Facebook is bad and you should delete your account

The Watercooler
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If you were to read “Data and Goliath”, you’d come across the startling fact that all those surveillance-performing government agencies out there in the US, combined (I think there were like 13 of them, or was it 17?) have a combined budget of $70B US per year to spend surveilling everyone on planet Earth (at least back in 2015 or so, when that book was written). So if you roughly figure that there are 7B humans at present, that works out to about $10 US per year, for every man, woman and child on the planet (and I don’t care what country you live in). If you divide that $10/year/person into a monthly cost, we again arrive at this curious $1 per person per month (roughly) to very, very systematically violate your privacy (or enable that ability, should they choose to do it).

I also recommend you read the part about the corporation called “Endgame”, and their Software-As-A-Service (SAAS) called “Bonesaw”. (Older article about it on Forbes).

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This article should be of interest to those who have been participating in this debate.

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-crypto-keepers-levine

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And we’re off to a good start:
Nearly 1 In 10 Americans Have Deleted Their Facebook Account Over Privacy Concerns, Survey Claims

“Privacy matters to our panelists. Thirty-six percent said they are very concerned about it and another 41% saying they are somewhat concerned. Their behavior on Facebook has somewhat changed due to their privacy concerns. Seventeen percent deleted their Facebook app from their phone, 11% deleted from other devices, and 9% deleted their account altogether. These numbers might not worry Facebook too much, but there are less drastic steps users are taking that should be worrying as they directly impact Facebook’s business model.”

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Nice article. I had already been warned not to trust Telegram. I prefer Wire or Signal, these days. Oops, let me re-state that, to make it more monastic-sounding: “I find Wire or Signal more suitable, these days.”

I think if we just accept anicca and realize that we will need to keep changing the technologies we use to communicate every decade or so (as enough bad apples show up in any particular forum of communication, and almost inevitably spoil the whole damn bunch), then it psychologically feels a lot less painful to learn something new.

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Personally it has no bearing on me. I go on the assumption that everything I produce on the internet is known by everyone, and that everyone has all my data. I post under my own name, and try to be transparent about my views.

I am politically engaged and often express views on social media that I know would be very unpopular with various powerful people or governments. But I’m not going to live my life in some paranoid hole.

I could delete my Facebook account, but I can’t delete my US citizenship. And for several years, since Snowden at least, I have assumed my government is basically watching everything. And they are much scarier than Facebook.

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William Heinecke renounced his US citizenship as he became one of the wealthiest naturalized Thai citizens. You can buy Panamanian citizenship for about $10k.

I know you’re probably not considering any of that, neither am I. But just to know it’s possible.

More relevant to the topic, I won’t delete my Facebook account I’ve had for I think 11 or 12 years (yes, one of the early University-only accounts). I’ve thoroughly deleted all the data I could from the account back from when I used it. I rarely ever log in and I get e-mails if a friend messages me there (some of my friends only use FB and rarely use SMS or any other communication medium). I don’t think there’s much use in deleting your account, I doubt that FB truly deletes the data from it’s backup servers and even if they do I wouldn’t be surprised if there are other backups on the servers of various intelligence agencies.

I would recommend never logging into FB on a mobile device (for many many reasons that I or others can explain if needed). I would recommend to “sandbox” your login as much as possible, if you really need to login on mobile you can use this sandboxing app for FB mobile. Tracking technologies have really advanced, “cookies” are childs-play for the modern surveillant, look into “canvas” hash fingerprinting, even “private browsing mode” doesn’t do much.

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For my practice the problem that FB poses is that it robs me of my peace of mind and increases busyness. It constantly agitates me with notifications, suggests friends, and exposes me to the various activities of my friends. In other words it increases cravings (for likes, for example) aversion and delusion.

