Get your loved ones off Facebook

All privacy concerns aside, Facebook has had declining utility to me (and my loved ones) over the last few years, which has translated into less and less use by everyone in my network. My news feed from three to five years ago was much more diverse in terms of content and number of people posting. Today, every other post is an ad, and in between are the posts of the remaining power users in my network. I'm not sure if anyone else has had this experience, but I would label the power users as the least common denominators in my network. Thus, my news feed has come to resemble a trashy tabloid magazine more so than a collection of the goings-ons of my network of friends. In my mind's eye, the Facebook ecosystem is like a corrupt, dangerous, almost comic book-like city: A lot of good people may still live there but they only occasionally peak out of the blinds from the protection of their homes and they rarely participate in the community. The streets are filled with trash, and the people running freely on the streets are lunatics and crooked cops. But maybe that's just my wild, childish imagination. I'm a much heavier user of instagram these days, which is probably just like a movie set with sunny skies built within this corrupt ecosystem of Facebook.

Facebook has been invaluable to me for keeping in touch with friends and family from my entire life time. I've rekindled contact with lost friends, kept in touch with family living abroad, made new friends. Its a tool and like any tool there are instructions and warning labels. What more, this tool is free, and to be fair, costs millions of dollars a month to run. And we mustn't forget Facebook is also a business, and yes, we are not the customers - we are the product used to keep the machine running and make some people a healthy profit in the process. That is the nature of business. Remember that, accept that and use it right, and Facebook is great. You don't like - get off it but don't expect everybody to follow suit. There has been (are still are) many attempts to move the party else where. They all failed or will fail since the point of the 'party' is having everybody attend and attend all at once.

I would like to see more people using simple email and blogs instead of social media. One way to make this work is having a clear flag for friends and family that an email is just for fun, and they should not feel like they have to read it if the title does not interest them.<p>I let people I work with, family and friends know that if I send out a broadcast email with everyone on a BC blind copy, then they really should not feel obligated to read the email. This allows me to send out general interest emails to a dozen or more people and feel like I am not wasting people&#x27;s time. I don&#x27;t use email lists, rather, I spend a minute deciding who might be interested.<p>This is cumbersome but it gets around problems of Facebook choosing which of your posts they will show your friends.

The entire appeal behind Facebook is the <i>huge</i> user base. Everyone I know is on Facebook, and so is everyone they know. If you&#x27;re going to get people to switch, you&#x27;ll need both some killer feature that sets it apart from Facebook and some means to mitigate the loss of that user base - perhaps some compatibility layer where information that wouldn&#x27;t reach your friends that switched with you to Platform X gets posted to your linked Facebook account.<p>I&#x27;m ultimately envisioning a future where people could host their own Facebooks or set up an account with a family member or small business, seemlessly transfer their data between servers whenever someone wants to switch providers, built-in SSL for everything, PGP with automatic key sharing between friends, encrypted file storage, etc. - everything that tech community advocates for in an easy-to-host-yourself distro.<p>So much good could come out of having a standardized platform for social media; you just have to be able to overcome Facebook&#x27;s inertia.

I have tried almost all of these arguments and simply put, the benefit that facebook gives most people is a much higher value than their perceived cost of privacy (or so they think).<p>Until the house is burning down across the street, it is often difficult to sell fire insurance, and they dont see the massive data mart that fb is.

For once I want to read an article from someone who&#x27;s a true insider in the alleged &quot;market&quot; selling and re-selling user data.<p>(Edit: I&#x27;m not suggesting such a market doesn&#x27;t exist -- I&#x27;d just like to know what&#x27;s actually going on. I&#x27;d like to know what&#x27;s &quot;de facto&quot; practice in the industry.)

