I didn't delete my account but I let it go dormant about 4 years ago. Don't miss it a bit. Social media is all about making you feel bad.
Its a platform for people with low self esteem to dream about what their lives could have been. For older folks to remember the past. For the average guy/gal to keep tabs on old flames.
And most importantly a place for jackasses and rich people with various complexes to show the world how great their lives are.
And Facebook is great at figuring out your weakness. For me for example, Facebook became a window for re-imagining my life in college.
No thanks. The trip down memory lane is fun every once in a while but the old picture catalog in the closet has morphed into an insidious entity, always beckoning you back. My phone vibrates, someone posted a new picture of you from 5 years ago and 50 people like it. Remember that day? All those people. Dont you?
Fuck that, I'm done being screwed with by a platform designed to give you your fix.
I have lived with essentially 0 social media presence for about seven years now, and I can say with certainty that my life is better without it. Facebook et al create an atmosphere where a relationship is defined by clicking a button that says "like" on someone's picture or sending them happy birthday wishes when you're reminded to. I find that even if I haven't seen someone in years, giving them a call and meeting up with them produces far better results than tepid, meaningless banter mediated by a walled garden. "But what if they live far away?" you ask. Send them an email. Long form, asynchronous, high latency communication also produces far better results than consistent small talk on Facebook
I've had just about 0 social media activity as well. My wife deleted her account and I meant to as well, but only remember when I get a new friend request, which I promptly ignore.
I guess my question is: do you use it minimally or not at all? I stopped using FB before I could get a sense for the feeling it gave me. I gather that it gives people the feelings you describe, but I wonder if that is the reality or just what people say.
On the other hand, a guy I know (fellow biker) was killed in a wreck two weeks ago. This past Thursday we held a fundraiser at a local establishment where his wife works and raised several thousand dollars for his family.
Facebook was absolutely critical to the success of this event. It was put together very quickly and there's no other way we could have easily reached as many people -- and as far away -- as we did.
It's great that, as Facebook offers you no value, you've chosen not to use it. Commenting on that in order to encourage others to do the same is great, as frankly, Facebook is a toxic company and the more people move off the platform the better.
However, your experience is not universal and your comment, rather than criticising the platform itself, actively disparaged current users of it, which is unconstructive and offensive.
I hoped to strike a chord with people currently using it for the same reasons I did. My post is partially self-deprecating and doesn't attack anyone specific. I'm sure there's people using the platform with no issues, and I think it's fine to criticize something for the behavior its built to induce in people.
That's fair enough, but the wording of your statements do seem to broadly imply "if you use Facebook, you are either X, Y or Z negative stereotype" rather than "these people exist on Facebook".
It's difficult to discuss this. Facebook on paper is useful and technically marvelous. Society and humanity can certainly benefit from it.
The problem is that certain types of people - irrespective of intent - are poison to other people. The problem is that we can be our own worst enemy.
How can we build a social platform and protect the users from each other? To protect the users from themselves? Especially when the steps necessary might be diametrically opposed to the bottom line. No idea. I wonder if it's even possible to devise such a system.
I believe the real problem is in us. It is not just the fact that poisonous users exist. We should be immune. We aren't because we lack the self-awareness and lack the courage to break free from these platforms when/if they become unmanageable. We should be mindful of others. We are taught to celebrate freedom, but when have we celebrated sensitivity and mindfulness of others?
He does say that, that I agree with, I don't like it.
He goes on to further imply those using it have low self esteem, are jackasses, or rich people with complexes. That's an addition to the comment that doesn't contribute to the discussion.
I appreciate other opinions which is why HN is so much better place than Facebook. Yeah I trashed it, it was bad for me. And I have a feeling it is for many others the same. And you might be right that I'm just a cynical jaded ass, I won't rule that out either.
However I think opinions can be dissenting, and even incendiary like mine often are and still contribute to or spark meaningful discussion.
And this is a difference in opinion I'm fine with. If I wanted everyone to agree with me I would adopt a vastly different writing style.
Reading slacking's comments, I feel that slacking is the type of person that slacking complains about. By putting down all those lesser people who use facebook, slacking appears to me to be just another "person with low self esteem" with a "complex to show the world how great their lives are".
Sure it does. Each type of social media appeals to a different type of person and determines the content you see. Yeah, the descriptions are a bit brash, but there's no need to squash discussion with accusations of offensiveness.
It is impossible to discuss the utility or value of Facebook without discussing the quality of the content it provides. As witness, the role of bots and misinformation, rabble-rousing, and white supremacist network coordination and recruiting in the 2016/2017 US election and aftermath.
