
Ask HN: Are you with me? Leaving Facebook.  - ihodes
I'll be deactivating my Facebook account (tainting what I need to) and removing as much information there as possible within the week.<p>I'm not a hardcore privacy advocate, but I joined Facebook with the understanding that some of what data placed there would stay private. That is what we agreed to.<p>Facebook has repeatedly violated that trust.
======
steveklabnik
Nope. I'm not.

Yes, privacy is important. However, the only information that I've ever put on
Facebook is information that I'd want everyone else to know. That's why I have
a Facebook; to give people who don't know me an idea of who I am and what I'm
like, and get a little bit of personal branding out there. For instance,
there's at least one little portion of my life that I don't want to be
broadcast out to everyone, so it's conspicuously missing.

I don't feel that Facebook told anyone that their data would be private. Maybe
I'm just naïve, or a little bit of an exhibitionist.

~~~
ihodes
I agree with a lot of what you're saying, and I'll miss Facebook for the very
reason you like it, too.

But I'm often more worried about what my _friends_ do that can effect the
amount of information out there, about me. Facebook makes it easy to
inadvertently share information about your friends. That, I don't like.

I'd love a replacement Facebook, one that is a little bit like Facebook used
to be: relatively simple, unintrusive and benign. I want fine-grained control
over what I can share, and not to have to worry about what will be given away.
Or at least know upfront what will be. Opting IN to things is great.

Basically, Facebook has treated me (and those who feel similarly) like crap.

~~~
steveklabnik
Even with the way Facebook used to be (I signed up in 2004), people could have
still shared information about you. One wall post is all it takes.

For that matter, this could happen anywhere on the Internet. Someone could
write a blog post about you, or tweet about you, or any number of ways to
publish information about others. The web is increasingly becoming read/write,
and Facebook privacy settings aren't going to change that.

~~~
jarek
Writing a wall post or tweet takes active action on behalf of the friend. Hmm,
this is on Jarek's Facebook profile -- let's paste it somewhere where others
can see it too.

With the recent app privacy changes, all they have to do is use an app. The
programmer can take care of the rest. Different level altogether.

------
cmelbye
No, I'm really happy with the service that they provide. If there's something
that's actually private, I'm not going to be posting it on the Internet in the
first place.

~~~
jamesjyu
Hear hear to that! I'm always puzzled by all these privacy nuts that go on and
on about privacy problems with social media sites like Facebook. If something
is absolutely private and you do not want to share it outside of one or two
people, DO NOT put it on a social media site! Period.

In fact, I would go as far as to say never put any critically sensitive
information on the web.

~~~
minalecs
well sometimes its your friends.. that will put pictures up of you without
knowing, or will tag you in and can't remove it yourself

~~~
derefr
Not having a Facebook account will not prevent people from posting pictures of
you on their own, and even including your name in the picture description
(thereby "tagging" you in every way except the notification.)

~~~
timr
Not having Facebook will not prevent people from posting pictures of you on
the web. The horse is pretty far out of the barn on that one.

------
ivenkys
I never went in - i still don't understand the point of FB or others of their
ilk.

If i really want to keep in touch with far-flung family, friends - i pick up
the phone or drop an email. If they are important to me i will make the
effort. I also don't find the need to advertise on a daily/hourly basis what i
am doing or tell people about the cool car/bike/tv/ipod etc. i bought. May be
its just not for people like me.

~~~
Legion
Facebook is highly efficient for communicating with a large number of "fringe"
acquaintances.

Things you suggest - picking up the phone, dropping an email - require 1-on-1
contact. I am limited in the amount of time I can devote to 1-on-1 contact.

But I can post on Facebook and people that know me but aren't necessarily
people I want to devote a lot of 1-on-1 time to - more distant relatives, old
friends, etc. - can see what I want to share. And I can skim my feed and see
what they want to share.

The level of time and contact is proportional to the relationship. They're not
my inner circle, they're outer circle. Facebook is the single best improvement
to my "outer circle" relationships ever invented. For low effort, I get to
have some contact instead of no contact.

For some people, Facebook is all about the time wasting activities, but that's
not the core of the experience unless you make it so.

~~~
ivenkys
I can see your point but my take is - that's what New Year, Christmas,
${Special_Occasion} are for, keeping in touch with fringe acquaintances. Send
an email on those days.

------
enomar
I left and advised everyone I know to do the same. Privacy was never an issue
for me, but Facebook keeps changing the rules. I can't keep up.

<http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline/>
[http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-further-
reduce...](http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-further-reduces-
control-over-personal-information)

------
philcrissman
I've stopped using mine, removed all apps, unfollowed (er, unliked?) all
pages.

I'd guess the market is ripe for a fb-type site that, for lack of a better
phrase, isn't evil. And doesn't have a horrible ux.