Although I agree with the point of the article, I abhor the way the author makes his points.<p>&gt; They use the vast amount of data they have on you, from your likes, things you read, things you type but don&#x27;t post, to make highly accurate models about who you are -- even if you make it a point of keeping these things secret. It&#x27;s a technique called linear regression which has been used in marketing for decades.<p>Oh man, not linear regression! They&#x27;re really breaking out the high-powered statistical tools aren&#x27;t they!<p>&gt; Peter Thiel. He wrote a book attacking multi-culturalism at Stanford<p>Thiel has since retracted those remarks IIRC.<p>&gt; From the Terms Of Service (not the Privacy Policy -- see what they did there?):<p>The following content clearly belongs in a TOS IMHO so implying something nefarious is just ridiculous.<p>&gt; There&#x27;s no need to talk hypothetically about government surveillance here. One of the first Facebook investors called Greylock has board connections to a CIA investment firm called In-Q-Tel. According to their website, it &quot;identifies cutting-edge technologies to help the Central Intelligence Agency and the broader US Intelligence Community to further their missions&quot;.<p>Oh man! A company that invested in Facebook about a decade ago has a board member that is a board member of a company that has connections to the CIA! I&#x27;m pretty sure that you can say that about literally any large technology company that exists.<p>Now, I agree that Facebook is funneling data to the NSA and they are building models of your life, but the way that this author makes his points is frankly disgusting. Not to mention the rate of about two typos per paragraph that make the article even harder to read.

Facebook should be prohibited from looking into the data that I send to friends. Rationale: telephone companies are not allowed to listen in on my conversations, so why should facebook be allowed to do essentially the same? IMHO, facebook and other social networks (with say &gt;100k users) should be regulated much like telecom companies, and I am surprised that they aren&#x27;t yet.<p>Also note that telecom companies are required to interoperate with other telecom companies.

Facebook has too much value because of Groups and Events. Both are incredibly useful and when <i>everybody</i> else is using it to organise things it can be hard to stay in the loop without.<p>That said, it is possible to use Facebook and insulate yourself. I use a fake name, a fake email and never added my phone number. My use is limited to Groups, Events and Messages - I don&#x27;t doubt that they are still mining data for my account, but my account doesn&#x27;t link to me.

I have found that simply using Firefox with third party cookies turned off, along with the PrivacyBadger plugin and no flash installation provides a pretty good experience, while making you generally untrackable unless ip tracking, cache tracking, browser fingerprinting, or nefarious permacookies are used...<p>... and if those techniques are used by a big player, and it gets out (which it most definitely will), they&#x27;ll have a consent decree (or worse) slapped on them so fast their head will spin. Look at what has already happened to Google when they were found to be circumventing Safari&#x27;s third-party cookie blocking.<p>The main things that don&#x27;t work under such a setup are: 1. Social buttons: meh, don&#x27;t care. 2. Commenting systems such as disqus: again, meh.<p>The advantages are: 1. Most sites simply don&#x27;t have ads under such a setup. 2. The sites that do show ads show non-targeted ads; generally related to the site content. Which is fine.<p>It strikes me that allowing cookies to be set or retrieved by third party domains was a terrible idea, and the current situation is a direct consequence.

The mobile privacy model is broken. I should be able to install Facebook without giving permissions they don&#x27;t need. Every 2-bit app doesn&#x27;t need to access my contacts and all my messaging history.<p>Until then, will not install Facebook app, and will limit apps to companies I trust or apps I can&#x27;t live without.<p>Facebook is a silly place too, but that&#x27;s whole &#x27;nother story.

Can you really get out of it?<p>I closed my account years ago. Use NoScript, Disconnect, uBlock. But my profile is probably still there. It&#x27;s been mentioned that they keep profiles of people who don&#x27;t have an account.<p>I can imagine they could attach this comment and my online activity in other platforms to that profile. Even tell my friends about them.<p>That would make a good episode of Black Mirror. Titled &quot;The Privacy Freaks&quot;, it would show people in a social network observing the lives and making fun of the absurd things privacy concerned people do to stay &quot;out&quot;.

