I quickly checked a few of those that say "impossible" and they clearly are possible - kinda makes me think I'd be better off searching for "[service] delete account" and just doing that.
(I did notice some said "subject to applicable law" - so I guess Europe!)
I'm not sure why one would use this "backgroundchecks" redirection link, which just appears to add ads to the top of the page. The actual site is https://justdeleteme.xyz/
I'd much rather they figured out how to fix their sync service - or at least let me actually delete everything on it and start again! I still get temporary containers coming back months after I have deleted them!
firefox containers is both the killer feature of firefox for me (I can't leave it) and also the jankyest. I don't think mozilla knows they have gold on their hands (but do they ever know?).
I lived through the firefox extension debacle in 2019 or so when FF accidentally let a cert expire and it helpfully uninstalled all my "unverified" extensions, of which container tabs was one. When everything was fixed, my settings were erased.
Except they weren't. To this day, I still get random ghost-like behaviour from my old container tabs settings. Google-contained apps will try to open in my banking container, as I gradually realise all of my containers were deleted but the URL-to-container mapping wasn't, and it was by ID not name, and the IDs have been reused.
Containers should be a core feature because they are /the/ feature ff has over the chrome army right now. I know they were (are?) trying to prove that core features aren't necessary because you can write anything in a web extension (IIRC that's how they justified getting rid of RSS), but it just hasn't been so in my experience.
I suspect that Mozilla looks at the telemetry and very few people use containers. I'd guess because users don't understand what they're good for. Perhaps you, an enthusiastic user, could do a little writeup somewhere (here?) on why they are the cat's meow.
Not many people use any extensions[1], which is why it should not be an extension, even if it is actually an extension in terms of implementation. Certainly I wouldn't expect my parents to discover and install the extension, but I might expect them to be able to be taught to use a first-class feature.
[1]: As the Firefox base dwindles further to only a hard core of techies, this might not be true, but it's probably true of Chrome: only 13 extensions have over 10 million installs and Chrome is used by over 2 billion people.
> I suspect that Mozilla looks at the telemetry and very few people use containers
The UX for using containers is abysmal, so no fucking wonder. This is the problem with "data-driven" design, it falls for the McNamara Fallacy. It's an over-reliance on 'scientific and objective' quantitative metrics while aggressively ignoring qualitative considerations and analysis. You'll never achieve excellence like this.
Containers are simple to use and incredibly useful.
Temporary account containers: automatically makes a new tab isolated from the others. This reduces the data thieves tracking and it allows you to ignore sites that have a limit on the number of articles you read before putting up the paywall. For some sites, there is advantage in using the same container so I use Multi-Account containers.
Multi-Account containers: I have multiple webmail accounts and have a container for each one pinned in my main browser window. For me, these containers are aligned with different businesses that I run and personal stuff. Using them is so easy - right click on a tab and reopen in X container.
Containers (and uBlock and side tabs) should be baked into the browser.
I have an Instagram account that I no longer own the e-mail or recovery phone number for. I have the password for it but every time I try to log in I get a ‘suspicious login’ warning and have to verify with said phone number. I want it gone but I cannot delete it. Loathe as I am I would even be willing to provide government ID.
Instagram literally has no contactable support if you aren’t a massive account (200k+ followers or whatever). I feel this should be highly illegal.
I have thought about retaining a lawyer and see if I can twist their arm legally (via GDPR), but I don’t want a simple account deletion to run in the tens of thousands of euros.
The automated ID verification might fail for a variety of reasons (frankly if they don’t originally have a copy I’m not sure what they’d be comparing it to) but the GDPR process should work if you fight long enough. You might need to prove that you owned the email or number though - email might be tricky but number is easier as you can submit a bill or do another subject access request to your provider which should still have records about it.
Yes, but here comes the problem: where would I send this request? Instagram notes no public facing physical address for my country and their support e-mail just sends back automated replies.
I would send the request both online and by tracked post with a proof of delivery. In the end your lawyer would do the same thing and charge for this at an hourly rate.
I once got my old username released through their generic support ticket system. I never received a reply, but instead found one day that they had processed my request.
I've been looking for a similar solution for deleting Facebook, though one with a checklist of "don't forget these things you want to keep."
Edit: I'd even pay >$100 just for a ZIP of "everything you might regret deleting." The connections are valueless at this point, but the pictures and my mom's priceless comments on them not so much.
That’s literally the export feature that Facebook had for a decade, for free. I use it regularly because I heard that sometimes it “forgets” older messages though.
The 'How to delete Google' section seems out of place and somewhat forced. The reasoning behind suggesting cleaning/deleting becomes weaker or absent further down the page. I think the page could have done with a bit more focus, just highlight the important ones rather than looking for filler material?
I communicate with a lot of people on Facebook, but I hated that I ended up scrolling my feed. So I unfollowed everything and now I have an empty feed and nothing to scroll.
I realize many have reasons to get rid of Facebook entirely, but for me this was a reasonable compromise.
I did exactly the same thing a few years ago - now it feels like a pull service that I'm in control of, instead of a push service with an algorithm controlling the content I view.
Same - and this is really the crux of the matter. You are in control of how toxic your social media experience is. Find that a group or particular person is making your world a worse place? Unfollow/Unfriend.
People bemoan the Facebook of old where it was updates from friends old and new, and family - but that's still the core of the product, groups are optional.
