
To Delete Facebook or Not to Delete Facebook? That Is Not the Question - DiabloD3
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/deletefacebook-or-not-deletefacebook-not-question
======
eksemplar
The annoying thing about Facebook from a Danish perspective is that everyone
uses it to plan social events. There are a lot of articles on how you’ll get a
richer social life and still get invited, but the truth is that you become a
bit of a hassle for everyone else.

They have to text you the details outside of Facebook, or alternatively, have
to adopt a new platform because of you.

Of course I still think you should delete Facebook. With all this recent
controversy they had a chance to right the wrong, instead they chose to double
down on exploiting their user base - not only in the legal department but also
by quickly running their facial recognition stuff before the GDPR goes into
effect.

On the plus side, the more people leave, the less Facebook will lose its
justification because right now, the sole reason to be on Facebook is that
it’s where everyone is.

~~~
mandrake-c-papi
I totally agree. I deleted my facebook about 5 years ago and I now find myself
extremely isolated socially. Friends made the effort for a little while, but
eventually I'm sure I was just forgotten by the more distant friends and my
social circle has dwindled to almost nothing. This doesn't really bother me
though, it's sort of a natural filter whereby "low value" relationships are
weeded out.

Probably more significant is the impact of not being able to make new friends
in the same way. The communities that surround my hobbies seem to be
concentrated on facebook. When I make new friends at the face-to-face events
the friendship doesn't transition to anything more significant because there's
no followup connection on social media. This seems to be one of the modern
ways that friendships are built - meet IRL, connect via social network and
then always have a connection of some sort which allows the relationship to
grow if nurtured. In my case I don't see or talk to these people until the
next physical meetup and so I'm "out of sight, out of mind". It seems to me
that other newcomers join the group IRL and on social media and are quickly
integrated, but I'm just some guy that occasionally shows up.

~~~
subpixel
I also deleted my account several years ago, and I've since made the conscious
decision to let relationships fade if the only thing that would keep them
alive were passive 'keeping up' via Facebook. But that suits my needs - I'm
really not interested in what hundreds of people I've met are doing on
vacation or thinking about politics or eating over the holidays.

My wife, on the other hand, lives for this stuff. She is much, much closer
emotionally to people she went through earlier stages of life with and she
routinely moans and shrieks about the things I mentioned above. And this suits
here needs, because she cares about that sort of information.

That said, even if we grant Facebook a monopoly on 'keeping up with old
friends', every other 'social vertical' that currently relies upon Facebook
for connection, networking, and event planning represents a startup
opportunity with massive market potential. Big one: mommy groups.

------
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)

~~~
cdancette
Turning off messenger notifications seems drastic and unnecessary (it's real
people contacting you). It's like turning off sms notifications of call
notifications, I do it whenever I need to concentrate , but not by default.

The problem are apps that notifies us about useless or non direct
communication stuff.

~~~
driverdan
Stop using Messenger as SMS. Just use SMS.

~~~
chrischen
Nobody really uses SMS anymore, unless it is Android <-> iPhone messaging, and
if the the users aren’t already connected via one of many other IM apps.

~~~
stochastic_monk
As an iOS user, I only use sms for friends who use android but don’t use
whatsapp or another end-to-end encrypted platform. IE, it’s just a fallback
for me.

~~~
chrischen
I think this is country specific. Whatsapp is used heavily in Europe and parts
of Asia.

If I didn't have friends in other countries I'd just be using Facebook
Messenger and iMessage as well. In the US it's predominantly Facebook
Messenger.

------
tomxor
> As a social media user, you should have the right to leave a platform that
> you are not satisfied with... Furthermore, if users decide to leave a
> platform, they should be able to easily, efficiently, and freely take their
> uploaded information away and move it to a different one in a usable format.

Data is not the one thing stopping people leaving facebook... friends are.

This force stopping people leaving is the same one that drove social media
into a monopoly - there is no cross platform protocol. Platforms do not
communicate with each other like email clients. In this scenario the very
nature of communication encourages people gather into a single large group for
convenience (if it wasn't facebook it would have been another).

The abuse of a company in such a position is inevitable.

The _question_ is not going to be how can we make a protocol now (it's too
late, facebook doesn't care), the question is how long will it take for enough
people to become disgusted enough to switch to something more open where
protocols could be developed, or where the platform is open source anyway and
corporate forces are not an issue.

~~~
amelius
> the question is how long will it take for enough people to become disgusted
> enough to switch to something more open where protocols could be developed,
> or where the platform is open source anyway and corporate forces are not an
> issue.