this article is not very accurate, it&#x27; like the author just found out about the data he is giving up:<p>-all your private financial transactions.<p>no, my private financial transactions are private, how can Facebook access them?<p>-...the right to privacy, and the right to have a say in how information about us is used. We&#x27;ve giving up those rights forever by using Facebook.<p>No, you are giving up a small part of your privacy using Facebook. You give up privacy basically using any online service, and a lot of offline as well (loyalty cards, phone number, ...). And it&#x27;s not forever.<p>-In reality, lots of your posts are never seen by anyone!<p>I think the article refers to the &quot;Top Stories&quot; features, but you can change it to &quot;Most recent&quot;. The problem is not facebook, but the amount of material available. They are not hiding posts, it&#x27;s just that they are too many for the average user

&gt; &quot;I&#x27;ve been pretty dismissive towards people who hesitate with privacy concerns.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s this dismissiveness that hasn&#x27;t helped innovation in social media privacy, but sent it backwards. Thanks for that.<p>&gt; &quot;Get your loved ones off Facebook&quot;.<p>And this hair-on-fire turnaround doesn&#x27;t help either. Our &quot;loved ones&quot; have their own brains. They would tell me to bugger off if I tried to spoil their fun.<p>I don&#x27;t think I believe that FB keeps shadow profiles. What would be the commercial usage of such data? I doubt they are sharing shadow profile data with ad partners. What would such data look like and how could anyone possibly verify it?<p>I never signed up to FB, it&#x27;s not my thing, too much like a club, not open enough, terrible or non-existent open data approach. I prefer gardens without walls. FB puts barbed wire fencing up by not allowing such basic things as RSS or feeds from FB to a website. Even the person who admins the FB page can&#x27;t get to its data. Instead you have to install their like button on your site, and get an ugly widget thing to stream the data in within this God-awful blue and white box thing that really looks ugly on a website, and is bloated and crap.<p>But I see other people enjoying FB, especially the group pages which is where the best action is I&#x27;m told. (my 20-something flatmate tells me as she looks at FB right now on the couch).<p>If you leave FB for whatever reason (or never sign up in first place) then just do it. You don&#x27;t need to blog about why you left. Just leave.

Too f*ing late. They already &#x27;know&#x27; you. What makes you think they will delete your profile and &#x27;forget&#x27; you? By closing your account or stop using it they may lose track of you for a little while but you are who you are and FB, NSA, etc already know it. In fact, I think the smartest way out would be to start posting, liking, commenting, installing apps that deceive your true self, let them build a different profile, fool them.

Off-topic, does anyone have any idea why the text looks so horrible on Firefox running on Linux? I&#x27;m using firefox-35.0.1-3.fc20.x86_64. I&#x27;ve also tried midori-0.5.9-2.fc20.x86_64 and it&#x27;s the same. Only google-chrome-stable-40.0.2214.94-1.x86_64 renders it in a readable way.<p>P.S. Screenshot: <a href="http://imgur.com/m4rLSHQ" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;m4rLSHQ</a>

I tried quitting FB 2 years ago when I realized I was no longer using it productively, but just sort of using it habitually, FOMO-style.<p>I caved in and deactivated my account when I realized there were some things I enjoyed about the experience - e.g. maintaining passive relationships with 2nd-tier acquaintances , especially from years past.<p>I just quit again 3 weeks ago, and this time feel absolutely no loss or desire to return. Baby pic? That&#x27;s what holiday cards are for. Announcement? If it&#x27;s important at all, it won&#x27;t be shared exclusively on FB (if there was a brief time that wasn&#x27;t true, it&#x27;s long past in my age group of over 30s).<p>One big takeaway is that FB is a very poor substitute for keeping in touch with family. I wonder what&#x27;s up with my sister. Hey I&#x27;ll FaceTime her.<p>And those 2nd-tier relationships with people who might aortof be interesting to keep track of? The last time I got a kick out of reconnecting with one of them was probably 5 years ago, so I feel sort of been there done that.

This article is rambling, unfocused, inaccurate, and has many distracting grammatical errors. Why is it upvoted?

