
WhatsApp co-founder tells everyone to delete Facebook - coloneltcb
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/20/17145200/brian-acton-delete-facebook-whatsapp
======
propman
I don't get what changed? We've knows Facebook tracks everything, we've known
Google does the same thing. If you've ever developed anything in messenger
even today, it's amazing how much information is given. We know all these
sites track everything you do outside of Facebook too. Everyone has been
trying to get them to stop, we know it's illegal to build a profile on someone
but Facebook gets around that by building a profile but not assigning it to
your direct name.

Regulations should have sprouted in Obama years, but the admin and tech execs
were too buddy buddy and no way Trump promotes this because it makes him look
like he is accepting Russia interfered and it's not politically expedient for
him to do so.

Same thing with Harvey Weinstein and all the metoo that was known by everyone.
I mean I'm happy with all of this coming out, but why now? How is it so
coordinated? Usually these guys pay journalists for fluff pr counter views or
to shut down stories. Weinstein did.

Is this Data just a metoo thing? Is google next?

~~~
noetic_techy
Its purely Trump hatred driving this. Because Obama doing this in 2012 =
Genius. Trump doing this in 2016 = Scandal. I'm a libertarian and yes I threw
my vote away on Gary Johnson, but looking at the media landscape, there truly
is a backlash against conservatives going on in social media, and this is just
part of that. Donald Trump won because fake news... no wait, it was Russia and
their abysmal social media spending... no wait, its because he gamed facebook!
They want to put more pressure on facebook to "do something about this" now
that the coin has flipped. I have a feeling though this is going to get out of
hand and drag facebook into the gutter.

~~~
matchbok
What Obama did was very, very different.

The fact that you don't know this (or ignored it) tells a lot about how biased
you are.

And yes, there should be backlash against conservatives. They just elected a
Nazi in Illinois.

~~~
RyanZAG
> They just elected a Nazi in Illinois.

I know nothing about American politics or what's going on in Illinois. But
that you jump straight on calling someone you disagree with a "Nazi", while
also saying how different what Obama did with no explanation and a lot of
insults, does not give me much confidence in what you are saying here.

Just letting you know in case you were trying to convince anyone of your
viewpoint.

~~~
matchbok
Didn't call anyone a Nazi, except the Nazi, who just won a Republican primary.

Try again.

~~~
RyanZAG
Sorry for that - you can't believe my surprise that you really do have an
actual Nazi running. That's honestly unbelievable. I hope you can understand
why I assumed you were being hyperbolic.

------
fzeroracer
So I want to cut off an argument at the pass here. Specifically: "Everyone
knows Facebook already gathers all of your data."

We, as people here both on HN and people in the tech world take for granted
the fact that we both know and understand how our systems work (mostly). We
know that companies package and sell our data, that if something is 'free' the
real subscription fee is what they collect on us during each use. But there is
a significant population that simply doesn't know, think it's too much of a
'conspiracy theory' or don't care.

My parents, as much as I love them, are absolutely hair-tearingly bad at
anything related to computers. They've had issues with scammers and Microsoft
phoning them up so that they can upgrade their computer's ram. When I tell
them about what kind of things Facebook does, they don't understand. They
don't get why their data is so valuable ('well so what they get my phone
number not like it affects me') and a lot of the time they have trouble
understanding what they actually do.

Breaking stories like this is not necessarily surprising no, not to us. But it
raises awareness and makes people wonder what companies actually are doing
with their data. I doubt it'll result in the bubble that is Facebook finally
popping but opportunities like this are always great times to pull aside your
family and let them know why things like this matter. And in this current
environment people are hyper-aware of things like this possibly more than ever
before.

So I don't think the argument should be based around normalizing this sort of
behavior by Facebook and other companies but rather revealing it to those that
might not be aware.

~~~
TarpitCarnivore
To add onto this, I believe a large amount of consumers of these products
assumed they were only accessing their own data. This story is highlighting
how these companies further connect dots between you _and_ all your
connections. This is where I feel people didn't recognize the larger scale of
all of this, especially with progmatic programming for ads. Any time you try
to outline how ad networks work w/r/t to "FB is recording us" you're met with
"yeah buts". I think a lot of people didn't want to believe this was possible,
but now have no choice but to accept it is very much happening.

------
iliketosleep
It's quite ironic that this is the man who sold WhatsApp and its enormous
userbase to facebook, creating a total lock in to the facebook ecosystem for
many who do not even use facebook. He would have known what kind of a company
facebook is, so I don't understand the contradiction between selling Whatsapp
to them and now caring about these issues. Anyway, I am still glad he's
getting behind the #deletefacebook movement.

~~~
apotheothesomai
Jan's commitment to privacy motivated WhatsApp. Jan and Acton always have
believed in it strongly.

That said, if your company has 50 people, and FB offers nearly $20B. How
exactly do you tell those people that you refused an acquisition that huge,
because you personally feel that FB is bad. Could you deprive an engineer who
has worked his ass off for 4 years >$100M?

Anyway, I was contracting for WhatsApp, when the acquisition happened.
Conversations took place, but I'm not going to quote anyone.