There are some other options:

\- Phone makers create a "message center", a central place where emails and
feeds are shown. Facebook must now adhere to these standards, and they lose
their "gatekeeper" position.

\- Someone develops an API to interact with facebook on behalf of a user. This
API performs a live export of friends, feeds, etc, so that other applications
can use them. After a while, people will use those applications instead of
facebook itself, and are ready to leave facebook.

~~~
exodust
Yes good ideas. Hhonestly I thought we'd have it by now. I've been waiting to
have my social account outside of Facebook that could connect with contacts
who "live" inside its walls.

Why is everyone so happy to be with one company? Why are they happy to allow
one company to manage their social connections and notifications for life?

Social connection technology shouldn't be tethered to one company, everyone
huddled under its "protective" wing. That is typical early 21st century
thinking. It's eco-system lock-in mentality, which works against users in the
end.

I heard a journalist recently call Facebook the "modern day telephone" (Leigh
Sales, ABC), which is a stupid thing to say. Facebook is not the technology,
it's a service that uses modern technologies.

Imagine if there was only one phone company or ISP everyone in the world used.
Not a great scenario for competition, innovation, safety, privacy and open
standards evolution. We need those new protocols and ways to connect by easily
talking between social media platforms.

------
tempodox
> Facebook and other companies must respect user privacy by default and by
> design.

That would be really nice, but before that happens a major cultural shift
would have to take place and I can't see that on the horizon anywhere. Until
then, the only language those companies understand is losing users, or not
gaining them in the first place. And that's only the part where we consciously
decide whether we're users or not. It still doesn't touch the part where our
data is grabbed beyond our influence.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _the only language those companies understand is losing users, or not
> gaining them in the first place_

Or being broken up. This is a classic case of market failure. Waiting for
users or advertisers to force a change is futile, and not their faults.

------
stratigos
Zuckerberg revealed his true colors years ago. I had a facebook for a moment
in perhaps 2005-06. I deleted it. I have never regretted that, quite the
contrary. I have enjoyed a life free of social media, and free of its
trappings and influences. I watch my friends get sucked into "comparing mind,"
scroll through streams of advertorials and recieve the corresponding
subliminal stressers, and constantly have their mindfulness interrupted by
notifications. I think the general concept of social media is great, and a
necessary thing for the world at large. I think facebook is evil, and it blows
my mind that people still continue to use this platform (And similar ones)
even though the company sells users out again and again. This era goes way
beyond "jump! how high?"

------
4lch3m1st
I think the thought of deletion is pretty much just one of the problems. I
managed to delete my Facebook profile a few months ago, but the amount of
pressure I often receive from people so that I create a new account is what
impresses me the most -- not from the personal level, since I already made up
my mind, but from the point that most of the people think Facebook is just an
essential, irreplaceable tool which everyone MUST have. I'm glad this did not
yet affect my work or study, but this "disease" seems to have already infected
most of my family and friends.

Now personally, I think people fool themselves most of the time to find what
seems to be a reasonable answer to why they use Facebook: be it networking, be
it a way to communicate with family and friends, be it a way to stay "in
touch" with the news (and that also opens up for the whole fake news
discussion, but oh well). I'm not saying those are not legitimate reasons to
have a Facebook account (these are actually the primary services that it
claims to offer), but I really wish people could see that there are other
means to that. Some don't even involve having any social media accounts.

------
rgbrenner
How is that not the question? Do you believe Facebook violated their users
privacy rights? Do you believe in accountability? Then the question is why not
delete facebook?

If you hold facebook accountable, then you send a message: users DO value
privacy, and any platform that abuses the privilege may find themselves with
far fewer users and a less profitable product. Don't hold them accountable,
and you'll get a sorry note from Zuckerberg, and he'll violate it later when
you aren't looking.

In fact, this article raises another question: how much does the EFF value
privacy? Apparently violators just need to say "I'm sorry" and continue what
they were doing, and the EFF will argue on their behalf that the benefits of
their service outweigh the cost of your lost privacy.

~~~
SllX
If you look beyond just Facebook, these are issues that will continue to crop
up no matter what platform you use. The EFF also makes the claim that there
are people for whom deleting Facebook is not a viable or tenable option, and
maybe they're right, maybe the tools for them to drop Facebook altogether just
don't exist. In that case, they should still have an expectation of privacy
and data portability.

Facebook's practices are a societal problem, but theirs aren't the only ones,
and services that have the same exact problems are probably being developed
right now or will be developed within the next few years.