I think transparency is good. The secretive (and superficial) society we have now favors cheaters and liars.<p>If there was a way to publicly expose everyone for who they really were, maybe society would start to value those individuals who have real integrity (as opposed to greedy, manipulative, two-faced individuals). Absolute social transparency would allow power to be placed in the hands of people who are actually worthy of trust.<p>That said, I&#x27;m skeptical about Facebook&#x27;s intentions. It looks like they just want to take people&#x27;s personal information and use it for their own benefit. Their primary goal is not to make society more transparent for everyone - They just want to keep this information for themselves and keep everyone else in the dark - That way they get leverage over everyone else.

&gt; Facebook&#x27;s blocks posts based on political content it doesn&#x27;t like. They blocked posts about Fergusson and other political protests.<p>Did Facebook literally do that or is it really about users deleting&#x2F;blocking posts on some Facebook groups or on they walls?

I would definitely get me and my loved ones off Facebook, I am just looking for an alternative on a few features that keep me on the platform. If that alternative was more open and secure, it would definitely make me switch. Me and most of my friends are using it as some sort of chat to organise events and have &quot;private&quot; discussions grouped by topics. The main feed really doesn&#x27;t appeal to me as it is mostly noise and it&#x27;s too hard to keep it clean and organized. That feed just ends up distracting me every time I want to see updates on an event or a group discussion.

The solution is really simple - have an (optional) monthly fee of $10 and the need to monetize (your) user data is gone. But how many people would take that deal? I somewhat doubt it would be a significant portion.

Quite ironic, but the only reason i haven&#x27;t deleted my FB account yet is because i participate in <a href="https://www.fbclaim.com/ui/page/faqs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fbclaim.com&#x2F;ui&#x2F;page&#x2F;faqs</a><p>Anyways in my opinion FB doesn&#x27;t have a lot of value because the stuff you read on it isn&#x27;t REAL. Everyone only posting their best pictures, best experiences, none of the normal or bad stuff that happens. Thus, not realistic = fake = no value.<p>And the worst part of the privacy abuse is of course people not even being aware of it...

This is hyperbolic. Facebook isn&#x27;t evil, selling ads isn&#x27;t evil and they have no intention or incentive to violate anyone&#x27;s privacy.<p>They don&#x27;t sell secrets about your life, they allow advertisers to target ads based on demographics, location and categories of interest. This does not mean they say &quot;Hey advertisers, Jane Smith likes to do drugs with her friends and take embarrassing pictures. Sell her stuff!&quot;. It&#x27;s more &quot;Show my ad to women between the ages of 18-24 in Portland, OR who have an interest in rock music&quot;. It&#x27;s just boring, not evil and not an invasion of anyone&#x27;s privacy. Mailing lists have been segmenting audiences for decades, often with much more personal information, and no one is freaking out about it.<p>The facebook model of advertising is stupid anyway. They have the potential to use unimaginable amounts of information to infer who is most like to buy what from whom. Instead of using it to the fullest extent, they let advertisers select their own targeting criteria based on tiny sample sizes and gut intuitions about who their ideal customers are. You have nothing to fear from this, it&#x27;s just advertising, same as it&#x27;s always been.<p>If you don&#x27;t like using facebook, just don&#x27;t use it. The sky won&#x27;t fall, the dead won&#x27;t rise and the sun will come up tomorrow. They aren&#x27;t doing any more harm than any other corporation, and the use of their product isn&#x27;t any more requisite than any other product.