> Its a platform for people with low self esteem to dream about what their lives could have been. For older folks to remember the past. For the average guy/gal to keep tabs on old flames.
It's amazing what a mirror Facebook is. Your Facebook description resembles very few other people's Facebook. Its nothing like mine.
I briefly worked on an app that had Facebook integration and got to see different people's feeds. Even straight white male programmer dudes like myself, each one had unrecognizably different content in their feeds. Mine is mostly baby pictures, art posts & science posts. Someone elses was entirely niche events and parties. Another was the most banal tabloid celebrity gossip. Another just seemed a random mix of every sort of media. Another was predominantly toxic right wing graphical text posts urging you to be afraid and lots of flags.
What I'm getting at here, is that I don't think Facebook itself is the problem. It's never the problem with a feed that you curate yourself.
I was with you until the last sentence. A feed we curate ourselves? Really? I never got to see most of what my friends posted over the years, so I can hardly be curating any of it, can I? :)
That would make sense if we only had a few friends. If you have a few hundred, you only see a small percentage of what they posted, regardless of your actions. Now I understand that my actions impact what I see, but I'm pretty sure it's way more nuanced than what you describe: what does it mean "like that"? I may like or read two posts and discussions about food, and Facebook infers it's about food, but I actually just liked the pictures of broccoli and don't want more food articles. I didn't curate anything, i just wanted to see the damn broccoli.
It's not "me" who decides what I see. I may just want the damn broccoli, but it may take a year or two before Facebook's AI figures that out. And I sure as hell will never figure out what THEY inferred about my preferences, because there isn't any "here's what _you_ decided to see" list that summarizes my inoccuous choices...
How many signals go to the feed? How many of these are my conscious choice? And I am what you could call an expert computer user who actually worked for one of those big tech companies so I can at least imagine some of that complexity and reason about it...
The liking and hiding emphasis features are trivial. They hardly matter. If Facebook's post emphasis algorithm was entirely random, very nuanced or specifically malevolent it wouldn't matter.
Only follow people whose posts you find enjoyable and you will find Facebook enjoyable. This is entirely up to you. If you stop enjoying someone's posts, you unfollow them.
Guaranteed 100% success rate. It's not difficult or tricky. There's no gotcha, there's no fee. Most people can figure this out. I'm not sure why this isn't intuitive for the OP or yourself.
> Its a platform for people with low self esteem to dream about what their lives could have been. For older folks to remember the past. For the average guy/gal to keep tabs on old flames.
Do you think this about federated Facebook alternatives like Diaspora?
My FB account's gone dormant since I've found a much better community on Instagram. You don't need to follow everyone you personally know like Facebook would expect you to. It's much more positive (not in the Black Mirror way) and there's a lot more substance in everyone's posts.
This is a highly cynical view of Facebook and social media in general. I don't use Facebook very often, but I like seeing updates from family and friends. And Facebook is very useful for messaging and organizing events.
It is. But I don't like the idea of using a platform designed to hook you in. Everything is about "engagement". Facebook is not above messing with your mood and life outlook to get more eyeballs. If you engage more when you're really sad that's what you'll start seeing.
I "deleted" my account on Facebook about 7 years ago. This January they randomly reactivated it just like that. It's public and visible. I haven't logged in there, because that would just show them I want it back.
I'm pretty sure this is in breach with their own terms. And maybe even illegal in the EU. I haven't had the time to take any action not am I sure what should I even do. Maybe report this to some EU watchdog?
To avoid that kind of stuff, when I deleted my account a few years back, I used an automated script to delete all my posts. Then I went through my profile and replaced all fields with empty or no fake data.
If they ever reactivate my account, there's not much left to see.
By the way, I thought quitting Facebook was going to be hard. But I haven't regretted it a second. Same thing with Whatsapp.
> Then I went through my profile and replaced all fields with empty or no fake data.
Facebook/WhatsApp is a gold mine for the NSA and the CIA (as well as others). I would be surprised if they ever deleted any data when you "update" a field. It seems far more likely that they keep 100% of all data ever entered and just display the latest entry of your "update history".
It is not a crime currently, and even under the GDPR it's not absolute, it also gives most companies an easy way out as they can deny requests based on "for exercising the right of freedom of expression and information;".
https://gdpr-info.eu/art-17-gdpr/
Also "deletion" and "processing" are very vaguely defined terms. Data can be made inaccessible while complying with deletion, but more importantly data can be abstracted in a manner that it is accessible but still compliant with the right to be forgotten.
I've worked on a few solutions for deep analytics this past year specifically designed to keep the data while being 100% compliant with the silly GDPR regulations including the right for erasure.