~~~
paulcole
So you’re saying they believed in privacy strongly but believed in getting
rich more. Got it.

Nothing wrong with that. I’d do the same.

~~~
golergka
Your beliefs are not as important as obligations which you got yourself into.
If you want to act on your own accord and don't compromise, then maintain 100%
ownership of your company. When you're managing a company that doesn't belong
to you completely anymore, you're obliged to act in the best interest of your
shareholders.

~~~
Synaesthesia
Yes, within the institutional role, eg as CEO of a company, a person is
obliged to make certain decisions. Eg a CEO is obliged to maximize profits for
his company, otherwise the shareholders will fire him.

So if you’re going to criticize capitalism, you should criticize it as an
institution.

~~~
paulcole
> CEO is obliged to maximize profits for his company

This is not even close to true.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-
the-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-the-myth-of-
maximizing-shareholder-
value/2014/02/11/00cdfb14-9336-11e3-84e1-27626c5ef5fb_story.html)

------
hutzlibu
The big problem with the whole post-privacy thing is in my opinion, that it is
asymetrical.

I mean, if everybody (could) know everything about everybody else, ok,
strange, but fine. But the big powerful players know much more about the
private lives of the average citiciens(or also politican), than the Gestapo
and KGB could ever dream of, but we know not so much about them. This is very
dangerous.

As it gives the people with all that (potential dark) information much power.
Especialy when there are so many ridiculous laws around, disconnected from
reality, like that Marihuana is still mostly illegal. And while for most it
would not matter, but someone working in health sector for example, can get in
serious trouble(at least in germany), if he would found guilty of smoking
sometimes. This makes people vulnerable to blackmailing etc.

I can only hope, that there are also enough righteous people, like Snowden,
involved, to blow the whistle, when things get overhand. But I believe there
is something fundamentaly wrong, with the current direction.

~~~
yters
Yes, but that is all of modern tech, and people give them their data willingly
for the convenience. No one is stopping that any time soon.

------
jiggliemon
All of this Facebook hubub and broad public outcry is really all owed to the
election of Trump. If Trump handnt leveraged CA, we’d still all be happy and
fat on out individual bliss boxes – patting ourselves on the back – because
our side [a la Obama] was smart enough to use this technology to our
advantage.

Now when the enemy has (and use) the same technology, we’re forced to cry
foul. Demand oversight. Demand regulation.

The greater public is OK with this technology. They’re Ok with sweeping data
collection (Snowden Files). They’re OK with mining personal data (Facebook,
Google, etc). Thy’re OK with 1984, so long as it’s their sides version of
1984.

It takes a Trump for your side to realize how shitty things got while you were
enamored with charisma on your bliss box.

Edit: typing on my phone. Fixing grammar.

~~~
cabaalis
I think the best thing that has come out of the election of Donald Trump is
that many people are now excited about the idea of constitutionally limiting
the power of the executive branch. That idea seemed to have been forgotten for
the past few administrations. Even when I agreed with Obama or Bush, I was
very disappointed when they would use innovative methods to single-handedly
override the will of congress or the judiciary.

~~~
dmfdmf
The courts need to reign in the use of Executive Orders.

------
77ko
Brian Acton's post[0] about the Signal Foundation[1] makes it sound like they
could play in the same space as Facebook:

> Of course, this is just the beginning. There is a lot of work to be done to
> make our dream a reality and we will continually be asking our peers, our
> community, and ourselves if there are more effective ways to serve the
> public good. In the immediate future we are focused on adding to our
> talented-but-small team and improving Signal Messenger. Our long-term vision
> is for the Signal Foundation to provide multiple offerings that align with
> our core mission. That will come in time.

The tagline on the foundations splash page, __To develop open source privacy
technology that protects free expression __sounds like it could mean a
facebook type thingamajig, since what is FB but providing free expression to
the masses?

[0]: [https://signal.org/blog/signal-
foundation/](https://signal.org/blog/signal-foundation/) [1]:
[https://signalfoundation.org/](https://signalfoundation.org/)

~~~
1337biz
At this point I am sceptical that any communication platform can succeed
beyond niche communities unless they go after the teenager market.

------
cocktailpeanuts
I find it very hypocritical of all these people who already have vested their
shares in Facebook coming out and criticizing the company.

As someone else mentioned on this thread, this is the guy who contributed to
the concentration of all things social into Facebook by selling Whatsapp.

I'm pretty sure most people are not fond of Facebook basically monopolizing
people's private data and monetizing, but you don't get to criticize if you
are the one who contributed to creating it, no matter how detached you are
from the company anymore. And if you really cared about this, why didn't you
just come out and say it before all this?

I see this with the recent trend of all these "former early Facebook
employees" who obviously got to where they are now by working for Facebook and
made tons of money by exploiting users. Now that their shares have all vested,
they criticize Facebook about how they're so "unethical", etc.

If you really care about user privacy, just shut up and start your own company
and see if you can fix it from scratch, instead of using the fame you gained
by working for the company you're criticizing.

It's hypocrisy at worst.