The latest one is hardly worse than the others. Sure, it&#x27;s bad if you use instagram, but I have zero interest in sharing photos of my lunch with crappy filters on it, and IIRC that&#x27;s the key change this time. Meanwhile, google add more and more anti-privacy provisions to their terms all the time and don&#x27;t get anywhere near this amount of coverage.<p>I&#x27;m definitely critical of facebook and their privacy record, but most of the linked post is about their app, which I never use and of people I&#x27;m close to, I don&#x27;t know anyone who does exactly due to those excessive permission requests. The tracking with like buttons is worse, but easy enough to mitigate with any number of addons. Facebook may be dodgy, but they are no worse than google, apple or microsoft in that respect.<p>There isn&#x27;t anything as good as facebook for communicating with friends, and for that reason, trying to stop people using it will never work, no matter the privacy implications. Treat facebook as something dangerous, be careful what you share, and contain it appropriately with addons, etc., but it&#x27;s unfortunately necessary. What are the alternatives? Google plus is a ghost town and run by the one company worse than facebook on privacy, and disaspora is a joke. I do wish there was a good alternative, but there won&#x27;t be, as facebook is as much a platform as a site these days.

Well, privacy or no... I have found just the sheer &quot;overhead&quot; of _dealing_ with FB to be exhausting. I mean, really.<p>Trolling through so many mundane and inane posts to get to the few relevant items of interest has become a huge time-sink, for me.<p>Yesterday, I posted a simple, non-accusatory statement that said that I was stepping back from FB for a while, maybe forever, and that we could still stay in touch via email and text. So far, the response has been nothing but positive.

&quot;And if you haven&#x27;t heard - it was revealed by wikileaks that all your Facebook data is delivered directly to the NSA.&quot; {{Citation needed}}<p>I avoid Facebook as much as possible, but there&#x27;s a whole lot of nutty nonsense in this article. The reason I avoid Facebook is that it grew from a culture of bros instead of a culture of professionals or academics, and I won&#x27;t entrust my data to bros. It&#x27;s the same reason I don&#x27;t use Uber.

Facebook is an awful experience, even with AdBlock. The only reason people are on Facebook is because everyone else is. It&#x27;s like the worst bar in the town, but it&#x27;s the only one you can reliably see anyone at. It&#x27;s <i>desperately</i> in need of disruption. Google+ could have done it, but their data greed with the Real Names policy fucked them.

I would heed that advice if I used Facebook purely to over-share pointless random personal information.<p>Unfortunately, Facebook is where people I want to communicate with can, and generally do see what I post, and engage with it at higher rates than on Google+.<p>Back when Google+ was new and very Google-oriented, I was able to build a community of a large number of followers for my personal account and a page for one of my books. But the Google+ user base is now larger, more diffuse, and less engaged. That&#x27;s not very useful.<p>Lately, LinkedIn has been a good alternative. LinkedIn has improved their update stream. I read it, and I post to it. But LinkedIn does despicable things with your calendar information.<p>I&#x27;m pretty sure the people at Facebook have figured this out: Either you need it, and will put up with the privacy issues, or it&#x27;s an entertainment medium for you and you don&#x27;t care.<p>I&#x27;ve deleted Facebook and LinkedIn apps from my mobile devices, but I still use them via their Web UIs.

I read about the fuzz but to me its unclear what changed in the policy. I dont haven a Facebook account because the current policy isn&#x27;t very different from the bad one years ago when I had an account and therefore deleted it.<p>So does someone know what exactly changed and why my dear ones should suddenly stop using Facebook?

Quick question: is Facebook tracking what you articles read online on third party sites even when you are not logged in to Facebook? This can be done via cookies, browser fingerprinting, and other methods so long as the third party site (e.g. Buzzfeed) is firing a FB tracking pixel?

I&#x27;ve never been a fan of Facebook, although as an early adopter I&#x27;ve been on it for a long while. In fact, I&#x27;ve always said (and still say) that Facebook is the closest thing the modern world has to a devil, because it uses your friends against you to encourage you to do things you would not normally do. It&#x27;s really, really bad.<p>But I&#x27;m still on. Why? Well, because, like I said, all my friends are on there. It&#x27;s a faustian choice: give up hearing from and relating to all of those people I have put so much emotional capital in all these years? Or stay and hold my nose?<p>I do not feel that the hype against Facebook is overblown. In fact, looking at it over a period of decades, it&#x27;s probably understated.

It&#x27;s ironic how that page uses google analytics, enabling Google to track your visit.