The data can be deleted or anonymised, and the deletion can also be soft, as long as no one can query your data specifically no one really cares how it's stored.
If "Show security notifications" is enabled in security settings then they'd get caught, so I don't think Facebook is going to start doing that. The address book and metadata they have access to are more useful to them anyway.
except for all the false positives. every time someone gets a new phone in a group chat, someone has to ask "did you change your phone or is someone snooping at you", which creeps them out, because it's off by default, and so we ask less and ignore it, "probably changed their phone".
it's terrible ux for security, it could have been much more transparent and actually encouraging proper security behaviour.
They still collect all the metadata. They know with whom you communicate, and how often. They know with whom you're in a group chat and the names of those groups. They know your profile picture.
(Disclaimer: I'm a bit biased though since I'm affiliated with Threema. I think privacy in day to day communication is very important though, that was my reason for quitting.)
I used a script to delete everything before deactivating. Unfortunately this caused some negative feelings from friends who I had unfriended when I decided to reactivate the account. In hindsight easily avoided mistake.
Since Facebook accounts can be easily reactivated by accident, or phantom causes as users here pointed out, I would next time use a tool that sent a message to each friend explaining the situation before deletion.
> Unfortunately this caused some negative feelings from friends
that's Facebook's toxic behaviour right there. it's disgusting! purposefully (yes) driving a wedge and animosity between me and my friends because I dared to do something that you / your platform doesn't like?? fuck that. I've broken (irl) contact with people who (consistently) tried that.
this is textbook toxic behaviour and psychological manipulation, how does anyone put up with this shit.
Threema. Self funded, no investors. Hosted in Switzerland on own hardware. Focus is on maximizing privacy and not having/storing any customer data. (Disclaimer: I'm an employee/developer.)
I'm using Matrix/Riot to communicate with two of my friends.
It's really nice in general. But if you want to use E2E encryption, the key exchange is really tedious. Every few months, when someone gets a new phone or accidentally logs out of his account, we need to meet in person to compare fingerprints.
Of course, even if you leave out the E2E encryption, it's still about as secure as Telegram's default settings. And with E2E encryption, it should be about as secure as Signal is (I'm not a cryptographer, though, so take this with a grain of salt). However, if the user is not experienced with key verification, I'd always recommend Signal over Riot.
Yes, I did consider that it was hacked or something. But that still means the account was/is restorable and not actually deleted like they lead me to believe.
I don't think anyone has logged in, since none of the details have been changed.
I've had the same problem with Myspace, 3 years ago. They restored my deleted account and they wouldn't let me log in. Regaining access was much harder than expected [1].
I'm still on the fence about the fact that having a facebook account is a bad thing.
I have seen it consuming a lot of my time in the past, and I did deactivate my account for a few months last year. I improved my life a lot, there were fewer distractions, and I generally had better self esteem. Not much was missing, except for a few conveniences I had with the account.
I have since reactivated my Facebook account, using it sparingly now. Instead, I uninstalled all IM apps from my phone, and turned off Email/slack/work notifications. I do not have the Facebook app, or the website in my bookmarks. I receive no alerts, no messages anywhere. Every week or so, I take 5-10 minutes to scroll down the News Feed (btw, doing this has the effect that I usually see much higher quality posts which Facebook thinks I've missed rather than a whole stream of memes and ads). I may or may not read the messages, and don't reply a lot. I have my email and phone number listed on my profile, so if anyone needs to really contact me, they almost always find ways to do so.
This gives me the option to use the perks at my will without being addicted and consumed by it. Visiting a city? Use the graph search to connect with friends you can visit. I can look up old photos at will if referencing anything. All this, given the fact that it's one of the only ways to connect with most of my non-tech (who rarely check their emails) friends in an asynchronous manner.
PS: This is not a comment praising Facebook. I definitely like having my privacy in my hand, out of NSA's reach. I'm just giving a reason as to why so many people might not be keen to delete their Facebook profile.
What's the best way to test if my account is deleted?
Every month or so I'll get a handful of emails from Facebook saying it looks like I'm trying to log in and asks if I need help with that. Either they're trying to get me to re-join in a very pathetic way, or someone else is trying to sign up using my email address, causing Facebook to think they want to re-activate my account.
I don't remember receiving anything like this, even after taking months away from the platform.
Are you sure your internet profile elsewhere is not subjecting you to doxxing attempts? I know friends who are in publishing or blogging etc. with fairly well known profiles on the internet, and they seem to be targeted far more regularly with attempted unauthorised logins to their email and social media accounts.
This. It's far more likely to be doxxing attempts.