~~~
sah2ed
I wouldn't call it hypocrisy, more like having to deal with the unintended
consequences of your action.

He and others that have come out to publicly criticize Facebook knew what they
were building, they just didn't see how powerful Facebook would eventually
become in programming people en masse. The way the last election turned out
was the wake up call.

Sean Parker himself admits as much in an interview with Axios:

 _" When Facebook was getting going, I had these people who would come up to
me and they would say, 'I'm not on social media.' And I would say, 'OK. You
know, you will be.' And then they would say, 'No, no, no. I value my real-life
interactions. I value the moment. I value presence. I value intimacy.' And I
would say, ... 'We'll get you eventually.'""I don't know if I really
understood the consequences of what I was saying, because [of] the unintended
consequences of a network when it grows to a billion or 2 billion people and
... it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other ...
It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what
it's doing to our children's brains."_

 _" The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook
being the first of them, ... was all about: 'How do we consume as much of your
time and conscious attention as possible?'""And that means that we need to
sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone
liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that's going to get
you to contribute more content, and that's going to get you ... more likes and
comments."_

 _" It's a social-validation feedback loop ... exactly the kind of thing that
a hacker like myself would come up with, because you're exploiting a
vulnerability in human psychology.""The inventors, creators — it's me, it's
Mark [Zuckerberg], it's Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it's all of these people —
understood this consciously. And we did it anyway."_

[0] [https://www.axios.com/sean-parker-unloads-on-facebook-god-
on...](https://www.axios.com/sean-parker-unloads-on-facebook-god-only-knows-
what-its-doing-to-our-childrens-
brains-1513306792-f855e7b4-4e99-4d60-8d51-2775559c2671.html)

~~~
cocktailpeanuts
I think what Sean Parker said was sensible. I'm talking about other people who
cross the line.

If these people were such a saint enough to come out and say "Delete
Facebook", they had years of opportunity to do so. It's not like Facebook's
user exploitation is something new. In fact this breach of user privacy has
been the general theme of Facebook from the beginning, even years and years
before Facebook acquired Whatsapp.

The appropriate reaction should be them sharing their opinion but in an
apologetic sentiment (since they clearly contributed to it AND profited from
it) instead of suddenly pretending to be a saint on the other side now that
their shares have all vested (and in this case he's working on a competing
product, which adds another layer of distaste in my mouth since he's basically
leveraging this social justice theme to get more users to use his signal app)

------
exolymph
Crossposting what I said on Twitter:

> My contrarian impulse is that I want y'all to stop dunking on Acton for this
> tweet. (Context: One of the WhatsApp cofounders who sold to Facebook and
> made lots of money.) People's views change over time and it can take years
> for a conviction to form and then crystalize.

> It's very possible that Acton is burning bridges with that tweet. Don't
> assume that he loses nothing by speaking up now.

~~~
jonbarker
This is true. He could have just sailed off on his social media yacht and
laughed at everyone.

------
gnicholas
If we use Twitter to announce that people should #deletefacebook, what social
network do we use in the event that it becomes necessary to #deletetwitter?

~~~
walrus01
you ssh into your own trusted openbsd system, run bitchx and connect to efnet,
just like the good lord intended back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the
earth.

i am only partially sarcastic here.

~~~
lgregg
you lost me after openbsd.

~~~
walrus01
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitchX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitchX)

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

~~~
lgregg
ahhh, Yes... I remember IRC. I used a different client though.

I looked at:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_Relay_C...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_Relay_Chat_clients)

mIRC is the only familiar one. Then again, this was back when I was a kid.
Vaguely related, AIM was my jam. I was a script kiddy and needed IRC to talk
to all the l337 h4ck3r5.

------
throwaway613834
I wonder if the Americans freaking out about this whole foreign influence
thing have any idea what their nation has done to _other_ countries' (both
democracies and otherwise). What's happened here is a complete joke in
comparison, and everyone is losing their head. Do people have _any_ idea what
the modern world has been like?

~~~
yters
It's mostly a way of targeting Trump. No one bats an eyelid when Clintons have
Russian ties.

~~~
chasing
Because Trump's ties are legitimately scary while Clinton's are trumped up
bullshit.

Which you should know, Donald Trump, Jr. You were in some of the meetings.

------
TaylorAlexander
Random comment but I see so many people talking about regulation. Why do we
want to hold the wolf by the ears here, continuing to use a service that
doesn’t respect us while trying to force them to act like they do, when
instead we could be advocating the use of user friendly services that truly
respect our freedom? Why if Facebook has proven to be focused on things we
don’t want (deep profiling), would you think any regulation (from politicians
who are seemingly all bought by campaign donations) would somehow redeem
Facebook?

For those advocating regulation, why do you advocate that over the development
of services that genuinely respect user freedom?

