
Steve Wozniak says he's leaving Facebook - SonicSoul
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2018/04/08/apple-co-founder-steve-wozniak-says-hes-leaving-facebook/497392002/
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superkuh
I'm not a famous icon for an industry but I _never_ signed up for Facebook.
I'm really enjoying not getting anymore looks of confusion or hostility when I
say I don't use it. And the occasional 'I told you so' is pretty sweet too.

I just wish the public at large, or these icons leave, would acknowledge the
more general problem beyond the simple partisan politics driving the flight
from Facebook. Centralization is always bad. Walled gardens are always bad.
The create the incentives and pressures will inevitably lead to the problems
people blame Facebook for.

But nope. These same people deleting their facebook accounts are still using
gmail, still using Apple's app store, and switching to using Discord or Slack
or the like to talk and organize.

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mayniac
>But nope. These same people deleting their facebook accounts are still using
gmail, still using Apple's app store, and switching to using Discord or Slack
or the like to talk and organize.

I get what you're saying: Google still reads everything sent/received through
gmail, Apple still provides very little transparency over the appstore etc

That all said, I still use these services because they actually provide
usefulness to me. Gmail has been my persistent email provider for a decade
now. If I didn't want a free email service, I could get a domain name that
looks professional enough and set up my own email server, but I can't be
bothered to maintain it when I don't use email that much. I could stop using
the Play Store, unlock my bootloader, get a custom ROM with privacy built in,
compile FOSS apps and all but it's far too convenient for me to search for an
app's name and hit download. I've weighed up the tradeoffs between privacy,
security and convenience and with the services you've mentioned, convenience
outweighs the negatives.

However with Facebook I just don't see the _point_ anymore. To begin with I
was fine with the lack of privacy. I knew that anything I post would be
analysed by a FB server and a profile built up on me for targeted ads, which
was a valid tradeoff for a free service that gave a lot of functionality:
pages were great for seeing what bands were doing, private groups were great
for shit-talking with people, events were and still are one of the best
features FB introduced, and I could see an unfiltered stream of posts from
friends which was essentially uncensored. Now there's better services for all
of those features (except for events). Facebook is a cluttered mess of
spaghetti code which slows down any device it touches and has features nobody
uses than features they do. Messenger is completely useless to me since not
only is the app a mess, but the privacy implications of having all my messages
read by Facebook are too severe. I never check my news feed anymore since FB
started filtering what people see. In the end, all I use it for nowadays is
events and a couple of private groups. And then of course there's the
increased the level of snooping they do on your private life, to the point
where severe world changing incidents like Cambridge Analytica are inevitable.

I spent a few days of last week writing a script to purge everything I've
liked, commented, and posted on Facebook. I would have left it at that if I
only had issues with Facebook's lack of privacy of its users, but since I just
have no use for the service anymore I'm going to be deleting my account also.

It's a shame, because Facebook could have been an incredibly useful and
reasonable service if they didn't expand as rapidly as they did. But it is no
longer useful to me at all, and a lot of people I've spoken to about this say
the same: it's no longer a website with any novel purpose, but one they keep
using because everyone else is on it and there's nowhere else to go.

~~~
tdeck
Small correction: Google stopped reading emails for ad targeting about a year
ago:

[https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/23/15862492/google-gmail-
adv...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/23/15862492/google-gmail-advertising-
targeting-privacy-cloud-business)

Obviously they're still in that system and at least being parsed for spam
filtering, but not for targeting.

~~~
njarboe
Not specific ad targeting (what ever that means). Every other use I am sure is
full speed ahead. Machine learning, group ad targeting, prediction algorithms
for google assistant, etc. I have used gmail for a long time and recently my
employer switched over. Got me really thinking about alternative ecosystems
but still have not made any big changes.

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headsoup
For all the reports of people leaving and constant breaking scandals,
unfortunately, the actual damage to Facebook still seems to be negligible.
They've been confidently informing investors that their stock price is ok and
membership is rosy.

If Facebook comes through all this rather unscathed then it reinforces that
these big companies just _don 't need to care_. It also says much about the
values the stock-market supports.

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afinlayson
I honestly don't know why Facebook (the tool in this problem) is getting more
flack for this then the candidates who used the tool to do the damage.

Can we do the same thing for gun companies, how about death in general? It
wasn't X's fault, he used a remington (tool) to kill someone but really it's
Remington's fault, their CEO should go to jail..

Next we'll start blame Amazon for being the company that transporting the
problem.

~~~
zaidf
I have come to believe the biggest mistake Facebook made is not hiring the
right lobbyists.

The disproportionate attack on Facebook versus, for example, Experian is
stunning.

~~~
desu_
You might be right to believe that Facebook's PR team is weak or that
Experian's practices are bad, but the Experian comparison isn't stunning.
Experian's name recognition is nowhere near as strong as Facebook's and it
makes the potential loot for journos less interesting.

~~~
zaidf
A large part of a solid PR team’s job is to cultivate relationships with
journalists so when situations like these arise, they feel compelled to cover
the issue in a more nuanced and educated manner. I don’t mean to say the PR
team has to strive to spread lies or dishonesty, but rather be able to get
your company somewhat fair coverage. I don’t think that is happening.

I’ll go a step further and argue that for a company like Facebook, you should
have a dozen folks whose job is to simply come in everyday and think about the
possible attack vectors from the PR side. And then you work backwards from the
worst case scenarios of each to begin addressing the issue from various sides
(engineering, BD, Corp dev etc), ideally long before it plays out.

To give you an example, google PR for a long time has been super aware of
getting caught in a media tsunami charging it for being a monopoly. My hunch
is that every public speaker representing google has been made aware of this
and is provided guidance. For example, you won’t find google engineers talking
at big data conferences even joking about world domination. Instead, in
public, google underplays its larger ambition to err on the side of caution.

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glhaynes
Just an aside: I’ve seen several people lately get a lot more interested in
leaving Facebook when they realize they can stay on Messenger while
deactivating their Facebook account.

~~~
earenndil
...which is dangerous, because it makes them rather _less_ likely to leave in
the future, while giving them the satisfaction of having "left."

~~~
lostlogin
These people believe the have left?

~~~
earenndil
Yes, otherwise why would they 'delete' their regular facebook?

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KasianFranks
Funny thing is that you never say you're 'leaving' Google. This is the
difference between Search(AI/ML/NLP) and social media

~~~
catach
I'd say the difference is how essential your user account is to the service.
You might say you're "leaving Youtube". You'd definitely say you're "leaving
Gmail".

Which touches on the point that saying that you're "leaving Google" is unclear
because there's a huge family of products and services that you might mean.