I was contacted by an undergraduate asking for grad school advice. Five minutes later there were several emails in the inbox from Facebook with exactly that content. I don't normally receive anything at that address (everyone I know emails me at a different address). How do you expect me to give you advice when you pull this shit on me?
I do use facebook, last thursday I got an email saying that I was trying to log in when I wasn't and it was super weird for it to happen at the time. It's either some bug, exploit, or facebook doing it on purpose.
Do those emails occur soon after you log in to Spotify? I recently found out that Spotify secretly tries to log you in as a Facebook user even if you don't use Facebook login. It first tries to pass the credentials through Facebook login and if that fails it goes through regular email login. This failed attempt triggers the Facebook security emails
I'm not sure that what they are doing is even legal. Just another reason to NEVER use the same email/password combination on multiple sites. I wouldn't be surprised if other apps are doing the same thing.
Ive never used Spotify. They seem to happen at random and their wording is a bit vague. As if someone's trying to access my account but they don't outright say so.
I'm also getting these emails. Deleted (not deact) my account 8 months ago and recently started getting notifications that someone is trying to sign up. If this comes from facebook just makes me not want to touch anything related to the brand anymore
Wouldn't that be related to various data breaches that happened over the years ? Not from Facebook in particular: it would make sense to try a login/e-mail and password from the Adobe data breach to see if this combination indeed works.
In addition to the other fine suggestions, I'd add that i they could simply be phishing emails. I get all sorts of such warnings and emails "from" sites I've never created accounts for.
My experience with deleting my LinkedIn accounnt;
Tried deleting. LinkedIn responded with a message saying I have active ads running and I am the creator of a LinkedIn group.
I ran an ad campaign ages back and created a group long time back. I am stuck with LinkedIn because of this. Worse than dark pattern.
Why not try a different approach, and start posting nonsense or content that breaches their T&Cs instead? Send annoying messages and make requests to lots of random LinkedIn employees. Embrace the fact that they want to keep your account open and keep shitposting until they decide to quit (by closing your account or banning you).
Have a friend of yours on LinkedIn report you as dead. I'm not joking, and this does work. Write something about how it hurts to look at your profile since you've passed, and to please take it down.
I've re-read your comment a few times. Now - it's early - but I'm missing something.
Is this a "Dark Pattern" (I'm not even going to try to parse how something can be darker than dark)? Or is it a safety feature (although maybe badly designed)?
Maybe all you have to do is shut down your ad campaign and your group. Then deactivate/delete your account. Would this not work?
It's a dark pattern if when creating those entities within LinkedIn if it's not clear that by doing that, you're removing the ability to ever close your account. But I agree with you -- deleting is definitely worth trying.
Perhaps you could try to transfer admin rights to another LinkedIn user before re-attempting to delete the group? My guess is that they require at least one user account to possess admin privileges for a group especially if it is non-empty.
Another approach would be to remove all users from the group before trying to delete the group.
I always wonder if programmers have a different experience on Facebook than other folks. I deactivated my account this year and a lot of it was because I could identify the patterns of content that I was being fed by the algorithms and didn't care for it. On top of that after I had the same political conversation with the same person for about the 5th time I just decided it wasn't worth the time anymore.
I really think they don't. Thats a big part of the problem. Lay people are being tricked into thinking that their Facebook feed is a reflection of reality rather than a highly curated set of articles designed to appeal to their specific sensibilities. They have no concept of what goes into the platform behind the scenes. They have no concept of the fact that there is a building in California full of thousands of world class scientists whose sole purpose in life is to get them to check that notification on their phone. They have the illusion of choice when it is pure psychological manipulation
I quit Facebook in 2008 and restarted using it last year. I use it defensively more or less once a week. I must say it's fun to play with it's patterns and rewarding when he welcomes you with "good morning" when it's night :)
But you realise how much he knows about you and how much discipline you need to escape it's algorithms. For example I click on random profiles and wait for them to request my friendship (supposedly because fb suggested me to them for friendship). But sometimes I must resist clicking on really interesting people because I'm afraid fb would know too much about me.
It's even more difficult when scrolling. If I stop scrolling on something it thinks I'm interested in the same kind of content. Sometimes I slip. Fortunately I'm "friend" with very few real friends. Most of my "friends" are random people. So my timeline consists of random things that are more or less interesting depending on my mood.
I set a few groups to "see first" which helps prune down the number of useless things in my newsfeed. Occasionally I'll click an ad or mark it as unwanted to try to train the FB algorithms.
The most useful things on FB are events, practicing people's names, and messenger. It's handy to try to go through the list of people who are about to go to a party so it's easier to remember them in person. Even though it is sometimes useful, it can easily take too much time.