Thanks all who comment thoughtfully.

~~~
pteredactyl
Cynically, it's beyond comprehension or willingness to learn for most. They'd
rather complain to the Government than do something about it. Unfortunately,
we've found ourselves in this situation. And why people look to the Government
as some panacea of trust and integrity is beyond me.

~~~
wu-ikkyu
>And why people look to the Government as some panacea of trust and integrity
is beyond me.

Blind allegiance to authority and the government is indoctrinated on us from
an early age by state mandated school curriculum, the media, implicit fear,
and other factors.

------
LeoPanthera
My extended family is "well distributed", living in three different countries
around the world.

Facebook has been an essential tool for keeping in touch and keeping track.

What do I tell them all to use instead? Migrating to anything else, even if we
all agreed, would be a huge pain.

~~~
orbifold
Telegram or Signal for messages, create a "Family" group there and proceed to
receive inspirational quotes from your aunt there.

~~~
lambdadmitry
Telegram collects your messages just the same by default (and inevitably
collects them if you want a group), it just doesn't monetize the data in the
open. Yet.

------
luckydude
This will get downvoted but whatever. I predicted all of this a decade ago and
I refused to be part of it. All my friends laughed at me and said I was crazy.

Maybe I am but I don't do all that social media shit because if you don't know
where they are making money, they are making it off of you.

And that's creepy. I'm willing to pay for value, but I'm not on board with
them making money by looking over my shoulder. It's not about me doing
something illegal, I don't do that, I'm fine, it's just creepy.

That social media stuff is like dopamine, feels good, but is not good for you.

~~~
wu-ikkyu
It's funny seeing the New York Times and others rail against Facebook like
this and yet they still don't have the conviction to #deletefacebook. Many of
the excuses read like those of drug addicts.

------
hnaccy
I'll take it but I'm still somewhat confused about how sudden this pushback
against facebook has been.

What did people think they did before now...

~~~
tlarkworthy
The effect on democratic processes ceased to be hypothetical.

------
avs733
With the way they create shadow profiles for non-users, I'm a strong believer
that the opportunity with facebook is to feed them as much bad data as
possible and let them deal with filtering it out.

------
objectiveariel
This is probably the most pathetic PR move we've seen this year so far.

Acton sold off his userbase to Facebook in 2014, with full knowledge of the
Snowden revelations of 2013 where we learned about Facebook's involvement in
PRISM.

------
laurex
Alert: this comment may be seen as self serving.

I work on an app that has been gaining popularity precisely because it's a way
to keep in touch with family and friends with no social media aspect (called
Marco Polo, a video walkie talkie). I'm curious if there is going to be enough
of a backlash to return to more organic face to face (and actually
interactive) communication versus broadcast mode and pretending to be
something that will seem impressive. That seems to be true of our users
anyway.

~~~
whalesalad
No. This is a fad and will blow over in a few days. No one cares that this
happened outside of the security community.

~~~
dpwm
> No. This is a fad and will blow over in a few days.

I'm not sure you're right. This is spilling into all areas. We don't even know
if CA has done all the damage it is going to yet.

> No one cares that this happened outside of the security community.

This has very little to do with security and very much to do with Facebook's
policies.

~~~
skellera
Policies that were ended awhile ago.

------
walrus01
I would be very curious to learn what sort of non-disparagement clauses
existed in the Whatsapp/Facebook purchase contract. And how exactly they were
worded.

~~~
fancyfacebook
I don't think anyone at Facebook has the bandwidth to deal with a mean tweet
from an old employee right now. If rumors are to be believed mass resignations
are coming.

~~~
Alex3917
> If rumors are to be believed mass resignations are coming.

Is this just inside knowledge, or has it been published anywhere yet?

~~~
fancyfacebook
No I have nothing to do with facebook despite this randomly generated username

------
EnderMB
The main thing I don't get from this approach is the idea that deleting
Facebook somehow frees you from this level of data mining.

In reality, it's well-known (not just by techies, but everyone) that when you
"delete" Facebook, you're only really deactivating that account. Your data has
already been mined, your data has already been sold and moved onto another
server, and even if Facebook wanted to get rid of you, the Channel 4/Guardian
expose has illustrated that data has been sold. The damage has already been
done.

Instead of trying to get people to leave, there should be pressure on
sanctions from affected governments. The only way to stop this level of data
misuse is to ensure that Facebook is fined adequately. Instead of trying to
crash the stock price, fine them $10k for every user breach, to the tune of
several billion.

My biggest worry from this scandal is that the anger will die down, and the
world will be told that you can get away with this level of data breach.
Equifax have largely got away with their breach, but if Facebook and CA can
get away with outright giving data away for profit then all we'll see is that
the line hasn't been crossed yet.

------
sn41
I guess maybe it is time to re-evaluate Web 2.0? User-generated content was
supposed to be empowering.

But we have ignored the powerful amplifying effects of positive feedback and
"echo chambers" artificially induced by such "customised news".

Maybe it is a bad idea to present customised news, what we need are diverse
views. Maybe it is a bad idea to tack on voting systems and like buttons with
every comment and tweet.