These companies hire psychologists in droves to make their products more addictive. There are certainly ways to combat their manipulation techniques, but let's not pretend this is some neutral product and try to pin the blame on the users. Cigarette companies used the same tactic and it hasn't gotten any less repellant.
Personally I think it’s a bad idea to delete any of your accounts. It becomes a huge hassle to claim anything if there’s a situation in which you need an account that can show that you have ownership.
In particular if you see a photo of you or yours somewhere and want it modified or removed.
Not to mention there’s really no value in deletion. Log out, stop using all of the clients. The end.
Whether or not you have an account with a service should not matter here. If your country doesn't grant you the legal right to get a photo taken down, then a service won't take it down even if you have an account. And if you do have the legal right do have a photo taken down, then the service will take it down even if you don't have an account, lest they become victim to a lawsuit that they will easily lose.
> Not to mention there’s really no value in deletion. Log out, stop using all of the clients. The end.
I see value in deleting information about me on the Internet. Not to hide it from companies like Facebook (because they probably hold you data even if you delete them), but from other people. You never know who can use your pictures/profile for. Obviously, the first step would be to not publish sensitive information about yourself, but if that ship has already sailed, well, the least you can do is to remove it before you "log out and stop using all the clients".
You don’t need to delete your account to hide it. Deleting your account simply just stops your ability to prove who you are if you later find your stuff archived or mirrored somewhere.
I don’t really see what you gain by deletion. Better off running one of many scripts to delete all your data and retain the account
I have friends and family, and groups in which I discuss highly specific topics. I don't think there's a better tool than Facebook that allows me to stay up to date on things that are important to me. The equivalent subreddits are of much worse quality. I know this will get downvotes, but this is my opinion.
Discord has taken over this role for me and all my social groups. And unlike Facebook there's no ads, no viral bullshit, no astroturfers, no personal information, and you can keep your identities separate across multiple social circles (all of which are private and invite-only by default).
Sure, but then we'll migrate somewhere else. "They'll be bad eventually" is by no means an argument in favor of instead using a service that is worse now.
Facebook at least doesn’t force me to subscribe to a 5$ service in order to upload images from my phone.
It’s so annoying that they can’t just compress images and videos on the client. Right now I’m always sharing videos and photos to telegram first, since their client actually compresses most of the files below 8MB and then continue sharing it to discord once again.
I agree! But honestly, I prefer some ads which I can block over a monthly pay wall just to share some images in a closed group. Especially since I’m a student :)
Some groups are really dependent on evidence the person is who they say they were - especially parent groups /Mom groups, health groups, where you’re looking for advice or legitimate local socialization / resource information.
Facebook has no way of actually verifying that you are a parent, so I hope nobody is relying on that to provide any sense of security. And my experience with Google+ is that a real-name policy is a woefully naive way of trying to filter out the maniacs; plenty of deranged people have no qualms about having their actions associated with their legal identities.
Thing is I'm not convinced that discord is really any better from a privacy perspective.
They still retain all of your messages (including DMs) unencrypted indefinitely with no easy way to remove them. Deleting your account doesn't remove messages either.
I didn't say anything about message privacy, but it's still strictly better than Facebook because Discord "profiles" feature nothing except a username (which, unlike Facebook, is not required to be your legal name), an avatar, a profile banner, and 190 characters worth of freeform markdown. And unlike Facebook, it doesn't pester you to ever add personal information. A company can't store private information that it never has to begin with. By all means, if you want message privacy, use a service that offers end-to-end encryption, which isn't Discord. (But keep in mind that end-to-end encrypted group chat (as in, not strictly one-to-one) is an impossible and unsalvageable UX boondoggle.)
> The nothing to hide argument states that individuals have no reason to fear or oppose surveillance programs, unless they are afraid it will uncover their own illicit activities. An individual using this argument may claim that an average person should not worry about government surveillance, as they would have "nothing to hide".
> Edward Snowden remarked "Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say." He considered claiming nothing to hide as giving up the right of privacy which the government has to protect.
I've been without Facebook for a decade now. Given what I know, it sounds like I'm missing out on some good stuff going on in Facebook Groups. I also hear Facebook Marketplace is the new Craigslist but Craigslist has been good enough for me still.
Marketplace is a mess. Absolutely unusable. The sheer volume of paid ads mixed with volumes of scams and really, really obnoxious creative (think borderline porn)makes it impossible to use with any clarity. Or even to use to find something specific.
It shows how awful FB is at design and UX. They really are the Fisher Price of the web. Its seems as if they build for stupid people who have no tech skills... In other words: the majority of people...
marketplace has almost completely replaced craigslist in my area. i do occasionally find some good deals on Craigslist but by far I have a better chance of finding something specific on Fb.
My generation doesn’t use emails basically. I changed emails quite a lot through my younger years as did my friends so it wouldn’t have been useful. We used to ask for people’s facebook shortly after meeting them. It’s the best tool to create and maintain your social graph. I understand that not everybody use it this way, and that’s fine, but if you do please think about that. It’s really heart breaking how I lost contact with old friends due to this
Locating and contacting old friends is entirely within your means in 2022. What is most striking to me as someone in my early thirties is how much learned helplessness is associated with these communication technologies that supposedly enhance our capabilities.
Facebook makes it easy to curate the appearance of friendship, but meaningful relationships take time and effort in the real world to maintain. People have traded quantity for quality, and the true impetus for this transformation is that social graphs with more nodes are easier for facebook to make money from.