Facebook is just dumb fun for me, a time waster when I'm waiting in line, and I like seeing the pics my friends put up. Some of my friends are pretty good at aggregating funny memes.
What I really want to know: how to permanently delete your entire presense of Google. All your emails, sent or received, all your G+, all your calendar reminders, Hangouts, etc.
Seems a daunting task. Especially the part where you have to contact everyone you know and ask them to delete their emails and hangouts with you.
What I really want to know: how to permanently delete your entire presense of Google.
You can't. Google reserves the right to retain/use your data indefinitely:
The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps).
The thing is that it will be nigh impossible for you to prove that Google didn't just set a flag to hide your data from public view, but still has and uses it (e.g. to target you with advertising).
There are no repercussions to not abiding by the law if you leave no (usable) evidence behind.
Well, I can't be sure about what the entire company is doing, but I've had an awful lot of code dealing with properly deleting accounts cross my inbox.
If we're actually keeping data, then that'd be a shock to me.
If we're actually keeping data, then that'd be a shock to me.
So, why not just state in the terms of service that data is actually erased within N days/months after deletion? One could always list exceptions (such as business listings).
Either Google cannot really guarantee that the data is deleted (due to its storage system); Google wants to reserve the right to retain some data in the future; or it is actually retaining some data. Otherwise, there is no point in putting this in your ToS. All three reasons are pretty worrisome.
Also, what you say is provably false in a more general sense. Google retains all kinds of analytics/tracking data of internet users that you cannot have removed. When you visit a site with Google ads or analytics, Google is keeping data on you.
IIUC that is anonymized data. The whole point then is that it cannot be associated to your account, i.e. cannot be removed when you delete your account.
Otherwise, there's a shit-ton of law and regulations around this issue. I'm sure there are plenty of options for you to take when you think a company violates EU law. Safe Harbor got wrecked because a young fellow from Austria thought so and courts determined he was right.
Well, do you also remove the data from the backups, the backups of the backups, and any "probabilistic models generated from the data"? That’s the more interesting question.
Outside of the crazies, for the rest, ever considered that maybe you are just uninformed?
Ten years ago, the ones telling people that agencies are storing everything by default, and Skype was bought/centralized to help with that were labeled as such. Nowdays it's "yea so"?
Aside for the browser storage, they also log every search request made from your browser. Since the only way to type a URL is to put it into the search bar, that means they get a log of every page you visit, how often you go there, how long yu spend there, etc. without triggering any other licenses or boxes.
The same profiling is done from Safari and other Chromium / Blink browsers that have the "awesome address bar"
I have read that when you visit a page with Analytics (which is like everywhere) Chrome has special handling so as to give them a more complete dataset without it being the browser that is officially collecting it.
they also log every search request made from your browser. Since the only way to type a URL is to put it into the search bar, that means they get a log of every page you visit, how often you go there, how long yu spend there, etc. without triggering any other licenses or boxes.
Not sure I follow. Why can't chrome just detect whether you entered a URL or not? If URL, load without sending to Google. If not a URL, send as search to Google.
In Firefox, back when it was introduced in Fennec somewhere around 2007 or 2008 (I don't know how it is now), you'd need 2 passwords. One to log in to your Firefox account and gain access to your encrypted data, and one to decrypt the data. It is feasible a nationstate can get access to your encrypted data, but it isn't feasible they are able to decrypt your data.
Exactly, as long as pretty much everyone I know uses Gmail, there's really no way to keep your emails away from Google. Encrypted mail would be an option, but it is such a hassle to set up for most people.
You can at least get a copy of all of it, and you can delete some of it.
1. Log in to your google account
2. go to https://www.google.com/settings/takeout (this doesn't work with the regional googles like 'google.co.uk' fwiw)
3. You should see a page called 'Download your data' with all the services selected. If you want to deselect anything, do, otherwise hit 'Next'
4. If you want to change the format or chunk size, do it here. Otherwise hit 'Next'
5. Wait. This can take a few days if your google account is big.
6. You'll get an email with a link to one or more archives to download. All your stuff will be in there in open formats.
7. You can delete your google account (I think from https://myaccount.google.com/preferences?pli=1#deleteservice... ) but it won't delete info they have on you in their caches
I very much appreciate the Google takeout service. I have switched to mostly using Fastmail, which is good but there is no easily used supported way to archive old emails locally on my laptop of backups. I don't consider using POP3 to fetch everything a good solution.
You can use tools like offlineimap to "backup" your Gmail account via IMAP. I used it to transfer all my mail to my own mail server when I quit using Gmail years ago.
Regarding your second part: Shouldn't this be just "how do I delete anything I interact with people?" Emails from privately run email server means you still have to find everyone and have everyone do the job (but I bet you most won't).
