at the face-to-face events the friendship doesn't transition to anything more significant because there's no followup connection on social media. This seems to be one of the modern ways that friendships are built - meet IRL, connect via social network and then always have a connection of some sort which allows the relationship to grow if nurtured. In my case I don't see or talk to these people until the next physical meetup and so I'm "out of sight, out of mind". It seems to me that other newcomers join the group IRL and on social media and are quickly integrated, but I'm just some guy that occasionally shows up.
I don't have Facebook and I have no issues making friends-because I get up and go out and talk to people. Sure they may not invite me to X events-but when I see them we talk, we have a good time, and we go on with our lives.
> meet IRL, connect via social network and then always have a connection of some sort which allows the relationship to grow if nurtured.
I think part of this is "they're just not that into you." Not in a relationship sense-they think you are a fine person. But people have family, work, other, older friends. The vast majority of "social network connections" went just as far for me as some of my in person encounters-that is, went nowhere. But a few did. People don't have the time to be friends with everyone so they simply outsource it to facebook. Sometimes they do things that are interesting and a friendship grows from it-most times, not, in my experience.
I don’t think that this phenomenon is attributable to Facebook. I.e., Facebook doesn’t necessarily steer you toward meaningful interactions, and even without Facebook you can nurture a friendship using SMS, email, and so on. Developing friendships takes more effort than a typical Facebook interaction allows (“liking” a pic of someone’s food or whatnot).
My wife, on the other hand, lives for this stuff. She is much, much closer emotionally to people she went through earlier stages of life with and she routinely moans and shrieks about the things I mentioned above. And this suits here needs, because she cares about that sort of information.
That said, even if we grant Facebook a monopoly on 'keeping up with old friends', every other 'social vertical' that currently relies upon Facebook for connection, networking, and event planning represents a startup opportunity with massive market potential. Big one: mommy groups.
[1] Granted, this may be age group specific. My friends tend to be 30-40-somethings, or late 20s at the youngest. Not so surprising, given I'm in my early 40s.
In reality it's cancerous.
This will be obvious in a year or two.
Perhaps, with the actual attention of the medias, it’s the right time to make a point, whatever it is.
fuck, you people make me sad
I also think that there is not much honesty in your question, by the way.
Read the EFF post again.
Why is it hard to understand that not all people feel like this thus find these reasons unreasonable?
> We are here to hold Facebook accountable no matter who’s using it, and to push it and other tech companies to do better for users.
In other words, regardless of whether something is necessary or not, if users are using it, EFF would be watching.
And I don't even think Facebook is "necessary" as assumed. Hence, I find it irrelevant to go meta and discuss my assumed understanding or consideration, or lack thereof, of others feeling.
Facebook has web interface. Uninstall the app from phone, and login once a week to check messages and to plan events.
He removed it from his phone (but still using the messenger app).
For surveillance you can say same for Google and their analytics code installed everywhere.
For democracy, i ap pretty sure same tactics are used in any media channel...
Facebook's uniqueness, in reach, magnitude of damage, and negligence, has been qualitatively demonstrated, by its actions and employees' defenses of said actions, over the past months.
Firstly, it speaks of how ignorant we all are, as a public mass, of how the world actually works, even the reality of an "obvious" situation we aspire to be commenting about. Because you cannot actually "delete facebook". Neither can you "delete" the entire service as if it is some "app" on your phone, or old-skool word document on your laptop, nor can you delete the data it knows about you. Even if FB actually deleted the data they had about you, you can't make their AI's "unlearn" everything they got from you, and you can't make their 3rd-parties delete your data as well ( no matter what you well-intentioned t&cs-ninnies might say to counter this, I just don't believe you that there's anyway to make these things happen ). So you can't Delete Facebook. The first rule of Facebook is: Facebook is eternal.