This enabled me reach out to an ”apparent” friend (someone I had very casual relationship with and didn’t talk to for 10 years) in 30 second. And that person helped my “true” friends evacuate from Ukraine and avoid being killed.
Extended social networks are integral part of humanity and communities. Being isolated and interacting only with handful of true friends is more modern invention.
I can tell you that facebook has allowed me to keep in touch with a huge amount of friends and there’s just no way to look for people in 2022 if they don’t have fb. At least the friends I lost. I travel a lot btw.
Perhaps hand out an e-mail address and/or something else that does not require people to agree to some corporate ToS/privacy policy where people can reach you to the ones you do care about staying in touch with, preemptively for when they or you stops using Facebook, be it by choice or force.
It is not acceptable that a single or a handful of corps should own the digital social room. If you rely only on them, then it is you who close people out, not the ones who choose to leave or get kicked out.
I get that it's a sad situation but you can not put the blame on the ones who left. Learn from that and you won't have to experience it again.
I guess I am part of your generation as well because I recognize your description.
I really strongly disagree with you. Before facebook mail was prevalent and yet it was impossible to keep in touch with people or to find lost friends. When facebook came about it was a godsend, and suddenly it made sense that a monopoly on social graph was the missing piece all along. You might not like facebook for some of the decisions they took, or what you read in the media, but it is still insanely useful to a lot of people however mad you are about it.
Calls, letters, and in-person visits are still a thing, and they are all vastly superior to facebook. Besides, the alternative to deletion is a bunch of zombie accounts that appear to be real people but will never respond to messages. Best to make it obvious and not leave an account around to cause confusion.
As if sending messages to an abandoned account they'll never check is any better? If they close their account instead of abandoning it, you won't waste your time waiting for a response to a message they'll never see. Instead you can ask mutual friends and acquaintances to help you establish contact. This almost always works and only requires a little effort.
There was a really good service like 10 years ago that auto deleted Facebook/Instagram and so on. Sadly (and obviously) Facebook and co were extremely unhappy with such a service existing and took devastating steps to kill it.
That said, it would be great to have some kind of service like that again. It shouldn’t be hard to erase a digital identity, that’s what GDPR stipulates anyway.
To protect my mental wellbeing, I find that carefully selecting who to follow on some of these services improves considerably my experience.
For Instagram and Twitter, my rule of thumb is to prefer topical accounts to entity ones. That is, accounts that are dedicated to a single topic, no matter how narrow or large the scope, over those of people and/or companies.
Personal and business accounts, no matter how focused they are, tend to go off topic very often, and there's nothing to do about it. A designer or an art studio can still post about politics, religion, or whatever the controversy du jour is about. An account about logo design or some python framework, not so much if ever.
This allows me to have a feed whose content I sort of control. With Twitter, it gets even better with lists, so I have ones about dev stuff, others about business topics, etc. and the content there is almost on topic most of the time.
Since I started doing this, the impact of social media on my mood almost vanished, yet I'm still able to closely follow what's happening on topics I really care about.
When I want to see what's happening on the real world, I check my Facebook.
I'm sure aware of how bad these companies are with personal data. So it you think it'd be better to delete your account, then, yes, do it.
Yea, I have followed a lot of philosophy professors and when COVID started the accounts started to behave like a botnet really aggressively retweeting anti-trump and covid mainstream media. I really don't know if that was actually a set of hacked accounts or if people really started to behave like locust. But just unfollowing people that just have opinions about 'current thing' will do a lot for the quality of your timeline.
> To protect my mental wellbeing, I find that carefully selecting who to follow on some of these services improves considerably my experience.
For Instagram and Twitter, my rule of thumb
This. These services aren't toxic if you don't follow toxic accounts.
Also, I didn't think much about it in the past but now that I split my time between 3 countries and 2 continents, having FB (messenger) is the best way to keep in touch with people without bugging them with my several phone numbers (and charges that may occur, thanks Canadian telecoms).
>This. These services aren't toxic if you don't follow toxic accounts.
Your ability to moderate your usage of these services doesn’t make them not toxic. Your statement is victim blaming.
These services are still major proprietors of surveillance capitalism. They sell your future behavior to the highest bidder. This is toxic in itself.
Beyond which, your participation in these services is a signal to those who trust you that these services are safe for them to use. They are not, because they are not safe for anyone to use. That you have mitigated the harm through devoting even more of your attention to them doesn’t change that.
Really? You're going to equate this to crimes someone perpetuates against another?
For weeks I've seen posts blaming Ukraine for being invaded and having genocide committed against them. That's victim blaming.
Social media users aren't victims of anything except their own inability to limit and moderate usage. Back in the day people would sit in front of the TV, now it's just a different screen. That's on them. Many people also use social media constructively; to do things like run their business, keep in touch with friends and family, etc...
The naïveté of this take is astounding for someone who frequents a technology message board. You’re just going to ignore the part where these services employ A/B tests to make their services more addictive? You’re going to ignore the countless stories about how Facebook knew that the content they boost is bad for mental health and is addictive but they did it anyway? You’re going to ignore .. the entire surveillance capitalism aspect where an entire industry is predicated upon keeping people engaged?
Have a feeling you’d get a long with the Sackler family famously. Christ.
> And commercial food producers make their products more addictive too... How about the tobacco industry? How about illicit drugs? Porn?
How about them? They also designed their products to be addictive.
“Personal Responsibility” is just the shield that powerful companies use to avoid being regulated.