~~~
pg
What features should it have? (Or not have?)

~~~
davi
1: I want ACLs meet Web. I want to publish personal stuff to close friends &
family, professional stuff to colleagues, and random miscellany to the world,
all via the same tool. I want to be able to customize the layout of my content
depending on the audience.

2: I want this without my friends and family having to learn about OpenID or
having to sign up for a new account somewhere. (I don't know how to do this, I
am just saying what I want. Posterous got this part right.)

3: I want to know that the investment I'm making in generating content will
last. This means I need to trust that the host of my content is not going to
disappear, or get bought and change its behavior radically. Alternatively, it
means that I am given the ability to migrate my content to a well-behaved,
API-implementing host elsewhere (including, possibly, on my own server).

Nothing I know of addresses this set of wants elegantly. Maybe because
monetizing the social graph requires as much transparency from the
participants as possible, at least according to current thinking. But I feel
that eventually, what 'sharing on the web' means will inevitably evolve to
accommodate this set of wants.

If Facebook decided to be less evil they could do ACLs-meet-web pretty easily,
since they already have such a huge installed user base. In fact, they may
have already done this a long time ago for all I know; back when I canceled my
account, they did not have this capability.

~~~
gcr
You are describing the Internet. Self-run web sites, blogs, and instant
messaging systems:

1\. allow you to fine-tune who sees what, 2\. do not require extra accounts
(save comment systems, etc.), 3\. are not tied to any one provider or company
and thus will last for a long time.

~~~
davi
How do you see the internet providing built-in ACLs?
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_control_list>

Even if it did, your assertion is like equating assembly to a high level
language. Just because you theoretically can do anything in assembly that you
can in a high level language doesn't mean you would _want_ to. I am trying to
specify a set of attributes for a non-existent tool that would let me more
fluidly publish what I write and create.

\----

edit: if anybody reading this would care to explain why I am getting downvoted
& the parent is getting upvoted so much, I would appreciate it.

~~~
tbrownaw
The internet provides something like ACLs using something similar to a
password capability model: I post stuff as "tbrownaw" or "Timothy Brownawell"
and anyone can know it's me, but I also have logins to various message boards
under pseudonyms, which you can only tie back to me if I tell you.

~~~
davi
Thanks. That is indeed an inverted form of what I was wishing for, and I
didn't get the idea from the initial response to my post.

------
kennu
If you share something with your 300+ friends on Facebook, I think it's
obvious it's no longer private. I have always considered Facebook a tool for
_finding_ interesting stuff intead of _hiding_ it.

A more open, non-evil alternative would be cool, of course. But good luck
rebuilding the whole social graph there. Almost anybody who has tried that has
failed.

(I view this as somebody who follows the Facebook News Feed all the time,
posts several times a day, and often participates in long discussion threads
about news, politics etc. with my friends.)

------
maxwin
We need a decentralized social graph. I should host and own my data not
facebook or any other organization. Maybe browsers should innovate and solve
this problem.

~~~
steveklabnik
You'd probably like OpenLike: <http://openlike.org/>

or OpenSocial: <http://www.opensocial.org/>

Not that OpenSocial took off or anything. And I'm not that confident in
OpenLike, either.

~~~
nose
opensocial isn't doing too bad. It is supported by Yahoo, Google, MySpace,
LinkedIn, and many more networks.

------
cj
I honestly don't care. People shouldn't have private conversations or
implicating pictures on Facebook, period.

If you don't do either of those two things, you'll be fine. No need to
dramatically or publicly terminate your account.

~~~
jseifer
Devil's advocate: If you have a facebook account you really can't stop people
from tagging you in "implicating pictures" and the like. You can un-tag
yourself after the face or delete things on your wall but there's no guarantee
you'll get to that before someone else sees it.

~~~
wyclif
I thought it was possible to not allow tagging to your Wall in Settings?

~~~
darren_
It is. If you set the 'photos and videos of you' privacy option to just
yourself, when you're tagged in a photo it appears on your Wall but only for
you. Your friends looking at your wall don't see it. That said, I don't think
you can block the actual tagging, which is a shame, although you can manually
untag yourself, and once untagged you can't be re-tagged.

Incidentally, you can stop your friends posting to your wall, or commenting on
any of your items, or even just block specific friends from commenting or
posting.

------
anactofgod
I don't know why I would. I decided early on that I wouldn't use any of their
apps, play any of their games, and actually introduce disinformation into the
medium from time to time. (I went to the "Barnum and Bailey Clown College",
"The School of Hard Knocks" and "How High". No really! I did!)

I view FaceBook as being purely frivolous, for casual interaction w friends &
acquaintances, and treat it thus. There are other "social networking" sites
(for instance, LinkedIn) for other types of (real/purposeful) networking.

------
cschep
I recently deleted mine.

