
1 in 10 Americans in survey say they deleted their Facebook account over privacy - spking
http://www.businessinsider.com/delete-facebook-statistics-nearly-10-percent-americans-deleted-facebook-account-study-2018-4?r=UK&IR=T
======
prepend
In a survey of people I know, 0 out of infinity kept their Facebook accounts
deleted.

But lots of people told me they did. Probably 30% of people I know.

Some actually deleted.

Some said they did and didn’t (really weird since you can see their account).

Some thought they did, but screwed it up.

Some said they did but switched to Messenger, or WhatsApp or some other part
of Facebook.

Over the past 5 years, not a single friend has stayed off Facebook. Although
it would be cool to install an app that actually tracked this to see people
who stay off.

I was hoping that this article would talk about how they did the survey
through Facebook :)

~~~
bowlich
I don't understand why go through the hassle of actually deleting
(particularly since it is so onerous). It changes nothing. There's probably
still a shadow account of the data you gave them. Deleting the account doesn't
put everything back in pandora's box.

You can just post that you're abandoning the account with where to reach you
online, log out, delete the cookies, and block their domain (what I did) and
have the same effect with the bonus that friends can still reach you if they
wonder where you went.

~~~
derefr
One difference: people who try to invite "you" (i.e. your Facebook profile) to
events through Facebook will discover that you don't exist, rather than the
event invitation just lingering in your now-abandoned inbox forever.

~~~
eertami
What I did is turn on email notifications for event invites - I now find I
never really goto the site unless an event pops up that I'm wanting to go to.

Haven't really got an alternative and I don't want to be "that guy" but it's
made Facebook usable for me.

------
JumpCrisscross
Deletion is too extreme for most people. Facebook is a monopoly for users and
in an oligopoly for advertisers. This is a market failure [1].

More reasonable: escalating partial dis-engagement. Here's what I did,
sequentially, over the years:

1\. Turn off notifications for the Facebook app on your phone;

2\. Turn off notifications for the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, _et cetera_
apps on your phone;

3\. Delete the Facebook app from your phone;

4\. Delete the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, _et cetera_ apps from your
phone; _and finally_

5\. Log out of Facebook on your desktop.

It took me 2 years to go through from step 1 to step 5. It has made me happier
and more productive. I still have a Facebook account. But the friction of
grabbing my laptop and logging in forces me to consider "is this what I want
to do? Or am I thoughtlessly reaching for the crack pipe?"

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure)

~~~
ummonUncommon
Knowledge that one need not use heroin this day has never saved those who are
its servants, nor those servants' prey.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _Knowledge that one need not use heroin this day has never saved those who
> are its servants_

Recovery rates for heroin addicts "ranges from 35-65%" [1]. And Facebook isn't
as addictive as heroin.

[1] [http://crehab.org/2017/08/14/heroin-addiction-why-the-
recove...](http://crehab.org/2017/08/14/heroin-addiction-why-the-recovery-
rate-is-better-than-you-think/)

~~~
whiddershins
I am a little unsure whether Facebook truly isn't as addictive as heroin, or
that it couldn't ultimately be as the algorithms improve. I find it as
pernicious as alcohol, for my personal, subjective, experience.

------
sho
These kinds of surveys are notoriously unreliable. There is no way for the
interviewer to verify, no penalty for the participant lying, and you're
talking to a complete stranger over the phone, further reducing the barrier
for lying. There's also possibly a motivation to "send a message" to FB such
that they improve their policy without the interviewee personally having to
pay a price.

Would be amazed if even half the "yes" responders actually did. Wouldn't be
surprised if literally none of them had.

Probably the best way for most people to "resist" would be to block FB
tracking, and anyone who sells it to them, at the browser level. If enough
people did, that swing the "materially hurt FB" vs "keep my personal utility
of the platform" balance into the positive.

edit: to clarify I meant the _respondees_ lying.

------
propman
Go on your friends list and look at all the deleted profiles. Facebook no
longer deletes the profile from your friendlist. If you have 900 friends and
50 delete, it still shows 900 and the names of deactivated profiles are still
in friend list, but with no avatar.

I went to my Facebook and found 8% of my friend list deactivated. I would be
surprised if this entire hoopla resulted in more than 1% deletion but even 1%
in NA is 1.8M accounts. That is around $200M a year loss for fb. Not a big
deal, but their valuation is based on forward growth, so not tiny either

~~~
sdhgaiojfsa
Note that they'll also have no avatar if they never set an avatar, and further
if they deleted their account in the past, before the latest hoopla. So this
way of estimating the number of people who have deactivated lately necessarily
provides only an upper bound on the total number of deactivations.