Shift the blame to the exploited and make it clear that their problems stem from their moral deficiency. Pretty convenient all told —- the personal responsibility of the architects of these systems and products somehow evaporates.
Personal responsibility cannot overcome AI designed to addict you. These services are not your friends. You are not the customer or the product. Your future behavior is the product. The only way to win is not to play.
> Personal responsibility cannot overcome AI designed to addict you.
I agree with your general arguments but you're going too far here. Individuals can overcome addiction. That doesn't change the big picture of how additive substances and services effect society as a whole, and I agree corporations use personal responsibility rhetoric to stave off government regulation. But you're going too far by suggesting that individual addicts have no chance of quitting. Many people have quit, proving that it's not impossible. It's good to see the whole forest, but don't forget the trees.
You can be an impartial observer of predator/prey behavior without considering yourself part of either group. But it doesn’t change the fact that there is a predator/prey relationship. In the case of social media, just like many addictions, there are too many variables at play to propose a simple solution like “just stop doing it.” So when you say people (who are indeed targeted) should “just” do the simple solution or else suffer the consequences, that is victim blaming.
I just reported every post FB recommend to me (not from someone I’m following) as spam and blocked the user. Over time it stopped showing crap to me (at least it seems so..).
> This. These services aren't toxic if you don't follow toxic accounts.
This is so wrong, on so many levels. They will capture your clicks, your usage patterns, your interests, and the internet will present to you in a non-neutral way, in a way which will not be in your interest, but in the interest of whoever is paying for the results of your data analysis. A way which will influence your perception of reality in microscopic and permanent ways, because they will know you more intimately than you know yourself.
Do not interact with surveillance capitalists. You will lose.
One should instead protect its behavioural breadcrumbs and try to use non surveillance ways of communication.
No. The parent comment’s viewpoint is fine, whereas your absolutist viewpoint is not helpful.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter are what you make of them. There’s nothing to “present” if you don’t mindlessly scroll but use them the way they were originally intended: to keep in touch with contacts. For some people it’s just easiest to keep in touch with them on Facebook, etc.
There also a lot of good Facebook groups, and marketplace is very useful.
Being able to stay in contact with people is extremely useful. Cutting that out entirely out of spite doesn’t do any good.
I don’t know about you, but when I cut out the toxic folks I actually discovered I wasn’t using Facebook for keeping up with folks at all. That was a side-benefit of the arguing I was doing with folks I hadn’t seen in years. I didn’t realize how insane that was of me, just giving all of these people my emotional and mental energy, until I stopped. And yeah, you can point to me and say, “see? Just stop! It works!” but it took MANY years for me to realize what was happening.
Can’t endorse this approach enough. I blocked/unfriended about 15-20 people on Facebook and it got exponentially more pleasant. What’s more, I barely use it now because as it turned out…I was mostly using Facebook to have political arguments and I had no idea. I just thought I needed it to keep up with folks.
Frankly, it’s shocking how much mental energy some random dude you met once 8 years ago can occupy if you let him on your feed. We choose to not remove them due to some vague fear of “the social media bubble” as if we don’t filter out people and organizations we don’t like all the time with or without it.
Content-marketing / keyword stuffing, so when you search for "How to delete Instagram", you get on Mozilla website and get to learn about it and eventually decide to download Firefox, which will make money out of ads from Google Searches and other partnerships.
Mozilla is very active on privacy advocacy and highlights Firefox’s privacy as a feature[0]. This makes some sense because the features of Firefox (cookie blocking, containers, first class ad blocking) all help preserve your privacy better than Chrome or Edge. As part of this advocacy space they’ve also done things like “privacy not included”[1] (the asterisk and lowercase are intentional, similar to the 1987 movie “batteries not included”).
I'm not even convinced deleting (and especially deactivating) your account does anything besides handing over control to Facebook and others. Perhaps it is better to obfuscate the data in your account and just not log in, even if emotionally less appealing than deleting.
No photo, some random DOB, location and obscure employement history for me.
I used to advertise on FB so had to maintain an account purely for this purpose but noticed a few times that 'people you may know' were usually a result of random encounters looking me up. Maybe because only facebook can verify you're not a creep or something?
One time I asked soemone out on a date and she seemed keen until the next day she had changed her mind. Probably pure coincidence that this person I didn't know until 2 days before was suddenly one of my 'people you may know' list.
Sure enough my blank FB profile was the giveaway that I am actually a serial killer. Now I'd rather these people just go down a rabbit hole of looking through 1000 possible matches and finding nothing instead.
I'm not sure deleting an Instagram account completely removes it from Facebook's servers. I recently deleted an old account, and after it was completely removed, I wanted to create a new one with the same username, but it complained that the username could not be used because it still "exists".
I've found myself between deleting, deactivating, and moderating my use of these apps for many years of my life.
I never found deleting or deactivating to be very helpful. At some time or another you're going to need said account for something.
While deleting is a bit extreme, some of these services will respect the actual deletion and others will not. I suppose the question at the end of the day is...why bother?
I've found it much more easy to "declutter" by following digital minimalism practices of getting rid of apps, only using browsers, practicing mindfulness of said platforms, and only using said platforms with a specific intention.
There's a laundry list of tips you could use to make social media harder to use or even more bearable, but the most effective approach I've used is simple moderation and mindfulness.
Also why is Mozilla writing articles about this? I get the privacy angle, but aren't they also willing to put ads in front of people and other partnerships sacrificing that privacy for users? Like how does Mozilla make money outside of Google search engine being the default? I do know they lay off many of my friends who work on dev tools or even mobile apps there(i.e. browsers).