The is fear bait and not a well rounded analysis, it belongs on FOX news and is completely sophomoric.<p>For example: (Peter Thiel) - believes in a theory called &quot;memetic desire&quot; which uses people&#x27;s social groups to manipuate their wants and intentions. - Copy pasted will spelling error^<p>A theory is not something you believe in, Memetic Desire ( Google René Girard) is a very interesting psychological idea, I find it interesting , will the author paint me as having evil intentions as well..

Can anyone name 3 alternatives and the strategy to get people to quit FB and sign up for something new?

I feel like this article, like every other article about facebook, is based on a misunderstanding of what it is and how it should be used. It seems to me that everything on facebook should be to some extent a facade, an idealised version of whats actually going on. Its a really nice way to keep in some sort of contact with people that you&#x27;ve fallen out of touch with or people who you were never that close with to start (but they post interesting things). This is where the primary value of facebook is (for me at least).<p>The point is, information on facebook is pseudo-public, not private and hopefully not too personal. Use it like this, and it don&#x27;t think theres any problem. There are plenty of other options for more private or personal communications so its not like they have any monopoly power in this area. So, regardless of the dubiousness of Mark Zuckerberg&#x27;s vision for open communications, i think the problems written about in this article reduce to a lot of hyperbole.

Does anyone know if deactivation helps with any of these privacy concerns? I have had my account deactivated for 4 years. I keep it open just in case I need to get ahold of someone if I can&#x27;t get through through phone and email (which has happened!).

So, if you don&#x27;t use the android app and don&#x27;t use it&#x27;s private messaging system for actually private stuff, you are just as &quot;safe&quot; as a non-user (since they can track you over websites with like buttons just as fine).

&quot;there are cases of vegetarians endorsing mcdonalds&quot; - more likely, that account <i>did</i> click &#x27;like&#x27;. however, paid publicizing of past likes that way is slimy and users didn&#x27;t give any meaningful consent to it.

Get off Facebook, Gmail, Youtube etc. Even though there&#x27;s not much I disagree with the author if you were to follow this I&#x27;d end up with very little to do online plus make my life extremely complicated &amp; difficult.

Linear regression! The horror!

Facebook&#x27;s total war on privacy prompted me to delete my profile years ago. I call my friends on the phone, and there are no ads.<p>The best Facebook privacy settings go in &#x2F;etc&#x2F;hosts, pointing facebook.com to localhost.

I like how there&#x27;s a facebook share button at the bottom of the page, even though he wraps up by imploring the reader to not use facebook to share this article.

I am off Facebook for more than year now and very happy.

The low contrast on this site made it hard to read. If you want folks to read an article that long, don&#x27;t put barriers in the way.

If still staying on facebook, and being quite assertive with content shared, then what else can be done to limit one&#x27;s online footprint. The article mentions ghostery and some EFF browser extension - that I unfortunately is unable to download at the moment, from the link in the article.<p>But without limiting your own freedom to much and being to much of a hassle what are some good minimum precautions?

This is one of the reasons why, back in 2005, I set up www.famipix.com

Sounds like we should get more relevant ads soon. Is that bad?

Nice to see someone turn around in such an articulate way.

I wish someone wrote a slick React based web interface for red#matrix (<a href="http://redmatrix.me/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;redmatrix.me&#x2F;</a>).

Lost me at the &quot;I have nothing to hide&quot; section. The first few paragraphs are trying to convince you that you actually do have stuff to hide.

So OK - much of these things sounds crazy. But it&#x27;s a free service and if you don&#x27;t really care if Facebook tracks you or your web-surfs, I don&#x27;t really see how it matters.<p>All these &quot;Get off Facebook, they are doing a lot of things you don&#x27;t like&quot;-posts are getting crazy. It&#x27;s like a mechanic running around screaming at people they are using the wrong oil in their cars or a lawyer running around acting crazy about people not suing everybody.<p>Some people are just that: They don&#x27;t care.