So my takeaway from this, reading the EFF's post is 1. we should be looking
beyond hashtag campaigns targeted at one specific corporation and 2. if for
whatever reason #DeleteFacebook is not a viable option, then you should still
have your privacy protected and 3. the subtext to point two reads to me as: if
you can #DeleteFacebook, you should, but we're not in the business of telling
you what services to use _wink_ _wink_ _nudge_ _nudge_.

~~~
rgbrenner
If the EFF wants to write an article arguing that privacy violations are
widespread, and therefore viable privacy-respecting options aren't available..
then I'm all ears.

Here's what the EFF says about Facebook: "Deleting Facebook is not a choice
that most of its 2 billion users can feasibly make. ... Without viable general
alternatives, Facebook’s massive user base and associated network effects mean
that the costs of leaving it may not outweigh the benefits."

Imagine that, a service a little over a decade old is now a dependency for
life. It's not "feasible" to leave. Apparently privacy violations must be
weighed against the size of the user base and network effects.

Last I checked, phones still worked. Messaging still worked. All of the
solution that existed a decade ago are still there. You CAN leave.

I look forward to the EFF proposing a legal solution to privacy such as GDPR
in the US. They haven't done that, and in the meantime, there should be
consequences for Facebook. The EFF shouldn't be arguing for the lack of
consequences for this specific privacy violation, without proposing a solution
to the problem across the industry.

~~~
watwut
EFF is not saying that people should not leave Facebook. It is saying that
currently for most of its 2 billion users, leaving Facebook is too difficult,
they wont do that and if they did that they would loose too much.

Your argument is phone and messaging which does not replaces Facebook for most
of those people. Phone being completely irrelevant. Just because those people
are not exactly like you, dont have same needs, same usage patterns and
similar social groups around them as you have, does not mean they don't exist.
Nor it means that EFF should not use them as an argument.

~~~
mirko22
So you are arguing that in the information age the only way to communicate for
some people is facebook? why can’t phone, sms or email work?

on the othe hand, how hard is to tap someones land phone and listen in to
their conversations, yet people still used it a lot before so i think
expectations of privacy in public space is just a fantasy... If you really
cares about privacy you wouls not use facebook, and you would look for
encrypted communication channels, most people don’t care however...

~~~
christofosho
How does one find old friend's phone numbers or emails, when they want to
reconnect, nowadays?

------
ibidibi
I wonder if there are any other tools out there that are capable of mining
valuable data (for the personal user) from the "Download my Facebook" .zip
file dump .. it seems like this is a data format that is ripe for exploitation
by other apps/services in the effort of freeing Facebooks' grip over peoples
faces.

Has anyone looked into the data that Facebook provide, to see what potential
apps/services could be built on it? It seems really ripe for exploitation, to
me .. but I have yet to download the .zip and inspect its contents. Off to do
that now...

------
glogla
Everyone is using facebook ... because everyone is using facebook. The more
people delete it, the weaker will the network effect be.

I would say that as a person who understands technology and the ramifications
of facebook, you have a moral duty to not use it. And you have a duty of
educating people about facebook.

You can't stop it alone (no single person can - even shooting Zuck would
probably not stop facebook) but you can stop voting for it, just like you
probably aren't voting for alt right/nazi parties in your local elections.

------
slim

       The problems that Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal highlight—sweeping data collection, indiscriminate sharing of that data, and manipulative advertising
    

No. The problem is that Facebook as a company has the data and the capacity to
manipulate any election in any country. And there is no law that is forbidding
them from doing that.