Secondly, even if you go ahead and delete your account, your protest is impotent. Your victory is symbolic. Your effort at self determination will be undone. Because it's sort of like people saying they were going to leave California ( or the US ) if Trump got elected. So you can do it, but it won't change anything. It will probably end up severely disrupting / hurting your life. And in the end, you most likely won't do it. What this reveals about our ignorance is how powerless we actually are, and how ignorant we are of what Facebook has become. It has become a utility. It is ( mostly ) essential. Even if you do not use it, other services assume you do, and your access to those is gatekept by your ( non-existant ) FB account. And if you do use it, or use Messenger, or Whatsapp, then it is a good way to stay in touch with people you know. And if you really use it then of course you know why you need it. Second rule of Facebook is: Facebook is necessary.
So the third thing I like about this is, how ignorant this hash tag reveals us to be with regard to the way to deal with Facebook. It's not about individual actions. It's about the collective. FB has begun to impinge upon the collective. It has become a utility. And it exists forever, despite the actions of individuals. When it goes rabid / stray, what is needed is collective actions to bring it back under control of the commons. Within the bounds of the common good. Only regulation can subdue Facebook to the useful and the good. Not protest. The third rule of Facebook is: It's a utility, stupid. Regulate it.
But also, can't we say, if you start allowing FB to grow and operated un regulated what's to stop pretty much anything on the internet to do the same?
Hmm. What to do?
That would be really nice, but before that happens a major cultural shift would have to take place and I can't see that on the horizon anywhere. Until then, the only language those companies understand is losing users, or not gaining them in the first place. And that's only the part where we consciously decide whether we're users or not. It still doesn't touch the part where our data is grabbed beyond our influence.
Or being broken up. This is a classic case of market failure. Waiting for users or advertisers to force a change is futile, and not their faults.
I was participating this year in a big street protest calling for police to keep investigating the prime minister for corruption.
The pressure lead to public exposure and accelerated investigation immediately.
1. Turn off notifications for the Facebook app on your phone;
2. Turn off notifications for the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps on your phone;
3. Delete the Facebook app from your phone;
4. Delete the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps from your phone; and finally
5. Log out of Facebook on your desktop.
It took me 2 years to go through from step 1 to step 5. It has made me happier and more productive. I still have a Facebook account. But the friction of grabbing my laptop and logging in forces me to consider "is this what I want to do? Or am I thoughtlessly reaching for the crack pipe?"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure
The problem are apps that notifies us about useless or non direct communication stuff.
In my experience, it has been neither. My friends effortlessly filter what I need to hear into iMessages, e-mails, phone calls and face-to-face shares.
Human communication is as easy to hack as it is fluid and resilient.
I turned of notifications because they were too distracting, and that only made things better. I still chat with my friends, but I do so only when I pick up my phone voluntarily.
People get also use to the fact that they don’t get an immediate reply when they write you, and they stop expecting it. Interactions are more relaxed.
I check FB messenger stuff from my browser.
FB also works well on the phone's browser- so that's another way to go. But somewhere along the way they quit letting you use Messenger in the phone browser. That was the sniff-test failure that let me know Messenger is probably not good for me. FB wants it too much.
If I didn't have friends in other countries I'd just be using Facebook Messenger and iMessage as well. In the US it's predominantly Facebook Messenger.
So I deleted Messenger from my devices. I haven’t missed it at all in a year.
Neither my dad nor my mom use it, nor the rest of my family. I've never used it. I'm starting to wonder if I'm the only one so thoroughly insulated from Facebook addiction.
Whenever it comes up in conversation I get a lot of people who reply with "I wish I could stop using Facebook", or "wow, you're lucky".
I had the Facebook app for a brief period when it was first released and decided that it was poison. So I'm maybe not as thoroughly insulated as you, but it sounds odd to hear everyone talking about how much of a necessity Facebook is for them.
If I had money shorting, the stock would be on my "to do" list.
And they brought it upon themselfs? Arrogance? Hubristic? Not respecting anyone? What did the little Capitalist say, 'The're stupid for trusting me.'?
Then again, what do I know? I gave up trying to understand people a long time ago.