> At some time or another you're going to need said account for something.
Nope for almost all of these. Different strokes different folks.
> Facebook
Nope. Haven't had one for more than 10 years now. So easy to live life without a FB account. I stay in touch with family and friends by phonecalls and Mumble.
> Instagram
Used it for maybe 10 minutes in 2013, haven't touched since.
> Snapchat
Same as Instagram, but in 2016.
> Tiktok
Same as above.
> Spotify
I listen to music on my harddrive.
> Venmo
Still using Paypal since 2012.
> Twitter
Nope, in fact my life has been significantly improved since I've not had an account. I use Nitter when I want to read a Twitter thread.
Amazon and Google are the only ones that I find very hard to avoid, but Google has gotten increasingly easy to avoid as alternative services are popping up.
> I stay in touch with family and friends by phonecalls and Mumble.
You are a counter-example for sure, but this means that you don't have a group chat platform to plan coordinated events with your friends? Maybe it's an age thing, but getting my friends in a call at a given time to organise a social event is probably as hard as organising the event itself. Compare with Facebook/Messenger/Whatsapp where everyone is in a group chat I can just write "Anyone wants to have dinner at my place this Friday?".
More seriously... My wife has friends that she sees pretty regularly, because we still live in her home state near where she grew up, but I really don't. I'm not sure what they use to organize but I do know that it isn't Facebook or WhatsApp.
I have a couple of friends that I keep in touch with over text but we aren't a group of friends. One of my friends does have a large friend group and I happen to be in a group MMS because of him. But it's not a place where events are organized because his friends are also scattered all over the country.
I use Discord for the group that I play DnD and video games with but, again, we're scattered all over the country. Only one of them is nearby.
Some events or even companies don't have a website, they just have a Facebook page that you have to be logged in to visit. Also, if your family uses Facebook, they will interact with each other on it whether you are there or not.
> Some events or even companies don't have a website, they just have a Facebook page that you have to be logged in to visit.
I really have not experienced this, but the several times I've had to interact with a company without a website, phone works wonders and is often quicker.
> Also, if your family uses Facebook, they will interact with each other on it whether you are there or not.
I really don't see the issue here unless you have a terribly unhealthy sense of FOMO.
People have a really weird definition of "need". Nobody needs Facebook. A handful of things might be moderately more difficult without Facebook, but not impossible. I bet if Facebook started charging $1000/hour to use, people would suddenly find it is in fact not really a necessity of life and would somehow find an alternate way to contact their families.
If Facebook started charging $1,000/hour to use, all these entities (including government offices... for me, it's not about my family at all) that have de facto chosen to conduct all their public-facing business on Facebook over the past few years would reverse course, and then we really could ditch our accounts with no problem. Let's hope.
I see it mostly with very small businesses and government offices, especially in small towns or rural areas. Years ago, they might have employed someone part-time to maintain their domain name, server or hosting service, website, etc. Then it became free and much easier to just create a Facebook page, and any layperson in the office can manage it as the social media coordinator. Sometimes they still have a real website, but it hasn't been updated in years. All the recent and relevant information is on their Facebook page.
There was an item on Hacker News a few months ago about the crisis of water contamination at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. As commented on that item, I was there. For a while, a couple Facebook pages were the only sources of timely information for affected residents. All the town hall events, in which US Navy and Army officials answered questions, were streamed live on Facebook, and being logged into a Facebook account was the only way to ask a question if you couldn't attend the town halls in-person (which had limited seating due to COVID). It was probably two weeks before they started putting all the information onto an official non-Facebook web page after people complained about this (during the Facebook town hall events, on behalf of friends and neighbors without Facebook accounts).
Hilarious! But I frankly see a big difference between having a 1-on-1 conversation with someone, and always being able to see what conversations people are having with each other every minute of the day via Facebook feed.
The fact that venmo is on this list is hilarious, but yes it is deserved. It's genuinely exciting to see where the limit of shameless growth hacking is, if there is any. Will there ever be a dialysis machine that invites all your friends?
What really helped me was getting rid of the app and distracting my muscle memory. It was weird to realize how often I was looking at the screen in search for the icon when I was otherwise idle. Once the habit to fill empty time with those was broken life was better. (less "stupid" posts on my mind, more enjoying the outside by looking up instead of the screen etc.)
And once in a while I unfortunately "need" Facebook: Restaurants having current info only there etc. and each time I'm happy not to waste time there anymore
> What really helped me was getting rid of the app and distracting my muscle memory. It was weird to realize how often I was looking at the screen in search for the icon when I was otherwise idle.
This, 100%. I went dry for January and included social media in that. Deleted apps on 1/1 and still find myself occasionally instinctively going to where they were - much less often now, but it was startling at first.
they’re all legally obligated to actually delete your data, feel free to cite the ccpa or gdpr, they’d rather delete the data than contest your residency
you don’t actually need the accounts for anything, I deleted all of mine and felt the same way at first… but 3 years in and I have zero doubts that i’m better off without them, should have done it sooner
The hackernews comments section, populated by people who are looking to talk about their latest argument against social media (guilty), but who typically need to find an appropriate article for that rant to be on topic.
I have an old facebook account registered using the email address that no longer exists so it is impossible for me to log into it. Yet it still exists and appears in google search results.
I would've written to the support, but I can't find any way to contact facebook. Any suggestions?