I had it for a long time, and I just felt like it was keeping the most brain
dead relationships barely alive. I was constantly seeing people in real life
and saying, "oh yeah, I read that on facebook." I didn't like that, and the
privacy concerns were just the last straw.

So yeah, I'm with you.

~~~
sheldonwt
I'm graduating from university next week at a school with twelve thousand kids
and this happens all the time to everyone I know. It's so mundane to learn
some new social goings-on around campus that it's cliche to mention you found
out on the site. I hate it for the same reason. On graduation day, leaving
facebook will signify a new phase of life.

------
glhaynes
One thing to keep in mind: there are no signs I know of yet that the 'unwashed
masses' are going to quit using Facebook: they love it and don't seem to care
about the privacy thing overall. So by leaving, you're missing out on a
significant perspective of what users (read: customers) experience everyday.
It's like refusing to use Windows during the 90s. Not saying you shouldn't,
but just that it's a cost to keep in mind.

Also: how confident are you that Facebook won't still be HUGE 10 years from
now? Many smart people think FB will only expand in its importance on the web.
Again, not saying it will be or that people shouldn't quit if it offends their
sense of propriety, but I'd hate to reopen my account 5 years from now after
publicly committing a principled FB suicide.

------
geuis
I am torn when it comes to this. In principal I want to. But my friends and
family are spread around the world and in many cases FB is the only way I have
of keeping in touch with them. My privacy settings are already as high as I
can make them but I can't readily leave the silo.

------
jrockway
Reminds me of this: [http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-constantly-
mention...](http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-constantly-mentioning-
he-doesnt-own-a-tel,429/)

If you want to give up Facebook, just fucking do it... but realize that nobody
else cares.

(For the record, I haven't updated facebook in about 5 years, because it bores
me. But I don't go on and on about it...)

------
sthomps
I did that, except I deleted, not deactivated. I'm not a hardcore privacy guy
either, but they got to be a little too much after f8

------
kevintwohy
I think the 'don't put anything you want kept private on the internet' is,
generally, a good argument. I will say though, that I do think Facebook
encouraged a reasonable expectation that certain data would be 'private,' and
that's since changed.

~~~
gte910h
I honestly hate I can be tagged in photographs and cannot turn this off.

~~~
kevintwohy
Yeah. The same is true of certain actions like '[name] commented on
[otherName]'s photo' - you used to be able to control those kinds of feed
stories but no longer.

------
scorxn
Facebook made the decision for me yesterday. I declined to link all my profile
data to business Pages, so everything I'd bothered to maintain was wiped out.
It was clear I'm no longer part of their intended user base.

It's fine. I have no interest in participating in an ad network, so I wiped
out the rest (friends, photos, etc) and publicized alternate contact info.
Gotta keep the account for some of my clients' Pages.

Facebook was great for me ca. 2004-5. Now its goals and policies are very
different. Maybe more people will get shocked away when tagging + image
recognition start imposing on their family photos.

------
rajat
Nope, like many others here, I use Facebook as a public communication medium,
which means I don't post private things there. It is not a tool for intimacy;
it's a resume that I am handing out to perfect strangers.

Perhaps, over time, had they not compromised their privacy standings, I would
have treated it more as a tool for intimate conversations with friends and
family. I certainly will not do so now, or ever again. I will treat them
forever like a public billboard.

------
random42
I deleted my FaceBook account yesterday. For me, their absurd privacy policies
are unethical, but the real reason is, I find it a complete waste of my good
time.

------
greenlblue
I'm with you. Although my personal problem wasn't with how they managed
privacy but with how they used social links between friends and exploited it
for marketing purposes. Plus, on facebook everyone is a fan of something and
that's all they are and the people that claim their facebook page gives others
a sense of what they are like in real life are delusional.

------
omnivore
Facebook has certainly gone from being pretty straightforward about privacy to
deceptive about it, but the real people who need to worry aren't tech savvy HN
denizens, but parents of those types and kids who don't have the first clue or
don't know what to check, etc. That said, there are some fairly easy ways to
ensure that you're not "exploited" digitally using Facebook. You can't scrub
it entirely of your presence, but you can at least ensure that people can't
access anything about you publicly without being a friend of yours.

That's fairly reasonable. Now the stuff like making wall posts show up on news
feeds and such are somewhere between annoying and intrusive, but that's where
we can just choose to ignore it, pair down the number of friends we maintain
or other tactics.

For better or worse, the site works.

------
petercooper
This is about as interesting as the old "Microsoft sucks" circle jerks that
would occur on Slashdot. I deleted my FB account six months ago and it wasn't
a big deal. There are plenty of people who will continue to use FB and not
care about most of these implications.

------
techist
I am not only with you, I am ahead of you. I deleted my account(with some
effort and patience)when I read that Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, had
declared that"Privacy is Dead". Well he may think so but a of lot of people,
including myself think otherwise.

------
benwerd
I've never been under any illusions about Facebook's business model or intent,
but the expansion of their boundaries and Zuckerberg's stance on privacy mean
I feel I have to take an ideological stand. Professionally, I argue for strong
access controls, user control over data and the ethics of privacy in web
applications, and that's incompatible with my continued presence on Facebook.

It's not just hackers and Internet professionals who are worried by this. So I
reckon it's up to all of us to create an easy-to-use, secure, friendly web-
based framework for us to share and collaborate with our friends.

------
phiberoptik
I'm a pretty big advocate of privacy, but in order to protect mine, I take
certain steps in order to avoid letting people use any of my personal
information.

For starters, any social media I use, I use one of my many nicknames. I never
use my real name, birthdate, and none of the information I use in any of these
sites is accurate. My address, my age, my DOB - NOTHING is real in my profile.
Even the picture I use isn't me.

This way, I control who gets my information and what they use it for. If
Facebook is using my information, it certainly doesn't represent me in anyway.

If you really want to control the information, you can.

------
Ixiaus
Stop placing your trust in other people.

I considered committing Facebook suicide but decided against it for the
primary reason that many casual friends I'm able to keep in touch with/share
media with that would normally be quite difficult.

I have my privacy settings locked down, all 3rd party apps removed, and I
_never...ever_ say anything on Facebook that I would encrypt/sign in email.

I'm sure people had a similar upset over the postal service when it was first
suggested! It has more to do with being _mindful_ of your mouth and being
aware of the options you have as an _individual_ for privacy (GnuPG).

------
adrianwaj
97 comments from 8 days ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1289997>

Ask HN: Anybody else quitting Facebook over privacy concerns?

