
Off-Facebook Activity Is a Welcome but Incomplete Move - DiabloD3
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/01/facebook-history-welcome-incomplete-move
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Jaruzel
I don't use Facebook, but I do use Messenger as I have a couple of close
family members who refuse to use anything else. I've just logged into Facebook
(which has no history as I've purged it[1]), and still there are 5 apps
sharing my activity with Facebook. These 5 apps are all on my phone, so I
guess Messenger is also sharing back to FB. :(

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[1] Shameless plug:
[https://github.com/Jaruzel/DeleteFacebookActivity](https://github.com/Jaruzel/DeleteFacebookActivity)

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gpvos
You can use Facebook's stripped-down web interface to send messages. It's what
I use on my phone.
[https://mbasic.facebook.com/](https://mbasic.facebook.com/)

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ourcat
Ahah! Thanks for this.

Many a time I've had to temporarily install their mobile Messages app just to
reply to someone while away.

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jonathanleon121
yes

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Astropop
_In the U.S., for example, three-quarters of adults don’t even know that
Facebook’s “ad preferences” page exists_

That's just ignorance. It irritates me when a person complains about social
media and its data farming, but the person doesn't bother to change some of
the settings a website/app has in order to diminish the collecting data
activity.

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asveikau
The fact that you found hacker news, created an account here and comment puts
you in the category where you poke around with settings and fault others for
not doing so. But there are _vast_ numbers of people using Facebook that just
aren't going to look at settings. They aren't bad people for not doing this.
Default behaviors mean a lot.

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Astropop
I'm not faulting anyone. I said it only irritates me those who complain
without taking any action.

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asveikau
But the possible actions we can take are not equally visible to everyone, and
this is true for many things in life outside of software as well. Putting an
opt-out somewhere deep in settings while doing things people would likely not
want technically solves the problem, but effectively does not.

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6gvONxR4sf7o
I might agree with the other commenter. If you can't figure it out yourself
(understandable for most people), it ought to be as easy as googling "where
are facebook's privacy settings?" I don't have an account, so I can't tell
whether the facebook help pages that come up are useful.

In general, I am frustrated when the complaint is about how hard a thing is to
do, when sticking that complaint into a web search gives you an easy answer.
That doesn't seem to be the case here though?

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p49k
I don’t know if you’ve used Facebook for a long time, but no matter how many
times you’ve gone and managed Facebook settings, if you come back a year later
you’ll find that you’ve been opted into all kinds of new garbage, you’ll find
that certain options are completely gone (for example, no longer being able to
opt out of public search or making your profile photo private) - even if you
were a layman who did your research, you will still likely fail.