------
DarkCrusader2
Instead of requiring Facebook and google to improve their ways, if we all
started using ad-blockers more aggressively, setting up things like pihole for
our family members and friends, wouldn't this solve the problem since
companies won't have any incentive of collecting the data? It seems to me to
be a much better idea that expecting multi-billion corporations to act against
their interests.

~~~
malikNF
Not really, the companies would then start asking for the information they
want directly from the users. Take for example the quizzes you see posted on
your facebook feed. "Find out what kind of potato are you?" and if you wanted
to know a user's name, ask a question like, "if one potato year is 10 human
years how old are you now?". I mean ask the question disguised as something
else, in this case a stupid joke. Ad-blockers alone wont fix this issue. I
think its us developers who created this problem and its us devs who has to
come up with an answer to this.

~~~
DarkCrusader2
But what are they going to do with this information if they can't show us ads
based on them. Collect and target all you want, I am not seeing any ads. If
60-80% users does this, what will be the point of collecting data anymore.

~~~
malikNF
They can sell the data to a 3rd party. This 3rd party can be an unethical
company that doesn't care about undermining democracy.

------
knowThySelfx
Delete Facebook? Then what about WhatsApp? Isn't it owned by FB now ;)

------
pretty_dumm_guy
I quite remember the day when my name appeared on the comments section of a
website I visited (through facebook widget I believe). I freaked out. But when
I discussed about this with my friends back then almost every one seemed to
have a cavalier attitude towards this(meaning they were completely fine with
it). I wouldn't be surprised if my friends still have the same attitude.

People are okay with sharing their information online if it provides them
convenience. Facebook provides them with the convenience of staying in touch
with people. This combined with "I have nothing to hide anyway" & "so what
if?" thought processes and monetary benefits on corporate side seems to have
led to this huge data bank that is Facebook today.

I am really glad people are talking more about this. Never too late. People
need to completely understand their actions online have consequences.d

------
odammit
Will deleting Facebook actually remove your data though?

I’ve deleted mine a few times and then inevitably have had to use OAuth for
some random site I’d auth’d to and lo-and-behold it works and all my data is
back. Last time I went through that flow was maybe a year ago.

I always assumed they did some sort of paranoid delete or “anonymized” the
data.

~~~
bassman9000
Nope

The only way to win is not to play

~~~
pervycreeper
Not even. They create shadow profiles for non-users.

------
chimen
Smart tactic since Facebook is on fire and Whatsapp is directly pulled into
discussions concerning privacy and whatnot.

Curious if he can dish out some facts to backup that tweet or it's just a
"convenient" time to shed some light over your new product which is basically
another..Whatsapp

------
powerapple
We are in the connected world. News can be generated by anyone and travel very
very fast. That's the reality. In the fast you have to talk to people knowing
what they think, now you can do it quickly and at massive scale. We will have
more and more information out there anyway, regardless how many researchers
working on cyber security and other problems. The only way to go back is to
unplug electricity grid? Really? There is nothing wrong with Facebook. And
that's how technology can empower people to do both good and bad things. Yes,
US people are not happy with the election, journalists now have a revenge, but
blaming technology? really?

------
maephisto
I just tried to delete the Facebook app on my Samsung Galaxy S8 and it looks
like that's impossible. It's so embedded in the OS that it cannot be deleted,
but only disabled.

------
intrasight
For several years, I've been pontificating the somewhat abstract idea that a
software app will one day hack the human psyche on a massive scale. And by
"hack", I mean to do us harm by tapping into the same pleasure mechanisms as
addictive drugs. It never occurred to me until today that perhaps Facebook is
this app.

~~~
imtyler
"Pontificate" implies a pompous demeanor, I think you meant pondering?

~~~
intrasight
Both. My friends hear it as potification ;)

------
Cyberspy
In May, once GDPR becomes mandatory, we'll all be able to issue data requests
to the likes of Facebook and Cambridge Analyitica etc, to find out just what
they know about us. The requests are free, so with social media, you could
almost mount a denial of service attack against a business if enough people
make a request!

------
StreamBright
Deleted it long time ago on my mobile devices. It is not enough though.
Facebook javascript is everywhere.

~~~
ironjunkie
Tech companies should bear responsibilities to NOT embed facebook javsascript
on any of their websites. More shame need to come when those javascripts get
embedded somewhere.

------
timvisee
I've fallen in a deep, deep hole. One I can't get out of (meaning, deleting my
Facebook account), because I've used "Login with Facebook" on quite a few
sites and platforms.