That's what the Cambridge Analytica scandal proved

------
tomglynch
I'm doing some research on alternatives to facebook. Social networks with
different business models. Hopefully will have a spreadsheet with descriptions
and info in the next few days.

~~~
PeterStuer
As a user the value is not in the technology, but in the 'other users', yes,
the old 'network effect'. So the essential question is ho to get overnight
adoption of one of those alternatives by all your friends, which means, by
extension, everyone. Since this is unlikely, regulating Facebook into a
privacy respecting business, hard and erring on the safe side, is the true
alternative.

------
chrischen
I’m not sure it’s possible for facebook to fundamentally respect privacy by
default. It is completetly antithetical to both their stated mission of
“connecting people” and their defacto mission of making money off advertising.

In order for them to achieve either of those goals, they have to increase time
spent on site and engagement, in order to maximize ad revenue. That results in
them serving content the user _wants to see_ at all costs. Besides the fact
that content a user _wants to see_ may not be the best for the user, and can
simply waste time, this can also mean a massive echo chamber reaffirming
peoples’ own beliefs. While it may serve to connect them with their like-
minded peers, it emotionally and intellectually results in _disconnecting_
them from the rest of society. This results in a dangerous shift in factionism
and idealogical siloing.

So the negative effects of simply serving what the user _wants to see_ at a
primitive level is fundamentally tied to an advertising business model. This
makes it probably impossible for facebook to positively incentivize users
without fundamentally changing their own incentive structures.

You may think there’s nothing wrong if facebook is merely delivering what
users want, but facebook uses manipulation to only deliver what users want in
the _short term_ for immediate gratification. It’s similar to addictive drugs
and cocaine. People’s long term thinking know it’s bad for them even thhough
their short term brain _wants_ it now.

Therefore if anyone is to create a facebook killer, all they have to do is
provide a social platform that has a business model that is both sustainable
and not reliant on short term engagement and selling ads. Instead it should
focus on ceding control of social interaction to the _user_ , rather than it
being the byoroduct of manipulative user experience. It should tie its own
success to ensbling users to achieve their own long term social goals. Since
it would be the antithesis of facebook, they’d have too much inertia in their
ad model to effectively clone it. Any other social platform can simply be
cloned by facebook.

------
jankotek
I think most people including journalist are basically computer illiterate.

Facebook has web interface. Uninstall the app from phone, and login once a
week to check messages and to plan events.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
One, we are in a market failure. Unilateral withdrawal is difficult. Two, even
if I withdraw, I am still subjected to Facebook’s surveillance and negative
effects on my democracy. The latter is what pisses me off. (The cluelessness
of Facebook’s management and culture, in respect of this problem, coming in at
a close second.)

~~~
mirko22
How are you still subject to facebook surveillance and “effects on democracy”?

For surveillance you can say same for Google and their analytics code
installed everywhere.

For democracy, i ap pretty sure same tactics are used in any media channel...

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _For democracy, i ap pretty sure same tactics are used in any media channel_

Facebook's uniqueness, in reach, magnitude of damage, and negligence, has been
qualitatively demonstrated, by its actions and employees' defenses of said
actions, over the past months.

------
christofosho
My only connection to other people outside immediate family was Facebook. I
deleted mine, and now am stuck with no methods of contacting many people I
know or once knew. I miss most of the major events in their lives. It's
interesting to see how easily disconnected one can be when you're no longer
seeing people involuntarily in classes and through a university community.

------
ratsimihah
I left because it had developed into a bad habit of scrolling through a
meaningless feed for me.

The data leak was just the trigger to take the jump.

------
hordeallergy
Every time there's a scandal and you don't delete your Facebook account,
you're telling them that you're fine with that behaviour and that they're
welcome to abuse you further. They'll keep pushing, whittling their users to a
group who tolerates anything.

------
regeland
Disclaimer - I was subscriber 7454 to FB, however I moved on and never used
it. I'm a little surprised that the EFF didn't mention the proprietary nature
of FB in the article. The EFF used to champion open standards... what has
changed?

------
amelius
We need an API to interact with Facebook, so that other tools can shield us
from it and help us migrate away.

Facebook will never build this API, but perhaps someone can use DOM traversing
as the underlying mechanism for an open source service that provides the API.

~~~
ClintEhrlich
Some of us are working on it:
[https://urbit.org/posts/overview/](https://urbit.org/posts/overview/)

~~~
ibidibi
Can I, somehow, take my downloaded Facebook .zip data and import it into
something Urbit'ish, yet still give me control over it?

------
JeanMarcS
The question is: what signal do we want to send ? Please go on (FB or every
over ones sitting on privacy, past or future companies), or the game is over.

Perhaps, with the actual attention of the medias, it’s the right time to make
a point, whatever it is.

------
davidy123
Many people are just focusing on the social networking aspect of Facebook,
which can provide cohesion, but it's more than that, and some aspects are
profoundly useful. It connects people around the world, it makes event
planning easier, it digitize communication to provide opportunities for
augmentation, and it has elevated consumer advocacy. In the global and online
trade age, it's important for companies to be more conscious of their image,
and consumers to be able to organize. Raising a complaint on Facebook is one
of the best ways to have an issue resolved these days.

Taking away these facilities would be a giant step backwards, like removing
telephone lines or postal routes. It's really a matter of defining who has the
authority of this position and how the information is distributed, where
Facebook is problematic.