If you don't own the server, say no more. What about caches? PDF?
I'm guessing it would be a modernized version of the way things were before every jackass with a selfie stick or a blog decided that they deserve to make a living shitting their thoughts and lunch pictures onto the internet.
A bubble can be a really nasty small bubble regardless of whether it's being deliberately externally manipulated or not. HN is 1000% definitely a limited bubble.
I prefer to see it as restricting information flow to that I am strictly interested in, or has a potential real-life impact on me (local news). It's a bubble of my choosing curated by me.
And I would try and escape the bubble not by expanding my online exposure to dis/information, but by getting out into the real world and doing more stuff there.
I hear what you're saying - it's about signal to noise. Reduce the noise and you become better informed, not worse.
I stopped using Facebook and I don't follow mainstream news. I don't hear much about Trump or North Korea but I read my subreddits (I dropped /r/politics) and learn about Rojava in Syria, talk with my friends about the Diversity Memo and work hard to hear a detailed woman's view on the matter, or hit my YouTube subscriptions to find a lecture on physics or social issues.
I still 100% have a bubble but I don't think adding Facebook or MSM back in to my life would in any way improve the fidelity of my view on the world.
In my opinion MSM looks like garbage from any angle and Facebook just began to feel unhealthy (for me).
I'm not passing judgement on your personal ability to seek out counterarguments but more generally speaking this is exactly how echo chambers come about. People are generally only interested in news that confirms their pre-existing biases and will often cite the same arguments you make in defence of their echo chamber.
I'm not saying I don't sympathise with your approach as a persons time is only finite. But if you are interested in fact or even just balanced opinion then you do need to be aware of the bubble you're creating and be willing to question what you read / hear on any issues of importance.
I am not cutting myself off from one side of mainstream news. I am cutting myself off completely.
I have no idea what is happening with Trump or North Korea. I am vaguely aware there was a flood in Texas.
The subreddits I subscribe to are special interest subs that have nothing to do with mainstream news or opinions, and are relevant and assist real world activities I do.
I only read local news that could actually be relevant to me, like a new restaurant opening up in town, or special interest sites like HN that feed my professional interest in technology and programming.
I have old been cold turkey for about 6 weeks, but I hope to get to the point where I have no knowledge of whatever "big stories" (or small) the MSM is occupied with.
My basic philosophy is that the main/only thing important in life is achieving my personal goals, and the only stuff worth knowing about is things that can directly affect that outcome.
I'm looking forward to walking in to work one day and see everyone's ashen face turn to surprise at my apparent indifference to some big "world event". Talk to me when life changes in my 50km real world bubble.
Right on. I try to do the same thing, except about once a week I will briefly scan through Google news or the Apple News App on my iPad.
Addiction to mainstream news does nothing to help me achieve my life goals. I have friends who (I think) satisfy the definition of addition, when it comes to watching hours of news a day. What a waste of precious time.
I'm in the same boat. Cut off news, FB years ago, all social media junk. No cable; very little YouTube and haven't been happier. Initially I did all of this because the negative news was getting tiresome and now I feel much better about the world I live in. Occasionally I'll read about NK and other politically charged issues here and on a few subreddits but it's very limited. I don't care that I'm oblivious to the word affairs, I just don't see the point of knowing what happened in Some far off place, especially if it's due to some jackass behavior from a delusional person or group of people.
And is heavily reliant on a single corporate sponsor, for server, protocol and client development, AND running the centralized server with basically all matrix users on it.
sigh Please stop spreading FUD about Matrix? We no longer have single corporate sponsorship (our historical main sponsor pulled out because the project is so successful they didn't see why they should be the only ones paying the bill), and based on what we know of the overall network, <50% users use matrix.org.
Oh, so now you have 3 companies sponsoring you again. A short while ago only PIA had become a major sponsor (which also already happens to own two major IRC networks, and be the largest sponsor of some IRC clients)
When we’re discussing "decentralizing" things, these things become important. In those cases, we shouldn’t give such companies any influence in any way. As we’ve seen with Google a few days ago, relying on funding from a company can end up with you having to either give up your project, or follow their demands.
We haven't given our sponsors any influence in any way, and we are aiming for a lot more than 3. The sponsorship is purely in return for their logo appearing on the website and promoting them on the blog etc as sponsors.
I got a test account banned for a david hockney picture that had a single-brush-stroke ass-crack visible (I wanted to see where they draw the line. For new accounts far earlier than I had expected). They refused to delete the account afterwards, it's just permanently deactivated.
