Users Abandon Facebook After Cambridge Analytica Findings

The question is - will this be just a minor blip to Facebook and then normal services will resume after the indignation wears off? Or will it the beginning of the end of the social media dominance of the platform?<p>For me personally, I use FB primarily to keep in touch with friends, family and old colleagues who are spread all over the world. It is purely a contact tool, and not really used to market products of services etc., so my attachment is purely an emotional one.<p>However, I must admit that this latest episode has really hammered my trust in the platform FAR more than any other previous ones (and there have been many). Yesterday, for the first time ever, I went through my FB settings and removed a lot of personal information as well as stagnant apps that I had approved YEARS ago from my permitted apps list.<p>I am also seriously reconsidering what I do post on there from now on, as well as drastically reducing the number of times I post. I&#x27;ve also turned off location tracking for the FB app on my phone, and am considering deleting it altogether and just sticking to the web platform.<p>Will I change my mind in a months time? It&#x27;s unlikely, but who knows? I like being able to talk to family that are literally on the other side of the world, and it is too hard for me to get them all to adopt Telegram or any other communication tool outside of FB Messenger, so I may find myself drawn back in.

First, I think what happened with Facebook&#x2F;Cambridge Analytica is appalling. With that said, I think this article is silly and emblematic of poor technology coverage in the media.<p>I think it would be awesome if users really did delete their facebook accounts if they thought these actions crossed some line. But the article cites ~50,000 #deletefacebook mentions. Come on, 50k hashtag shares is evidence of &quot;Users Abandon...&quot;? it then proceeds to document case studies of people leaving. The article title would imply that users truly did see this action as a last straw and are leaving in droves, and it seems that is the narrative that the writer wanted to write about.<p>Is that truly happening though? I&#x27;d love to see the data, but I don&#x27;t think they will delete their accounts. Why would the writer elect to write an article fitting a narrative for which there is little data? Surely, the more interesting article would be &quot;Are users deleting their accounts? Why not?&quot; That I would read and find interesting.

CA scandal is just a final push. I kinda stopped using FB like half a year ago, for that I don&#x27;t really know what I could get from this platform. Viral videos, nope. Sensationalized editorial with an angry face attached below, nope. Friends having party like no tomorrow, fine. But there are so many of them, and they are kinda repetitive.<p>Since it is public and real name social network, I have to be extra careful sharing anything that might be offensive to any member of my &#x27;friends&#x27;. This kind of self-censorship is pretty stressful, I end up just shutting up.<p>Novelty and fun is gone from this platform for me.

I personally stopped using Facebook as an experiment in September of last year. The idea was to go 1 month without the social network. After the month was over, I never went back.<p>This wasn&#x27;t about the data sharing. I was aware of this all along. I also didn&#x27;t delete my account. All data &#x27;breached&#x27; has been sucked out long ago. It was just that I realized Facebook made me feel worse. I was constantly engaged with championing causes I feel passionate about. However, I did realize that for all my activity I achieved fairly little, and that the daily &#x27;triggers&#x27; and &#x27;write-offs&#x27; didn&#x27;t function as a relieve, but rather as a self-reinforcing of a feeling of perpetual anger and discomfort.<p>I do miss some of the social interactions with friends and acquaintances with whom FB was the only link left. I kept Messenger and occasionally use that still to communicate more directly.<p>I don&#x27;t think I will go back to FB (or similar social networks), even if they would solve the &#x27;privacy&#x27; issues. I currently feel this type of &#x27;long distance&#x2F;low threshold&#x27; social paradigm is more harmful than beneficial to our psychological makeup.

I have a bad feeling that like the Snowden revelations and Occupy Wall Street these findings will actually embolden companies like Facebook and Cambridge Analytica the same way the NSA and Wall Street banks were likely emboldened because it will once again prove that after a short outburst of moral outrage people will go back to being complacent without substantive change being enacted. They will get away with it and double down on the activity because they know that nothing will be done.

A point that is brought up occasionally, but probably not enough: Deleting Facebook really isn&#x27;t possible for a nontrivial percentage of the world population, since Facebook <i>is</i> the internet in some places. Their monopoly over internet infrastructure in some developing countries is such that people can&#x27;t afford non-Facebook internet packages, and seems to disincentivize actual low-cost internet infrastructure from being built out.

If people knew the amount of info collected and sold they would abandon everything. Even 7 months before your born, someone has a profile on you. What CA did leveraging data for targeting is just the beginning, ML applied to data in the future will make what CA did look like amateur hour.<p>Like others have said with elections, this all started long ago with social, CA just happened to do it better this time. Even without them, sophisticated targeting can still be developed regardless, so it&#x27;s just a matter of money and audience reach.