------
nodesocket
Either this survey is biased, or Zuckerberg and FB are outright lying when
they say they have not seen a noticeable increase in deletions. My money is on
the survey and media who push these headlines being BS.

~~~
humanrebar
Why?

------
everdev
I did this years ago to claims even here on HN that people think when you say
"I deleted FB" or "I haven't used FB in years" are bragging.

I think it's important to spread the message that life goes on outside of FB.
If you delete, you'll be in good company.

In a less extreme version, try not using it for 10 days and notice how you
feel. There will be withdrawal, but if you can't pause a behavior for 10 days,
you're probably addicted. Maintaining relationships outside of FB is like
riding a bike and it'll feel awkward not to be involved in the "Did you see on
FB" conversations at first, but you'll be past it in no time and back to more
present conversations.

~~~
nightski
For the most part I really dislike FB, and have no meaningful relationships on
it. But unfortunately many local restaurants, breweries, and biking/activity
clubs post activities on FB which I would likely completely miss out on. Until
there is a competitor which is able to provide this I'm stuck on FB for the
foreseeable future. However my profile is pretty minimal, I haven't shared
anything for several years, and I run an adblocker. I don't think this is much
more of a privacy concern than _not_ having one as you are still tracked.

------
evo_9
So if you have never had a FB account, is there a way to delete your shadow
profile and/or even check if they have one on you?

~~~
lancefisher
Move to Europe, and file a right to be forgotten request after May 25th, when
the GDPR goes into effect.

~~~
ajmurmann
Do I have to live there or can I just be a citizen?

------
jiveturkey
I doubt that. It’d be bigger news than Syria (sadly) if FB lost 10% of its US
users.

------
beizhia
I actually deleted my facebook account because I felt like it was negatively
affecting me mentally. I've never been the most social person (although I'm
working to change that), and I would spend a lot of time alone reading my
facebook feed, thinking about how I don't do as much cool stuff as all the
people I'm friends with. I realized that I would only really post things to
seek affirmation. Initially I just changed my password to something long that
I couldnt remember, to keep me from logging in, knowing that I could reset the
password if I needed to login. I never did though for the next 6 months.

I also deleted the instagram app from my phone, and blocked reddit on all my
PCs. Hackernews might be next I'm afraid - I just don't see that it's a good
use of my time anymore. I've even been considering getting a non-smartphone
next time I need a new phone. Maybe it's just a reaction to everything going
on online, but I'm enjoying being free from social media.

------
amelius
I would quit Facebook if there was an alternative for keeping track of events
and inviting people, which my friends would actually use.

------
KasianFranks
You can't delete 'Search', a lesson for 'Social' and why it will always lose
to Search. Just ask AOL, Geocities, friendster and MySpace. Doing something
that's easy to duplicate makes it easy to exploit and rarely pays off in the
long term.

------
MR4D
I posted this article [1] Earlier today, but am linking here because I thought
it showed how futile deleting an account actually is.

In short, your data doesn’t hardly matter. Facebook is capable of generating
tons of meta-data that you have no control over.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16845031](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16845031)

------
amelius
By the way, Facebook still leaks information.

Proof:

On Facebook, create a targeted ad, targeting people who have secret property
"X"; the ad should be about a product "Y" not involving X.

Wait for people to click the ad, visiting your website, and buying the product
Y. Now you know the identities of these people _coupled_ to the fact that they
have property X.

This also works for Google.

------
beenBoutIT
According to FB, it takes 90 days for an account to actually be deleted. If
you 'delete' your account and then login before the 90 day period has passed
your account is just reinstated. I'd love to see what percentage of these
users stay off of FB long enough for their accounts to actually get removed.

------
MarkMc
9% seems rather high to me. No mention of how the survey was conducted. Was it
a telephone survey? How were the respondents chosen?

It will be interesting to compare this 9% figure with the change in users that
Facebook reports at their next earnings release.

------
poletopole
I deleted my facebook account with all my content eight years ago after I was
told some eastern European accessed my account, which made me realize what a
liability facebook is, not to mention your page is the first thing an employer
looks at when hiring.

------
erikb
Did they also delete their Whatsapp and their Instagram, their browser cache
and their current mobile phone number? Otherwise it probably doesn't matter
much.

------
Kiro
I really want to know the demographics here. I don't know a single one out of
my hundreds of friends.