What do others recommend in a situation like this?

~~~
gpmcadam
Consider whether any of those associated sites are still useful. You can
enumerate these on Facebook itself, it shows you which sites have access to
your account.

Secondly, make a list of these sites. Ask yourself: "if I lost access to these
sites today, would I care?" \- remove the ones you don't care about.

Lastly, separate each one from Facebook one-by-one. Some will be easy, log-in,
set a password, unlink Facebook. Done. Some will probably require getting in
contact with the site's support team.

Don't worry about doing this over night. Just rest in the knowledge that every
step you take, is getting a bit more control over your data.

Eventually the list will shrink, and then you can start the mammoth task of
doing the same things with:

* Your post history

* Your likes

* Your check-ins

* Your reviews

* Your event history

* Your employment history

* Your photos

* Your wall posts

* etc.

Good luck!

------
lovelearning
While I agree with the co-founder, I wish he'd also suggested deleting
WhatsApp given that it's become a tool for many people spreading lies,
disinformation, propaganda, faked photos, fake videos and hatred.

------
axd
If this isn't the opportunity for Diaspora* to become a thing in the public's
mind, I don't know what is. We have to use this in order to move to a better
platform for social media.

~~~
criddell
Diaspora is a non-starter.

Look at their getting started page. Step one - choose a pod. You just lost 90%
of the people that might be interested. They need to get rid of that step.

~~~
noarchy
This would likewise affect Mastodon. One of its arguable strengths is also a
weakness, in that regard.

------
pers0n
So many bloody apps and websites require or ask for fb accounts to sign up,
tinder, coffee meets bagel, bumble, etc etc. everyone empowered them.

Note I never got a fb account, so some sites I just can’t use.

------
knowThySelfx
I guess what Snowden said is true. FB is a surveillance company under the
guise of social network. FB is not the only one in this case. All companies
which store info could be suspect.

------
thetruthseeker1
Every company has its ups and downs. Some downs or negative things warrant
their demise. I don’t think what FB did here is worth calling burn the witch
on them or actively trying to kill them, and I do hope FB are able to learn
from this and change for the better.

Now, that said, I do think there is an underlying point others ops have
alluded to: The disdain for Trump and everything that could have helped him
win ( legitimately or illegitimately ) which I am not sure is the best way to
react. I think that approach is not a very rational one. What needs to be done
there w.r.t Trump is probably worth a separate discussion, but I disagree with
knee jerk reaction here from the whatsapp founder.

------
amrx101
Why the hell are my non tech friends and acquittances so surprised by this?
What did they think? That Facebook will not sell their data for profit? How
can people be so fucking naive?

------
Hendrikto
I deleted my facebook accounts years ago, and never looked back. Nobody in my
fried group even really uses it anymore. Most people just check in once a day
for 3-5 minutes.

~~~
tzfld
>Most people just check in once a day for 3-5 minutes

Actually, that's a huge thing.

------
gexla
There's a group of rich people mentioned in this post and now they are telling
their followers to delete FB _after_ getting rich. If we were to ask them how
FB plans on making money when they started their involvement with the company,
then monetizing user data would have been the answer.

This is something the world will just have to get used to. We're past the
point of no return. As individuals, we can do a lot to protect our privacy,
but it's a lot of work.

------
swyx
technically he did start a Facebook competitor (loosely speaking), he just
happened to have been bought by them!

~~~
hannasanarion
And then he quit his company to work on another competitor!

He gave 40 million dollars to and works on Signal, the app that WhatsApp is
basically a skin of anyway.

~~~
hprotagonist
50 million, i believe.

------
Angostura
Is this the Same WhatsApp that demands unfettered access to your entire
contacts list before it will work?

------
known
FB users are 'unknowingly' revealing sensitive info that could be detrimental
to their future

------
RyanShook
Calling out the company that made you a billionaire is such a brave move...
inspiring.

------
dasyatidprime
To repurpose what I was thinking of posting as an Nth-level comment, and
leaving this long because I don't have time to shorten it (and because I'm
trying to phrase it with so many preemption pieces that it won't immediately
attract some kinds of detractors which I want to try to advance this argument
beyond/around), yada yada:

Making it purely up to the individual to decide these things when they have to
decide in a coordinated way or else connections break down results in unhappy
situations. Right now, we have enough coordination anarchy in digital social
networks that it leads to some combination of entrenchment, pseudorandomness,
and fashion cycles (at least as far as I can see).

In the US, mail became a regulated monopoly, and the telephone network has
regulation to try to give newcomers a better playing field and avoid capture
effects (not that this always works—but things like “in this metro area, all
ten digits must always be dialed so that the new numbers being introduced
don't become the lower-class numbers that everyone fights to avoid anyway”
have happened). Structure and usage regulations for physical shared community
spaces have enough difference in focus and constraints that they don't seem to
get applied the same way, and the localization and nature of enforcement mean
they don't have the same kind of massive leverage. It is my strong suspicion
that the lack of a single consensus “physics” in shared digital spaces (and
attendant shared approach/instinct; cultural differences and training aside,
human bodies have substantially similar baseline physical capabilities and
constraints across the world) means that even with arbitrarily “benevolent”
(whatever that means) government intervention, the idea of a level field
doesn't work the same way to start with, and there's a panoply of little
technical decisions that have “already been made” that combine to make things
amazingly awkward on that level as well.