I deleted my Facebook account. Good decision. The username - my first name (very common in my country) - was then used by a guy who regularly posts sexist, religious hatred, general ultra right wing posts - he’s kinda high up in a state committee of the ruling party. I kinda feel bad about that. (Same guy got my Instagram handle as well - I think he was waiting for it)
Then I had to open a Facebook account anyway, because house hunting here became next to impossible without it. So that’s there.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 263 ms ] thread(I did notice some said "subject to applicable law" - so I guess Europe!)
I lived through the firefox extension debacle in 2019 or so when FF accidentally let a cert expire and it helpfully uninstalled all my "unverified" extensions, of which container tabs was one. When everything was fixed, my settings were erased.
Except they weren't. To this day, I still get random ghost-like behaviour from my old container tabs settings. Google-contained apps will try to open in my banking container, as I gradually realise all of my containers were deleted but the URL-to-container mapping wasn't, and it was by ID not name, and the IDs have been reused.
Containers should be a core feature because they are /the/ feature ff has over the chrome army right now. I know they were (are?) trying to prove that core features aren't necessary because you can write anything in a web extension (IIRC that's how they justified getting rid of RSS), but it just hasn't been so in my experience.
For mosts it should be easier and more intuitive to use Firefox with First Party Isolation enabled.
The mental gymnastics of container management becomes superfluous, and there is minimal risk of leaking data by mistake.
Not many people use any extensions[1], which is why it should not be an extension, even if it is actually an extension in terms of implementation. Certainly I wouldn't expect my parents to discover and install the extension, but I might expect them to be able to be taught to use a first-class feature.
[1]: As the Firefox base dwindles further to only a hard core of techies, this might not be true, but it's probably true of Chrome: only 13 extensions have over 10 million installs and Chrome is used by over 2 billion people.
Multi-Account Containers
Temporary Containers
Sidebery
The UX for using containers is abysmal, so no fucking wonder. This is the problem with "data-driven" design, it falls for the McNamara Fallacy. It's an over-reliance on 'scientific and objective' quantitative metrics while aggressively ignoring qualitative considerations and analysis. You'll never achieve excellence like this.
Temporary account containers: automatically makes a new tab isolated from the others. This reduces the data thieves tracking and it allows you to ignore sites that have a limit on the number of articles you read before putting up the paywall. For some sites, there is advantage in using the same container so I use Multi-Account containers.
Multi-Account containers: I have multiple webmail accounts and have a container for each one pinned in my main browser window. For me, these containers are aligned with different businesses that I run and personal stuff. Using them is so easy - right click on a tab and reopen in X container.
Containers (and uBlock and side tabs) should be baked into the browser.
Instagram literally has no contactable support if you aren’t a massive account (200k+ followers or whatever). I feel this should be highly illegal.
I have thought about retaining a lawyer and see if I can twist their arm legally (via GDPR), but I don’t want a simple account deletion to run in the tens of thousands of euros.
Yes I am intensely frustrated.
The automated ID verification might fail for a variety of reasons (frankly if they don’t originally have a copy I’m not sure what they’d be comparing it to) but the GDPR process should work if you fight long enough. You might need to prove that you owned the email or number though - email might be tricky but number is easier as you can submit a bill or do another subject access request to your provider which should still have records about it.
Good luck!
"The data controller responsible for your information is Meta Platforms Ireland Limited, which you can contact online or by writing to:
Meta Platforms Ireland Ltd.
4 Grand Canal Square
Grand Canal Harbour
Dublin 2 Ireland"
The "contact online" link leads to the following form: https://help.instagram.com/contact/186020218683230
I would send the request both online and by tracked post with a proof of delivery. In the end your lawyer would do the same thing and charge for this at an hourly rate.
Edit: I'd even pay >$100 just for a ZIP of "everything you might regret deleting." The connections are valueless at this point, but the pictures and my mom's priceless comments on them not so much.
I realize many have reasons to get rid of Facebook entirely, but for me this was a reasonable compromise.
People bemoan the Facebook of old where it was updates from friends old and new, and family - but that's still the core of the product, groups are optional.
In particular if you see a photo of you or yours somewhere and want it modified or removed.
Not to mention there’s really no value in deletion. Log out, stop using all of the clients. The end.
I see value in deleting information about me on the Internet. Not to hide it from companies like Facebook (because they probably hold you data even if you delete them), but from other people. You never know who can use your pictures/profile for. Obviously, the first step would be to not publish sensitive information about yourself, but if that ship has already sailed, well, the least you can do is to remove it before you "log out and stop using all the clients".
I don’t really see what you gain by deletion. Better off running one of many scripts to delete all your data and retain the account
The counter to all of this is "for now..." - there's no network that gets massive without falling prey to numerous kinds of incentives.
The UX as a free discord user is horrible.
They still retain all of your messages (including DMs) unencrypted indefinitely with no easy way to remove them. Deleting your account doesn't remove messages either.
https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/discord.html
https://stallman.org/discord.html
> The nothing to hide argument states that individuals have no reason to fear or oppose surveillance programs, unless they are afraid it will uncover their own illicit activities. An individual using this argument may claim that an average person should not worry about government surveillance, as they would have "nothing to hide".
> Edward Snowden remarked "Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say." He considered claiming nothing to hide as giving up the right of privacy which the government has to protect.
It shows how awful FB is at design and UX. They really are the Fisher Price of the web. Its seems as if they build for stupid people who have no tech skills... In other words: the majority of people...