------
titzer
Crazy idea: introduce a tax, per byte, on personal information, even if
anonymized.

------
coldtea
> _1 in 10 Americans in survey say they deleted their Facebook account over
> privacy_

So, we might not have gained more hope on privacy issues, but at least we now
know that a lot more people will outright lie and BS when polled on the
matter, than we previously thought....

------
acconrad
Would you be concerned if less than 2% of your userbase left?

~~~
codingdave
Yes. Having worked at a company with a 99.8% retention rate, I'd absolutely be
concerned if that jumped 10x.

Because that is the real metric... not how many people left, but how does it
compare to the retention rate prior to the recent events?

~~~
InterestBazinga
I agree. But, I feel it is not as serious as in other areas because there are
no true competitors to Facebook?

------
adrianlmm
>a survey

right

------
ummonUncommon
MySpace was a thing my friends and I resisted, but Facebook entered my life
around age 15, when an attractive classmate invited me. I could be criticized
for a lack of willpower when I joined the tool at that age, though I think
that'd be unfair. Shortly thereafter, the service atomized every in-person
form of social interaction I had once held dear, into a set of in-person
interactions which were the footnote to an online logbook. I'm not sure how to
qualify the negative impact the "social internet" had on myself and my peers,
but I think it's probably immeasurable and not dissimilar from epidemic
narcotic use.

This continued through my young adulthood, during which time the traditional
media was covering the suicide of Tyler Clementi and later Aaron Schwarz. I
noticed the tool routinely used for cyberbullying, outing classmates of
alternate sexualities, contact with strangers and subsequent dysfunctional
communication, race hate, other forms of anomic and disinhibited
communication, abusive surveillance of individuals within human courtships,
and the routine use of aliases. Violence associated with online
"socialization" continues to escalate in countless communities. Later, the
implementation of Facebook Live would popularize its worldwide use for live
video broadcast of interpersonal physical violence. Knowing the marketing
effects of most other media, the deployment of that particular functionality
was probably a given after the Clementi suicide.

The effects of the tool upon partly-or-entirely political processes such as
election, incarceration, hiring, policing, etc., are still for-profit and
poorly-characterized. With a user count in the billions, billions in value,
contracts with data mining firms, use as a media outlet by municipalities in
lieu of traditional public media, its probably safe to say they are sizable
and wholly-undemocratic. It is comedic that the idea of "democratization" is
used in conjunction with a technology whose aim is to recontextualize
friendship as an interaction which occurs at an extreme distance and with
intensive record-keeping, as opposed to the chance in-person encounter of
individuals with their spoken narratives in an agora, square, etc.

The sort of behavior for which Facebook exists and continues to exist is the
exact behavior legislated against upon the now-decommissioned ARPANet. The
internet was never open or free. To say now, "The internet should neither be
commercial nor political, but can be free" is too late, a lie, and unfair. The
Kindle is a great device. Text messaging may be a small improvement to the
human condition, like the lightbulb, or motor cartage. Remarks on Facebook are
likely confined to the realm of observation.

Media is not inherently social. For it to be social, its purpose has to be
removed from a dominant narrative and subsequent revenues upon this narrative,
which is necessarily impossible. Community farming, in spite of its tremendous
cost, is social. Healthcare, in spite of its tremendous cost, is social.

I post these remarks only to document my experiences for posterity. I cannot
undo the damage these tools and their attached profit motives have done to my
life, but I can note them publicly.

------
derimagia
Said they deleted _

------
Thaxll
This kind of survey are bs, why do people even talk about them. No one care
about the privacy issue and people will keep using Facebook.

~~~
ilovecars2
Having spoken to a number of friends and people I haven’t met on the Facebook
groups I was in (theme was all car enthusiasts) - not one of them cared. Their
arguments were that Facebook knows everything about them anyway. My flatmate
also gave he same opinion when I asked her. I can only assume that the general
public just don’t care or feel that they have bigger things to worry about.

------
ajeet_dhaliwal
We can all be ignorant. I would never have thought so many people would
consider this a new concern and felt the time to act was now, in April 2018.

Although I don't personally use Facebook I think most people who like it
should just continue using it but just think more carefully about the
information they share. Deleting now isn't going to bring back the data that
has already been shared.

~~~
908087
The problem is that "the information they share" and "the information Facebook
collects" are two very different things. During the recent hearings,
Zuckerberg kept stressing the fact that users "choose what they share", while
conveniently dodging addressing the fact that Facebook collects much more than
that.