(this was years ago, before I even had a real account)
Nice to see simple instructions with direct links to relevant leaving Facebook pages. Hopefully they remain up to date as Facebook makes changes to its "exit policy".
Ive kept my account although I've wanted to delete it several times, trimmed it down to make it look like anyone's ordinary life. I sometimes posts pictures from social events I attend, but only clean stuff that looks like something a normal nerdy person would do.
At one point I figured that I might need it to seem normal sometime in the future.
Traveling to the US last year I'm glad I did, passed through the border checkup much easier than my other privacy loving friends who deleted thei social media accounts.
I also kept my gmail address even though I moved to fastmail. Mostly use it for signing up to things and unimportant stuff, but it sure was handy at the airport.
I guess it still exposes some of my life, but it's not like I can ever become anonymous again, since they never delete anything.
> Traveling to the US last year I'm glad I did, passed through the border checkup much easier than my other privacy loving friends who deleted thei social media accounts.
This is sad. As a US citizen, I have no idea how to even begin fighting crap like this.
Donate to the EFF. They're the only organisation providing solid advice on how to protect yourself against these (IMO unconstitutional) border searches [1]
I've been contributing monthly to the EFF (and ACLU, among other organization) for years. And will also encourage others to do so! They're great organizations!
The issue is the EFF and ACLU aren't going to be able to get sweeping legislative changes themselves. We, the constituency, need to be very vocal action as well.
I just feel ignored and dismissed by my Congress Critters.
They look through your electronics, also your laptop. Didn't take them long to clear me though. But I'm a white Scandinavian and my most recent posts to Facebook were about board games and concerts and most of my mails were in Danish or spam about video games.
I mean, they would probably still have cleared me if they had access to the full story, I'm not that much of a deviant. But take the board game nights as an example. A few of my friends smoke weed at those, and even though I haven't done that for 10 years, it's not something I'd want to be associated with on a social media site that a government trawls, so I make sure to keep that part out of the pictures.
On the other hand if you lack these things that everyone is expected to have, they become suspicious.
Wait, you're saying US customs looked through the contents of your laptop and electronics before letting you through? They checked your social media profiles?
This is absurd. As an American, I apologize for my government's lack of hospitality toward you. No country has ever treated me like you were treated by mine, nor would I feel fondly toward any that did.
I had de-activated my account ~7 years ago. Back then, deleting facebook was not an option. I thought I was done with it till recently (~2 months) i started getting all sorts of notification and what not on the linked email. Even got an email saying my `linked phone number` was removed. I never had one and had not used fb on phone ever. It was however an old number of mine(walmart straight talk number i had for ~4 months around the time i had deactivated it). Idk how that got added or approved or when that happened but w/e. I hated the idea of having to re-login to delete. (I wish i could have used some other burner computer or anything other than my laptop but maybe this is too much paranoia.) But I did recover password and went through the deletion process.
I didn't even bother asking for copy of my data or w/e. And I don't even care if NSA or whoever has a copy of it. By making leaving facebook hard, it made me bitter about it back then. Hopefully my account will be deleted from facebook and i never have to see use that site again.
P.S. Thanks for the link HN, I'd volunteer my personal data to some of the people here if they ever needed to compete with FB A.I! o/
My only problem with deleting a Facebook account is the Facebook login, which some of the apps enforce and most importantly developing apps which use Facebook login (for test purposes).
Surely I can create a fake account for that, but then you also need to resist the peer pressure of people trying to add you as “friends” all the time.
The thing that prevents me from leaving Facebook is a couple of Pages that are driving traffic to my websites and humans to my communities. What to do?
when I first deleted my Facebook account, I decided to keep tabs on it(letting a friend check if she could still see messages we exchanged). For a while, my name was shown as part of the message(but it was black, so you could not click it like a link). I made her check later on and it just said "Unknown user" or so, I cannot recall the exact phrase. Our messages were still there
Well, if you have made your account impossible for you, or anyone aside from certain employees of those companies, to access, the account is deleted. I mean, the social network MySpace, which still exists today (and is currently ranked #1,343 in the US by Alexa [0]), can have tons of data about you from 2006 to 2008, just as Yahoo Search can have tons of data about you from 1995 to 1998, but if you have completely stopped using both of those websites altogether, what's the value there?
Better yet, a girl you dated for the past 3 years but then broke up with could have tons of knowledge about you, and photos, and videos, but unless you're a politician, celebrity, or high-level business executive, where's the risk there? I'm not saying it's risk-free for everyone, but for the majority of people, it effectively is. Even just consider how Snapchat became so popular among teenagers over the last few years; new generations use new technologies, including, in this case, computer programs, which are now called apps, and even Windows 10 retrofitted that word from smartphones to desktop computers.