I mean, if you don’t have such connections then who cares, but if you do think about that
You can always exchange email addresses before closing down accounts to stay in touch.
Facebook makes it easy to curate the appearance of friendship, but meaningful relationships take time and effort in the real world to maintain. People have traded quantity for quality, and the true impetus for this transformation is that social graphs with more nodes are easier for facebook to make money from.
Extended social networks are integral part of humanity and communities. Being isolated and interacting only with handful of true friends is more modern invention.
Perhaps hand out an e-mail address and/or something else that does not require people to agree to some corporate ToS/privacy policy where people can reach you to the ones you do care about staying in touch with, preemptively for when they or you stops using Facebook, be it by choice or force.
It is not acceptable that a single or a handful of corps should own the digital social room. If you rely only on them, then it is you who close people out, not the ones who choose to leave or get kicked out.
I get that it's a sad situation but you can not put the blame on the ones who left. Learn from that and you won't have to experience it again.
I guess I am part of your generation as well because I recognize your description.
Zuck needs you more than you need Zuck.
https://www.datarequests.org/blog/sample-letter-gdpr-erasure...
Send this letter by email and my registered snail mail letter to the Data Protection Officer of the company (e.g. Facebook's Dublin Office).
Violating such a request can lead to fines of 4% of annual revenue of any offending company.
The reach of the law is concerned with where you are, not what your citizenship is.
That said, it would be great to have some kind of service like that again. It shouldn’t be hard to erase a digital identity, that’s what GDPR stipulates anyway.
More info on the service I’m referring to: https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/12/facebook...
For Instagram and Twitter, my rule of thumb is to prefer topical accounts to entity ones. That is, accounts that are dedicated to a single topic, no matter how narrow or large the scope, over those of people and/or companies.
Personal and business accounts, no matter how focused they are, tend to go off topic very often, and there's nothing to do about it. A designer or an art studio can still post about politics, religion, or whatever the controversy du jour is about. An account about logo design or some python framework, not so much if ever.
This allows me to have a feed whose content I sort of control. With Twitter, it gets even better with lists, so I have ones about dev stuff, others about business topics, etc. and the content there is almost on topic most of the time.
Since I started doing this, the impact of social media on my mood almost vanished, yet I'm still able to closely follow what's happening on topics I really care about.
When I want to see what's happening on the real world, I check my Facebook.
I'm sure aware of how bad these companies are with personal data. So it you think it'd be better to delete your account, then, yes, do it.
This. These services aren't toxic if you don't follow toxic accounts.
Also, I didn't think much about it in the past but now that I split my time between 3 countries and 2 continents, having FB (messenger) is the best way to keep in touch with people without bugging them with my several phone numbers (and charges that may occur, thanks Canadian telecoms).
Your ability to moderate your usage of these services doesn’t make them not toxic. Your statement is victim blaming.
These services are still major proprietors of surveillance capitalism. They sell your future behavior to the highest bidder. This is toxic in itself.
Beyond which, your participation in these services is a signal to those who trust you that these services are safe for them to use. They are not, because they are not safe for anyone to use. That you have mitigated the harm through devoting even more of your attention to them doesn’t change that.
Really? You're going to equate this to crimes someone perpetuates against another?
For weeks I've seen posts blaming Ukraine for being invaded and having genocide committed against them. That's victim blaming.
Social media users aren't victims of anything except their own inability to limit and moderate usage. Back in the day people would sit in front of the TV, now it's just a different screen. That's on them. Many people also use social media constructively; to do things like run their business, keep in touch with friends and family, etc...
Have a feeling you’d get a long with the Sackler family famously. Christ.
At some point you need to talk about personal responsibility...
How about them? They also designed their products to be addictive.
“Personal Responsibility” is just the shield that powerful companies use to avoid being regulated.
Shift the blame to the exploited and make it clear that their problems stem from their moral deficiency. Pretty convenient all told —- the personal responsibility of the architects of these systems and products somehow evaporates.
Personal responsibility cannot overcome AI designed to addict you. These services are not your friends. You are not the customer or the product. Your future behavior is the product. The only way to win is not to play.
I agree with your general arguments but you're going too far here. Individuals can overcome addiction. That doesn't change the big picture of how additive substances and services effect society as a whole, and I agree corporations use personal responsibility rhetoric to stave off government regulation. But you're going too far by suggesting that individual addicts have no chance of quitting. Many people have quit, proving that it's not impossible. It's good to see the whole forest, but don't forget the trees.
Well. They do their best with recommendations and popular posts which try to lurk into your feed anyway. The whole TikTok is kinda based in that idea.
I spent a day or two reporting every recommended post that I didn't like hoping to tell the algorithm to leave me alone. To no avail.
I still see these posts on my feed whenever I check it. And it's very bad.
This is so wrong, on so many levels. They will capture your clicks, your usage patterns, your interests, and the internet will present to you in a non-neutral way, in a way which will not be in your interest, but in the interest of whoever is paying for the results of your data analysis. A way which will influence your perception of reality in microscopic and permanent ways, because they will know you more intimately than you know yourself.
Do not interact with surveillance capitalists. You will lose.
One should instead protect its behavioural breadcrumbs and try to use non surveillance ways of communication.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter are what you make of them. There’s nothing to “present” if you don’t mindlessly scroll but use them the way they were originally intended: to keep in touch with contacts. For some people it’s just easiest to keep in touch with them on Facebook, etc.