I&#x27;ve had a dormant FB account for years. I don&#x27;t like the site and I never add content. I believe that social media has become a net detractor to quality-of-life for many (most?) humans who use it. I think Mark Zuckerberg is either incredibly naive, or a sleaze bag, but in either case should suffer some consequences from this.<p>That said, I probably won&#x27;t delete my account. It remains the only way many of my friends plan events. It exists, for me, solely so I can be invited to things. I imagine there are many others like me. Like it or not, I suspect this is a blip for FB.

I am getting a bit annoyed by how shocked people on here are about this. The friends end point in the graph API was hardly a secret. It is an open API. There was no way for Facebook to enforce that data collected from authorized apps wasn&#x27;t being saved. It&#x27;s part of the reason the friends API was put under tighter restrictions a few years ago.

What&#x27;s interesting is that of the 5 people the article profiled, only 1 seems likely to have voted for Trump. Based on location and occupation, I would guess the others were not Trump voters.<p>My impression of this whole scandal, is that where you are on the political spectrum affects how you see it. I think a lot of the anger at Facebook is not because of what they did, but what they people see as the consequence from it, mainly the election of Donald Trump.<p>Facebook cannot afford to alienate both halves of the partisan divide at the same time. There is a substantial portion of the Left that at least partially blames Facebook for Donald Trump&#x27;s election. Given that, I wonder if in the near future they will try to position themselves as a more conservative friendly company than the other Silicon Valley tech players.

&quot;The hashtag #DeleteFacebook appeared more than 10,000 times on Twitter within a two-hour period on Wednesday, according to the analytics service ExportTweet. On Tuesday, it was mentioned 40,398 times, according to the analytics service Digimind.&quot;<p>Is this really such a big deal for Facebook?<p>Suppose 50000 persons delete their Facebook everyday, then it will just lose 1,825,0000 users one year, not counting new users joining Facebook every year. And Facebook has 2 billion users.<p>Edit: The number lost in one year is 1,825,0000, not 1,825,000.

This will fade away. Facebook will thrive. (Disclaimer: I closed my FB account 4 years ago).<p>The majority of people behave by classical Pavlovian conditioning: they&#x27;ll get addicted for what gives them immediate pleasure even if it brings them pain in the long run. That&#x27;s why we have so much obesity, tobacco, cocaine and opioids. This is why FB will keep thriving.

Facebook did report the first decline in monthly active users (MAU), is this the turning point [1]? Ive always wondered if facebook would die a quick death or a slow crawl. Wonder who gains from this ? twitter resurgance ? dont think so, snap ? not so sure, time for google to give another go to push google+?<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;01&#x2F;31&#x2F;facebook-north-america-daus-drop-for-first-time.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;01&#x2F;31&#x2F;facebook-north-america-daus-...</a>

I don’t care much about what platforms other people use. My preference is paying for services. While I use DuckDuckGo, I am an enthusiastic Google customer for GCP, Google Play books&#x2F;movies&#x2F;tv shows, premium music with no ads YouTube.<p>I would like to use Twitter more, but I don’t like the ads. I would gladly pay $50&#x2F;year for ad free Twitter. I like Gnu Social, but not enough like-minded people to follow.<p>I spend 20 minutes a month in FaceBook, but jump through hoops not to be tracked.

I&#x27;ve started using Scuttlebutt recently (A decentralized social network, setup guide at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scuttlebutt.nz&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scuttlebutt.nz&#x2F;</a>) and it&#x27;s surprisingly good.<p>It&#x27;s mostly geeks on there, and it&#x27;ll still be a few years before my Mum can use it, but that&#x27;s the way I like it. Facebook is mostly just a photo feed of what I&#x27;m up to for my family now.

If you’re worried about privacy, there’s an alternative strategy to removing data&#x2F;tracking, and that’s obscuring your data by burying it in the noise of fake data. I’ve installed plugins that automatically issue searches, crawl pages, and click on ads. Clicking on irrelevant ads destroys the value of ads themselves. This pleases me.

I deleted my Facebook in 2012 because I don&#x27;t like it. However, scraping user profiles is a privacy problem? What about archive.org that will scrape your personal website so you are never able to get rid of your previous version?