> Well, if you have made your account impossible for you, or anyone aside from certain employees of those companies, to access, the account is deleted.
Eh, no, that isn't the same at all.
There's 2 clear cases where this is proven:
1) In the case the company still uses profiling on your personal data in order to profit from you. (Or, if they still contact you in relation to your supposedly deleted account as pointed out by people throughout this thread.)
2) In the case of a security breach the data used for profiling (which was supposedly deleted) can be breached, shared, etc (a good way to figure out where spam comes from is using catch-all e-mail addresses something which ironically works great with Gmail).
For people in the EU, if they ask a company to delete their account, that company has to comply which includes any and all of their data. I don't know how it is for US but as a general statement I do wish our friends overseas including in the land of the free have solid laws to protect the individual citizens since I find that an integral part of a free nation.
Even from a moral PoV it makes sense (not that publicly owned companies have any sense of moral). Because in the end with a profiling service company you are the product, gaining access to a gratis service. When you decide to stop using the service, you are no longer benefiting from them; why should they benefit from you in the years to come? With security risks attached?
> Better yet, a girl you dated for the past 3 years but then broke up with could have tons of knowledge about you, and photos, and videos, but unless you're a politician, celebrity, or high-level business executive, where's the risk there?
No offence, this is very ignorant. Everyone has something to hide. Moreover, revenge porn is an example which perfectly fits your scenario. But that was done with consent at that moment; there's other complex scenarios where the cat is out of the bag like bullying videos on the school yard.
> Even just consider how Snapchat became so popular among teenagers over the last few years
And there are many ways to record the data received via Snapchat. As long as the space between device and eyes is analog, there's always going to exist one loophole there. A loophole you won't hear Snapchat about as it doesn't serve their investors/shareholders.
I also believe there is no such thing as not having an Facebook or Google account. They create it for you by creating your tracked profile. The only thing that happens when you create an account is that they can give the profile a name.
True - but deleting FB is not just about data safety. For me the primary interest was simply removing myself from an unhealthy, superficial, hedonistic and materialistic part of reality and society.
I'd be interested to hear your response to the point I made in my above comment in this thread. The fact that younger people increasingly view Facebook as uncool is a big problem facing the company; yes, Facebook Inc. still has Instagram, but Zuckerberg himself saw the rise of Snapchat, and tried to buy them out. The stock may be crap right now, but in terms of where people are sharing their minds and their lives (i.e. personal data), Snapchat is very relevant these days. In that way, it definitely does resemble Twitter; it's a very important part of the daily lives of tens of millions of people. I was about to say "daily online lives," but everyone is online for at least half the waking hours of their day now. (And for the record, virtually every B2C Internet stock stays below its IPO price in its first several months.)
Snapchat's stock is low because the hype has passed and the bubble has bursted. Their service is lackluster as the core principle of the company (sending media which can only be temporarily accessed) isn't a way to protect data since the sender and receiver have different interests because of their lack of a relationship based on trust and longevity. In that regard it makes sense the service is popular with youth as they don't fully grasp trusting relations, they take higher risks, all because their brains have not yet fully developed. You don't see adults using Snapchat for anything serious. They might just as well use more common, equally secure platforms e.g. WhatsApp, or face to face.
Snapchat would've been very cute in the '90s before people had e.g. cameras on their phones, and when phone screens were lower quality (although it'd be problematic to make a picture in the first place then). Nowadays, its painfully obvious how irrelevant the service is.
The only relevance Snapchat has is their userbase, mainly consisting of youth; personal data, the databank as a whole (pretty much the same but worth mentioning), and the potential to start a new service under the Snapchat flag.
Previously, we only offered Personalized Search for signed-in users, and only when they had Web History enabled on their Google Accounts. What we're doing today is expanding Personalized Search so that we can provide it to signed-out users as well.
Let's say, ALL facebook resources are wiped out from the planet. I suspect that users' data still partly exists external to facebook due to facebook having used users' data for advertising with our consent to their TOS.
Its a platform for people with low self esteem to dream about what their lives could have been. For older folks to remember the past. For the average guy/gal to keep tabs on old flames.
And most importantly a place for jackasses and rich people with various complexes to show the world how great their lives are.
And Facebook is great at figuring out your weakness. For me for example, Facebook became a window for re-imagining my life in college.
No thanks. The trip down memory lane is fun every once in a while but the old picture catalog in the closet has morphed into an insidious entity, always beckoning you back. My phone vibrates, someone posted a new picture of you from 5 years ago and 50 people like it. Remember that day? All those people. Dont you?
Fuck that, I'm done being screwed with by a platform designed to give you your fix.