There also a lot of good Facebook groups, and marketplace is very useful.
Being able to stay in contact with people is extremely useful. Cutting that out entirely out of spite doesn’t do any good.
Frankly, it’s shocking how much mental energy some random dude you met once 8 years ago can occupy if you let him on your feed. We choose to not remove them due to some vague fear of “the social media bubble” as if we don’t filter out people and organizations we don’t like all the time with or without it.
I use it to clean twitter on regular interval.
It works with every service except Google and Apple related ones (They can't add support for those without getting kicked off the app stores)
No idea, just wondering if it's just batches of 3000 would solve that.
[0]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/privacy/
[1]: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/about/
They're all for privacy (which is a selling point) until there's money on the line.
Much like Apple.
I used to advertise on FB so had to maintain an account purely for this purpose but noticed a few times that 'people you may know' were usually a result of random encounters looking me up. Maybe because only facebook can verify you're not a creep or something?
One time I asked soemone out on a date and she seemed keen until the next day she had changed her mind. Probably pure coincidence that this person I didn't know until 2 days before was suddenly one of my 'people you may know' list.
Sure enough my blank FB profile was the giveaway that I am actually a serial killer. Now I'd rather these people just go down a rabbit hole of looking through 1000 possible matches and finding nothing instead.
I never found deleting or deactivating to be very helpful. At some time or another you're going to need said account for something.
While deleting is a bit extreme, some of these services will respect the actual deletion and others will not. I suppose the question at the end of the day is...why bother?
I've found it much more easy to "declutter" by following digital minimalism practices of getting rid of apps, only using browsers, practicing mindfulness of said platforms, and only using said platforms with a specific intention.
There's a laundry list of tips you could use to make social media harder to use or even more bearable, but the most effective approach I've used is simple moderation and mindfulness.
Also why is Mozilla writing articles about this? I get the privacy angle, but aren't they also willing to put ads in front of people and other partnerships sacrificing that privacy for users? Like how does Mozilla make money outside of Google search engine being the default? I do know they lay off many of my friends who work on dev tools or even mobile apps there(i.e. browsers).
Nope for almost all of these. Different strokes different folks.
> Facebook Nope. Haven't had one for more than 10 years now. So easy to live life without a FB account. I stay in touch with family and friends by phonecalls and Mumble.
> Instagram Used it for maybe 10 minutes in 2013, haven't touched since.
> Snapchat Same as Instagram, but in 2016.
> Tiktok Same as above.
> Spotify I listen to music on my harddrive.
> Venmo Still using Paypal since 2012.
> Twitter Nope, in fact my life has been significantly improved since I've not had an account. I use Nitter when I want to read a Twitter thread.
Amazon and Google are the only ones that I find very hard to avoid, but Google has gotten increasingly easy to avoid as alternative services are popping up.
You are a counter-example for sure, but this means that you don't have a group chat platform to plan coordinated events with your friends? Maybe it's an age thing, but getting my friends in a call at a given time to organise a social event is probably as hard as organising the event itself. Compare with Facebook/Messenger/Whatsapp where everyone is in a group chat I can just write "Anyone wants to have dinner at my place this Friday?".
It can make it even easier, especially if you have various groups you interact with on different platforms.
More seriously... My wife has friends that she sees pretty regularly, because we still live in her home state near where she grew up, but I really don't. I'm not sure what they use to organize but I do know that it isn't Facebook or WhatsApp.
I have a couple of friends that I keep in touch with over text but we aren't a group of friends. One of my friends does have a large friend group and I happen to be in a group MMS because of him. But it's not a place where events are organized because his friends are also scattered all over the country.
I use Discord for the group that I play DnD and video games with but, again, we're scattered all over the country. Only one of them is nearby.
Signal, Text Message, and most importantly and most universal, E-mail. I've coordinated Secret Santa events purely by email for the past 5 years.
I really have not experienced this, but the several times I've had to interact with a company without a website, phone works wonders and is often quicker.
> Also, if your family uses Facebook, they will interact with each other on it whether you are there or not.
I really don't see the issue here unless you have a terribly unhealthy sense of FOMO.
There was an item on Hacker News a few months ago about the crisis of water contamination at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. As commented on that item, I was there. For a while, a couple Facebook pages were the only sources of timely information for affected residents. All the town hall events, in which US Navy and Army officials answered questions, were streamed live on Facebook, and being logged into a Facebook account was the only way to ask a question if you couldn't attend the town halls in-person (which had limited seating due to COVID). It was probably two weeks before they started putting all the information onto an official non-Facebook web page after people complained about this (during the Facebook town hall events, on behalf of friends and neighbors without Facebook accounts).
The fact that venmo is on this list is hilarious, but yes it is deserved. It's genuinely exciting to see where the limit of shameless growth hacking is, if there is any. Will there ever be a dialysis machine that invites all your friends?
And once in a while I unfortunately "need" Facebook: Restaurants having current info only there etc. and each time I'm happy not to waste time there anymore
This, 100%. I went dry for January and included social media in that. Deleted apps on 1/1 and still find myself occasionally instinctively going to where they were - much less often now, but it was startling at first.
you don’t actually need the accounts for anything, I deleted all of mine and felt the same way at first… but 3 years in and I have zero doubts that i’m better off without them, should have done it sooner
I would've written to the support, but I can't find any way to contact facebook. Any suggestions?
Then I had to open a Facebook account anyway, because house hunting here became next to impossible without it. So that’s there.