~~~
nfnaaron
I'm not quitting, I've just pared my data and I don't use it much, it's
boring. To me.

------
s3graham
Sort of, never joined so I guess I'm effectively joining you.

------
GeneralMaximus
Already done that, but for an entirely different reason. I realized that most
"social media" websites are meticulously designed to get people hooked. The
"Like" button, for instance, was not added to FB on a whim. It makes sure
people keep posting new status messages and keep logging in every day (or
_shudder_ every few minutes) to see if someone liked them.

My hosts file currently blocks Facebook, Twitter and Reddit, among other
websites.

------
SandB0x
How about changing your name and birthday a bit

Winston Jonathan Smith -> W.J. Smith

01/03/1980 -> 01/01/1950 (this doesn't even have to be visible)

and not posting any sensitive information on there?

------
bcl
Nope, I'm not leaving.

But what I have done is sanitize my profile info and remove all of my 'likes'.
I joined FB to communicate with friends, not to be a cog in another marketing
machine. I'll still use it to keep up with friends and share pics, but that's
the limit of it.

Their recent announcement that they are going to be sharing their databases
with 3rd parties is what pushed me to take these steps.

------
andymoe
As soon as tell me how to delete my data for real. Maybe they will let us into
the datacenter to help them do it.

------
jchonphoenix
I'm already gone. They annoyed me after forcing me to link to pages in my
profile.

------
chanux
No. YOU ARE with me. I deleted my FB sometimes back and lived happily ever
after.

------
Qz
I've never really used it for much, so I don't see much gain in deleting it.

------
lvecsey
Relax. Just grow some crops on Farmville and don't worry so much.

------
oomkiller
I like Facebook, I also like the new features they are adding. I never posted
anything under the assumption that the world couldn't see it. So no, I won't
be joining you.

------
milofelipe
I just deleted my 0 karma Plurk account a month ago. I deleted my Friendster
account (I'm from the Philippines) last week. I "MIGHT" delete Facebook next.

------
cmars232
I will if there is a better place to go. Or even a place that isn't better yet
but could be made better by the early adopters.

------
benkant
I haven't had a Facebook account for years. My leaving had nothing to do with
privacy.

------
cianestro
I've been purging my data every week for 2 years on facebook. It keeps things
fresh.

------
adamc
Left it a year ago, but more because it was a time-waster than over privacy.

------
known
Isn't it easy just to change your name.

------
brown9-2
How exactly did they violate it?

------
schammy
I really disapprove of what Facebook has done in the past year or two with
privacy. It's disgusting.

However, I don't really "use" Facebook. I have an account but I rarely post
anything on it, and I don't use any of the apps. I just use it to see what my
real life friends are up to, including many that I don't actually see anymore
because they have moved away.

So, their new privacy stuff doesn't really affect me, since I really only use
Facebook on a passive level. So I am not deleting my account. But I still
strongly disapprove of what they are doing.

------
adrianwaj
I've got two words concerning Facebook (and feel free to downvote):

Fuck Facebook

and for the more adventurous:

Fuck Apple