Good. It is about time people wake up to facebook and Zuckerberg&#x27;s lack of belief in privacy[1][2].<p>I remember when this chart[3] first made the rounds. If this didn&#x27;t convince people that facebook is evil. I don&#x27;t know what will<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2010&#x2F;jan&#x2F;11&#x2F;facebook-privacy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2010&#x2F;jan&#x2F;11&#x2F;facebook-...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;03&#x2F;21&#x2F;facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerbergs-statements-on-privacy-2003-2018.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;03&#x2F;21&#x2F;facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg...</a><p>[3] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mattmckeon.com&#x2F;facebook-privacy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mattmckeon.com&#x2F;facebook-privacy&#x2F;</a>

It was nice to &quot;see&quot; Zuckerberg on CNN today, given he was at his office reading from the script (you can see the eye movement) and interviewer was somewhere else in a greenbox room.<p>Unless CNN went SO amateurish that you only show a back head of interviewer and you never show him with the journalist together!

I think it&#x27;s worth stating: if you&#x27;re not deleting your friend connections, you&#x27;re not leaving.<p>I say that because your friends retain their friend count, and that&#x27;s a big part of FB-identity. Also, you can always pick it back up when &quot;they&quot; fix the problem (which isn&#x27;t fixable).<p>I made my act public, left a message with contact info as my last message, and then deleted <i>all</i> my &quot;friends&quot; (which was, honestly, a pretty nice reminder of folks I hadn&#x27;t spoken with in a while). Finally, I bcc&#x27;d them on an email so I could stay in touch. I can always reply-all that email if I need to spam them with news&#x2F;info&#x2F;etc...<p>it&#x27;s not a perfect solution, but it&#x27;s the best I could come up with on my own, and I&#x27;m advising my friends to do the same.

If you want to cripple Facebook but still get the advantages of using it as a contact book &#x2F; for events and groups, just block the news feed.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;news-feed-eradicator-for&#x2F;fjcldmjmjhkklehbacihaiopjklihlgg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;news-feed-eradicat...</a><p>Yes, I know they make money other ways. But if no one uses the news feed, their ad revenue will take a noticeable hit. Most of the negatives come with the endless feed&#x2F;scroll in the first place. I still spend time on Facebook, but only when I want to. No endless scroll, and I don&#x27;t miss a thing when it comes to groups&#x2F;events&#x2F;messaging.

Anyone on here is probably one of the tech influencers for their family group. I&#x27;ve just started the work of trying to get people to move onto using Signal. I really really like the ethos of the organisation. I don&#x27;t see how there&#x27;s any downside (other than the time of getting people to switch).<p>Wouldn&#x27;t it be great if, as a start, everyone moved to a secure not-going-to-sell-your-data organisation for instant messaging.<p>Then, if Whisper Systems could just bring out some magic Facebook alternative, well, that would be just amazing.<p>We should care about this stuff, we should try to influence our friends and family.

Users still abandoning Facebook for a while, but not really for &quot;Cambridge Analytica Findings&quot;, but because of social media censorship for conservative, libertarian and for (classical) liberal views...

Still looking for an alternative self-updating Rolodex.

Key point to remember: A user in the developed world is MUCH more valuable to FB, so even if only westerners quit, each westerner is worth up to 35x what someone from the developed world is worth, in terms of ad income.<p>They may have &#x27;2 billion&#x27; users, but they&#x27;re super vulnerable to an exodus of even 5% of them in terms of income, if they&#x27;re from the right regions.<p>(This is based on my hazy recollection of stats which had a US FB user worth $35USD to FB in income, where someone from the developed world drew in &lt;$1USD)

I wonder how many more would abandon Facebook after seeing the targeting options in the Ads creator.

How many people here would scale back their Facebook use to one day a week, say Facebook Friday?

If you want this to happen, users need an alternative. I&#x27;m not sure it matters to them if the alternative truly protects their confidentiality or if they will understand whether it does or not. I know there are alternatives out there, is there one that is user-friendly, confidential, and secure, and that users can switch to right now?<p>It reminds me to remind myself: A project that seemed quixotic a month ago suddenly has potential and value. You need to start developing such things when the market is in the &#x27;quixotic&#x27; stage in order to have them ready when the world suddenly understands. Congratulations to those who started months or years ago.

I asked a friend if they would pay $1&#x2F;mo for a facebook alternative, and they said no -- they would just start using instagram. When I explained facebook owned instagram, they still didn&#x27;t think $1&#x2F;mo would be worth it, citing:<p>&quot;It&#x27;s just another thing I have to pay per month: Netflix, Spotify, etc.&quot;<p>People have mental budgets, and maybe their psychological good will in balancing those budgets get drained over time for things like recurring payments that aren&#x27;t on a bigger scale ($100+) and aren&#x27;t 100% necessary like internet.

I hope many many ditch Facebook, a message must be sent. I personally made my last facebook comment &quot;Das vidanya facebook&quot; and disabled my account and deleted facebook &amp; messenger apps.