We've tried “just stop using it!” since Stallman started saying it ages ago,
and it doesn't work in practice for a lot of people (“because not everyone
does it!” is of course the exact coordination problem I'm calling out above).
Regulation seems almost untenable from this position, at least assuming pace-
of-advancement continues to be a serious concern and expectations haven't
globally converged, though I wouldn't be surprised if some particularly fluid
kind of regulation popped up (especially from the European sphere) that would
break logjams better. What _else_ can usefully be tried if we don't want to
wind up in the Big Social hegemony world?

One that I rarely see is “capitulate in an accelerationist manner, let them
become governments, and then push to make them good ones”—interesting as a
thought experiment, but I wouldn't want to try to put that in practice from
here. Can we extract useful information from that, though?

A related observation: to some extent, the success of Mastodon (within several
communities I'm part of, enough so that I can use it as part of the primary
“social network” set in the same way many people use Twitter and observe a lot
of jumping ship there from Twitter along the way, even though in terms of
absolute popularity it may still be far weaker) mimics what's been called the
Amish-congregation government model to me (you are heavily bound by your
choice of instance but it generally remains practical to switch), and instance
leaders seem to be taking a much more active and community-centered role than
Big Social allows. But that's still ultimately based enough on the Twitter
model of interaction that there are lingering social problems (at least I find
them to be problems) from that, and the currents of code changes are still a
coordination/effort problem of their own, though that's partly mitigated by
several instances running interesting forks already while leaving
interoperability intact. I'll be very curious to see how that evolves.

------
josinalvo
In calm seriousness:

Can sb compare the technical feats and the scope of the data collection by the
obama campaign and the trump campaign?

------
Sonnol53
did he leave after the acquisition? or is he still involved in the company?

~~~
mistahchris
> In 2014, Facebook bought WhatsApp for $16 billion, making its co-founders —
> Jan Koum and Brian Acton — very wealthy men. Koum continues to lead the
> company, but Acton quit earlier this year to start his own foundation.

It's in the first two sentences. Action is one of the co-founders of WhatsApp

~~~
hannasanarion
What he was asking is the last sentence. He quit WhatsApp to help make Signal.

------
dotsh
Deleted comment.

~~~
niravs
that's a scam and a fake account.

------
isostatic
Jan Koum Is entertaining. He was a frequent flyer and wanted to build an app
that could tell people what time zone the person they are talking to was in,
that they were on a flight, etc

He posted on flyertalk about it and got a "meh, you have to install something?
Why bother?" response

5 years later, as a frequent flyer he was into collecting miles and using them
on tickets, and he had managed to get business class flights to mobile world
congress in Barcelona, but while the deal was going through to sell whatsapp
to Facebook there were a couple of delays. Nothing major.

He thought to himself "these are non changeable tickets, they'd better get a
move on", then reflected how absurd a position he was in.

1: [https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/travel-
technology/952359-tho...](https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/travel-
technology/952359-thoughts-about-my-free-iphone-app-whatsapp.html)

~~~
avree
I think you're reading a lot into the single response he got.

For anyone who doesn't want to click through, the reply said:

"It appears that this requires the other party to also have the app installed,
right?"

There's nothing that could be even remotely translated to "why bother" or
"meh" in the response. It's a simple question.

~~~
isostatic
It was more the lack of reaponses that made me think it was a meh. Also I
hadn't read the thread for a year or two and was going if memory when I wrote
the post, did a search later.

------
fareesh
Despite the barrage of negative stories that would have ended nearly every
other Presidential campaign - ranging from accusations of racism, misogyny,
treason, incompetence, mental instability - despite all of it, tens of
millions of Americans absolutely love President Trump.

I cannot imagine how utterly frustrating it must be for them to watch the
media bounce from story after story in some convoluted attempt to explain why
they voted the way they did - from Russian hacking to white supremacy to
Facebook ads to Facebook data. This is just one more in a long line of
justifications when the most likely reasonable explanation is that he is
beloved by millions, not just in the USA but around the world.

The same goes for Brexit.

"Your side won because the Russians and this data company and Facebook made
you vote that way. We're going to make sure this never happens again!"

It's unfortunate that in the aftermath of polarizing and controversial
decisions like these, this kind of rhetoric will now drive people further
apart, because one side refuses to accept the reality of the other's opinions,
and dismisses them with conspiracy theories.

Today people are pretending to be shocked that Facebook shares data with apps
through the developer API. Most of the permissions being talked about were
removed a long time ago. What is happening now is basically vindictive hatred
for Facebook from the tens of millions who feel wronged and cheated by
electoral results that they lost fair and square.

~~~
jakear
One note: fair and square by your interpretation of "fair", maybe. But the
country as a whole uses its laws to interpret fair, and the important
allegations are that the Trump campaign broke those laws by directly
communicating with this agency.

~~~
cabaalis
"In 2012, the Obama campaign encouraged supporters to download an Obama 2012
Facebook app that, when activated, let the campaign collect Facebook data both
on users and their friends." [0]

The only real difference between what was done here and then was how it was
represented to the users.

[0]: [https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/facebook-
data-...](https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/facebook-data-scandal-
trump-election-obama-2012/)

~~~
culturestate
> The only real difference between what was done here and then was how it was
> represented to the users.