------
alecco
Outside US many events are organized via WhatsApp

(I guess that’s why FB acquired it for 19bn)

------
lordnacho
For me, the answer is to not put your personality on FB. Just put on the
platitudes of your life, and like the platitudes of your friends' lives. "Look
my kid did this". "Isn't the weather great today". "Glad you weren't hurt in
that disaster".

I log in most days, but all I do is ack my friends. When I put something on,
it's some BS that lets them ack me. I don't think it takes me more than a few
seconds to scroll through and hit like.

Next to that there's the occasional "I'm in town" which is a call for a face-
to-face.

~~~
psyc
My friends behaving like this is the reason I quit.

------
ggm
Wean your contacts off the messenger and #deletefacebook

------
some_weirdo
The obvious answer is #DeleteFacebook

------
shmerl
Don't register there to begin with.

------
nkkollaw
Oh, cool. I was really missing the daily post about deleting Facebook.

------
dosycorp
What I really like about this is what the "hashtag" #DeleteFacebook says about
us and our time right now.

Firstly, it speaks of how ignorant we all are, as a public mass, of how the
world actually works, even the reality of an "obvious" situation we aspire to
be commenting about. Because you cannot actually "delete facebook". Neither
can you "delete" the entire service as if it is some "app" on your phone, or
old-skool word document on your laptop, nor can you delete the data it knows
about you. Even if FB actually deleted the data they had about you, you can't
make their AI's "unlearn" everything they got from you, and you can't make
their 3rd-parties delete your data as well ( no matter what you well-
intentioned t&cs-ninnies might say to counter this, I just don't believe you
that there's anyway to make these things happen ). So you can't Delete
Facebook. The first rule of Facebook is: Facebook is eternal.

Secondly, even if you go ahead and delete your account, your protest is
impotent. Your victory is symbolic. Your effort at self determination will be
undone. Because it's sort of like people saying they were going to leave
California ( or the US ) if Trump got elected. So you can do it, but it won't
change anything. It will probably end up severely disrupting / hurting your
life. And in the end, you most likely won't do it. What this reveals about our
ignorance is how powerless we actually are, and how ignorant we are of what
Facebook has become. It has become a utility. It is ( mostly ) essential. Even
if you do not use it, other services assume you do, and your access to those
is gatekept by your ( non-existant ) FB account. And if you do use it, or use
Messenger, or Whatsapp, then it is a _good_ way to stay in touch with people
you know. And if you really use it then of course you know why you need it.
Second rule of Facebook is: Facebook is necessary.

So the third thing I like about this is, how ignorant this hash tag reveals us
to be with regard to the way to deal with Facebook. It's not about individual
actions. It's about the collective. FB has begun to impinge upon the
collective. It has become a utility. And it exists forever, despite the
actions of individuals. When it goes rabid / stray, what is needed is
collective actions to bring it back under control of the commons. Within the
bounds of the common good. Only regulation can subdue Facebook to the useful
and the good. Not protest. The third rule of Facebook is: It's a utility,
stupid. Regulate it.

~~~
mirko22
Facebook is not a utility by it self, it is a web site, if you start
regulating it what stops the government to regulate pretty much anything on
the internet?

~~~
dosycorp
That's true. Once we start regulating FB we will never be able to stop
regulating everything. Soon, tentacles of regulation will be everywhere. Even
our thoughts will be regulated. Ok, let's not regulate it then. Good point.

But also, can't we say, if you start allowing FB to grow and operated un
regulated what's to stop pretty much anything on the internet to do the same?

Hmm. What to do?

------
TheSpiceIsLife
I think _" Social Media"_ is a complete abomination and should be burned to
the ground and the earth salted that nothing may grow there.

But! Facebook has some really useful features.

I used to engage quite a lot with the _social_ features of Facebook, but now I
only use it for a few of things: 1. Facebook Marketplace has now become more
useful than Gumtree which used to dominate the local secondhand goods market;
2. Events; 3. Facebook Messenger.

I couldn't give a flip about reading anyone's opinion, posting my own, or
looking at your photos.

But what I don't get is, the elephant in the room: why haven't the FBI raided
Facebook HQ and seized control of all their data centres: it should obvious to
everyone that minors have used Messenger to share lewd pictures and videos
with each other, and we all now know that Facebook doesn't actually delete
anything because they let download all your data and that data includes
pictures and videos you've "removed / delete", and even ones you took with the
Messenger app but didn't send!

Zuckerberg is _literally_ sitting on a mountain of child porn!

~~~
warent
You mean literally figuratively