This is different than saying that Facebook is a failure. As a business, they're obviously tremendously successful.
I feel like Messenger is fine since it’s not a facebook exclusive feature (instant messenging).
Facebook will never build this API, but perhaps someone can use DOM traversing as the underlying mechanism for an open source service that provides the API.
I log in most days, but all I do is ack my friends. When I put something on, it's some BS that lets them ack me. I don't think it takes me more than a few seconds to scroll through and hit like.
Next to that there's the occasional "I'm in town" which is a call for a face-to-face.
Has anyone looked into the data that Facebook provide, to see what potential apps/services could be built on it? It seems really ripe for exploitation, to me .. but I have yet to download the .zip and inspect its contents. Off to do that now...
I would say that as a person who understands technology and the ramifications of facebook, you have a moral duty to not use it. And you have a duty of educating people about facebook.
You can't stop it alone (no single person can - even shooting Zuck would probably not stop facebook) but you can stop voting for it, just like you probably aren't voting for alt right/nazi parties in your local elections.
But! Facebook has some really useful features.
I used to engage quite a lot with the social features of Facebook, but now I only use it for a few of things: 1. Facebook Marketplace has now become more useful than Gumtree which used to dominate the local secondhand goods market; 2. Events; 3. Facebook Messenger.
I couldn't give a flip about reading anyone's opinion, posting my own, or looking at your photos.
But what I don't get is, the elephant in the room: why haven't the FBI raided Facebook HQ and seized control of all their data centres: it should obvious to everyone that minors have used Messenger to share lewd pictures and videos with each other, and we all now know that Facebook doesn't actually delete anything because they let download all your data and that data includes pictures and videos you've "removed / delete", and even ones you took with the Messenger app but didn't send!
Zuckerberg is literally sitting on a mountain of child porn!
Data is not the one thing stopping people leaving facebook... friends are.
This force stopping people leaving is the same one that drove social media into a monopoly - there is no cross platform protocol. Platforms do not communicate with each other like email clients. In this scenario the very nature of communication encourages people gather into a single large group for convenience (if it wasn't facebook it would have been another).
The abuse of a company in such a position is inevitable.
The _question_ is not going to be how can we make a protocol now (it's too late, facebook doesn't care), the question is how long will it take for enough people to become disgusted enough to switch to something more open where protocols could be developed, or where the platform is open source anyway and corporate forces are not an issue.
There are some other options:
- Phone makers create a "message center", a central place where emails and feeds are shown. Facebook must now adhere to these standards, and they lose their "gatekeeper" position.
- Someone develops an API to interact with facebook on behalf of a user. This API performs a live export of friends, feeds, etc, so that other applications can use them. After a while, people will use those applications instead of facebook itself, and are ready to leave facebook.
Why is everyone so happy to be with one company? Why are they happy to allow one company to manage their social connections and notifications for life?
Social connection technology shouldn't be tethered to one company, everyone huddled under its "protective" wing. That is typical early 21st century thinking. It's eco-system lock-in mentality, which works against users in the end.
I heard a journalist recently call Facebook the "modern day telephone" (Leigh Sales, ABC), which is a stupid thing to say. Facebook is not the technology, it's a service that uses modern technologies.
Imagine if there was only one phone company or ISP everyone in the world used. Not a great scenario for competition, innovation, safety, privacy and open standards evolution. We need those new protocols and ways to connect by easily talking between social media platforms.
The data leak was just the trigger to take the jump.
(I guess that’s why FB acquired it for 19bn)
Now personally, I think people fool themselves most of the time to find what seems to be a reasonable answer to why they use Facebook: be it networking, be it a way to communicate with family and friends, be it a way to stay "in touch" with the news (and that also opens up for the whole fake news discussion, but oh well). I'm not saying those are not legitimate reasons to have a Facebook account (these are actually the primary services that it claims to offer), but I really wish people could see that there are other means to that. Some don't even involve having any social media accounts.