I haven&#x27;t deleted mine, but I will the moment GDPR kicks in, and I have a legal right to expect that my data will be completely removed from their systems, which is not the case now.

Today I switched off the location tracking for Facebook on my Phone. I never enter the correct birthday on Facebook. Unfortunately we cann&#x27;t trust any of the tech companies.There are a lot of people working and keeping track of security for now seems impossible. Anyone in the company can put in code with a security hole. May be AI in future can help in making systems secure. For now, none of the apps is secure. There are companies that can unlock any iphone. Would you leave apple for that?

Users leaving the platform is definitely a dent in Facebook&#x27;s image.<p>However, I&#x27;m pretty sure that at the end of the day if companies start withdrawing their funding for Facebook ads, the platform&#x27;s shine will drop sharply.<p>So far apart from Mozilla, there really hasn&#x27;t been any comment from the corporate side. I suppose it&#x27;s a bit of the chicken and the egg problem - Fb has a lot of data so companies want targeted advertising and companies paying for it leads Fb to collect data.

I think it would be fun if consumers of digital information did perform en masse exodus from Facebook after an event like this.<p>It may serve as an example for other service providers that there is a risk of losing their customers base if they screw up too.<p>As of today google, twitter, fb, apple really have carte blanche from consumers since they know most consumers are not going to lift a finger and the whole thing will be forgotten in a week due to short attention span of most consumers.

I already deleted my FB account once, maybe 6-7 years ago (not suspended, deleted). It was a mistake. I lost contact with a lot of people, including my relatives in Europe and old friends from grad school. Once I rejoined FB, it took a long time to re-build my friends list. FB has a lot of flaws and I don&#x27;t use very much or share very much on it, but for staying in contact with people... I can&#x27;t think of anything better, unfortunately.

Its time to regulate this. Make facebook and all other social media platforms to open up connectivity to other platforms.<p>It can&#x27;t be, that one company has so much power.

This article will have merit if it was posted after their next earnings call and there was a percentage decline in users. This is all anecdotal and speculation. Habits are the hardest thing to break. And 50,000 people, even if US-only, are a rounding error for their MAU&#x2F;DAUs. C&#x27;mon, NYT.

I give all these fb junkies (yes that&#x27;s what they are, they just don&#x27;t know it, just like smokers used to) about 5 days. Then the withdrawal symptoms will kick in and they &#x27;ll give in. Facebook knows what it is doing.

Would be funny to track how many of them will post to facebook about it. And then how many will relapse a month later. And then how many of them will come back to post about how their 1 week without facebook went.

To be honest: I’m not willing to delete my account just now. I fear people will just forget inviting me to events if I’m not in the list of friends.<p>But I will stop posting, liking, and commenting. Let’s slowly starve the monster.

Does anyone know if there&#x27;s a way to delete the account completely? I mean, I tried deactivating it months ago, but knowing that the profile is still out there bothers me a lot.

If only all the sites stopped embedding the social media buttons, i don&#x27;t mind people on Facebook, twitter, instagram, etc etc, i do mind their tracking buttons everywhere.

I truly believe only a vocal minority are actually deleting their Facebook. I think a majority will simply cut back on their Facebook and social media use.

App access to private data should have an expiry date. Looking at app access and seeing apps you tried for a day 5 years ago shouldn&#x27;t be the default.

I think this is just another Uber-fiasco in the making, there were lot #deleteuber campaigns, but they came out unscathed, I believe.

OK, but is Facebook <i>really</i> that much worse than other mainstream social media? Or at least, now, not four years ago.

Small hype. In 1 month its business as usual.

Unfortunately if I want to stay in contact with my family I have to use facebook. Pretty effective lockin.

Used tools to delete all of my facebook and twitter content. I&#x27;m free from it. Feels great.

I&#x27;ve been passively looking for a good FB alternative for a couple years. And I mean a web site not an app (don&#x27;t get why anyone would use social media apps). Perhaps I need to more actively look. But I figured some on this thread have done some research. With a good alternative, I think I could get enough of my friends to convert.

<i>puts tinfoil hat on</i> There&#x27;s an avalanche of articles from the news corp lately regarding Facebook. Is this a battle of the titans? <i>puts tinfoil hat down</i>

Hmmm. I&#x27;d get off facebook but then my friends would think I unfriended them.

Good.

Manufactured outrage. Nobody is leaving Facebook. They&#x27;re too vain. Even Brian Acton was saying #DeleteFacebook from his Facebook.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16633630" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16633630</a>

None of the everyday fb users even know about this. They&#x27;re just using fb like normal. Only those who were already anit-fb are creating hype.

There were still people on Facebook? Hard to believe.<p>I think people fleeing from Whatsapp or Instagram would be real news.