That is an incredibly important distinction. There is a vast gulf between
"these people asked for my data and I consented to its use" and "these people
surreptitiously collected my data for purposes other than those which they
disclosed."

~~~
cabaalis
A couple issues with that statement:

(1) The issue is not getting the data of the people who used the app, it's the
millions of their friends who were included. This is what's being implied
should be thought of as a "breach" (with the media trying its darndest to make
it look like Trump himself downloaded all the data into a big CSV file while
laughing)

(2) Regardless of the reason for the permission being asked, the resulting
dataset was collected in both instances. So I equate the outcome in my mind.

~~~
ncallaway
> Regardless of the reason for the permission being asked,

This seems...insane.

Informed consent makes all the difference in cases like this. How can you feel
that it's irrelevant whether data was obtained under fraudulent premises,
versus with explicit consent?

It would be like saying 'It doesn't matter that company A had a real product
with real traction and raised $10Mm, while company B lied to investors about
the amount of user activity and raised $10Mm. The resulting funds raised was
the same in both instances. So I equate the outcome in my mind'.

Now, I don't mean to imply that you believe the quote above, but what you said
sounds _exactly_ that outlandish to me.

~~~
cabaalis
> How can you feel that it's irrelevant whether data was obtained under
> fraudulent premises, versus with explicit consent?

Very simply: None of the millions of friends were asked for their consent in
either case. There was no consent requested or premise given, the data was
simply "obtained" in both cases, by the same means.

> but what you said sounds _exactly_ that outlandish to me.

Maybe because it has nothing to do with what I wrote? Allow me to make up a
statement that does. "Hey, Bob, can I have access to your account so I can
understand you better to advance the Obama campaign? Ok, good. Oh, and Tom's
your friend, so I get his information also. ....... Hey, Bob, can I have
access to your account so I can understand you better to create a personality
profile? Ok, good. Oh, and Tom's your friend, so I get his information also."

Now, you are Tom. You were not contacted in any way whatsoever. You were not
presented with a reason for accessing your account in any way whatsoever. Your
data was simply pulled, and that is why I equate the two. I am indeed quite
sane.

~~~
ncallaway
From the perspective of the friend (Tom), I better understand your point.

I was looking at the situation from Bob's perspective, where I think we can
agree that there _is_ a significant difference in the two formats of
collection.

------
dingo_bat
After selling his customers to Facebook for $20 billion. Cool story bro!

~~~
Double_a_92
How could he have denied that much money?

------
sqdbps
That is ungrateful on his part.

Much like #deleteuber this #deletefacebook tantrum is about Trump. Facebook
was roundly lauded for helping Obama get elected.

------
matte_black
Don’t let billionaires tell you what to do.

~~~
walrus01
the whatsapp cofounders strike me as accidental billionaires, it's not like
we're talking about standard oil, jp morgan, the louis dreyfus company or a
typical old money davos-attendee billionaire.

~~~
paulcole
>accidental billionaires

Not sure if you were being clever but that’s the title of a book about
Facebook’s history.

------
IzzFizz
like all my mom does on her phone is facebook

------
samstave
Serious question, the US constantly states what side of a vote some lame
senator or rep is on, but you never here anything about who is the makeup of
the electoral college in msm - what their tax returns look like and who is
paying them off. Why?

So, have one electoral college rep release their finances, and then you know
the true state of politics

~~~
learc83
> but you never here anything about who is the makeup of the electoral college
> in msm - what their tax returns look like and who is paying them off. Why?

Because electors are temporary and almost completely symbolic. In the vast
majority of states if the Republican candidate wins, electors nominated by the
Republican party go to D.C. If the Democratic candidate wins, Democratic
electors go.

The respective parties pick hardcore supporters who will almost certainly vote
for the party that nominated them, and in 29 states they are legally obligated
to do so.

No one cares about them because they never change the outcome. There have been
a handful of times when electors have voted against the will of their states,
but they've only changed the outcome once, in 1834. The Democratic nominee for
Vice President should have won that year, but 23 electors chose not to vote
for VP, so it went to the Senate, who voted for the Democratic nominee anyway
(so the electors didn't actually alter the outcome).

------
meri_dian
As has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the vast majority of people
really don't care what data Facebook collects. Addresses, phone numbers, etc
are all publicly available already. Products you like, your political
affiliations, etc, not a big deal to most people, not because they aren't
aware, but because they don't care.

So ask yourselves, if the vast majority don't care, perhaps it's not really
that big of a deal.

And maybe, just maybe, Cambridge Analytica has a target painted on its back
because it helped get Trump elected, and we're being manipulated into hating
them now by media that is engaged in all out war with the Trump
administration.

~~~
pmlnr
> So ask yourselves, if the vast majority don't care, perhaps it's not really
> that big of a deal.

That's not the question to ask. They question to ask is how do we make them
care?

~~~
meri_dian
Why should they care? I'll be honest, it doesn't bother me much. Why should I
care?