With metta

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I’ve written a poem about Facebook (actually a Haiku):

Cruel Heartless Scoundrels
Coyote walks past, cold dawn
Close Facebook Account

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Exactly my take too …

If anybody find’s anything at all interesting in my activities, then please tell me all about it, because that would actually be something completely new here :male_detective:

I think that they even could run my profile through the Large Hadron Collider in Cern, and still be unable to come up with something other than

1300×1300 52.9 KB

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Hey, has anyone tried this newcomer on the scene? It’s endorsed by Tim Berners-Lee.

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Recent articles and podcasts about this has finally led me to delete my account. Just want to share two important ones, one was an NPR interview with the writer of the book called “Attention merchants”, which is an overview of the advertising industry up to today, and discusses how social media sites like facebook harvest human attention in order to increase and fabricate demand for products.

More here: Review: ‘The Attention Merchants’ Dissects the Battle for Clicks and Eyeballs - The New York Times

Another was Jaron Lanier, an old silicon valley figure, who has written about the model of sites like fb and google with the moniker of “siren servers” in his recent book “Who owns the future?”. Having listened to several interviews and talks by Lanier who very knowledgeable about the field, I became convinced of how dangerous and ultimately, nefarious these organizations are. Here’s a popular article by him:

Ultimately I had to delete my account, I did not want to be part of this any longer. Institutions like facebook have one purpose, to make money by convincing human beings to spend as much time as possible on their feeds, and thus they ultimately end up creating as much greed / hatred / delusion as needed to keep users on the feed. And then the data is sold to those want to create and manufacture desires for their products.

The fact that I am feeling a sense of anxiety right now after having just deleted facebook tells me that I did the right thing.

So I agree with this post wholeheartedly, delete your account!

edit: One more book which is interesting here is “Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked”

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Even if you are a non-user of Facebook, Facebook still tracks you. Great!

Interesting quotation there:

The word is STALKING. It is illegal in the real world and should be illegal in the online world as well. I leave your site (or never use it) and you shouldn’t be allowed to STALK me.

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Excellent clarifying interview. Humans don’t know how to jump from a slowly heating pot. Corporations “eat” humans.

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Actually, “Mewe” might be a realistic replacement. I took a look at it, but didn’t actually create an account. I wanted to know how it was that they intended to make money (which any business needs to stay alive).

I liked how they offered some features free, and some features are paid. For example, reliable voice and video calls are paid (but secure/private).

At first I thought, “what? Pay for voice and video? But you can get free, private voice and video calls from Wire and Signal”.

But then I eventually realized that you might get private, free calls from Wire and Signal, but don’t ask them to be reliable, as it’s a free service. It seems to be one of those famous engineering dilemmas that goes something like “free, private, and reliable. Pick any two.” There’s also a famous (albeit less helpful) phrase now that goes “if you are not paying for the product/service, then you are the product/service”.

In other words, if you want private, and reliable voice and video calls, then I say, expect to pay a little something for that. Voice and video demand much more bandwidth than plain old text messages, implying the need for fancy-schmancy technologies (like STUN, TURN, ICE, and Jingle, and a distributed network of servers relaying the connections around).

Somebody deserves to be paid somehow or other to create and maintain that infrastructure. At present, this infrastructure is paid for by allowing one’s privacy to be raped and pillaged (on services like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger).

So I think people need to be willing to open their wallets, even just a crack, if they desire freedom from the Stalkers and AI robots.

PS: By having free accounts on both Wire and Signal, I’ve found that if one is behaving unreliably, the other one works! They seem to have infrastructures that get too busy, from time to time (for the free accounts), but thankfully both have not been too busy at the same time, at least not so far. Having said that, Wire seems to be the more reliable of the two (but is not completely perfect; it has a couple of minor bugs I’ve learned to live with).

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Paying is good, must in most countries of the developing world everything described above here, is a luxury. Some services may need to funded in a different manner (adds, sponsorships etc).

With metta

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Sorry for diging up this old topic, but a nice short document was made some time ago, speaking about this and connected topics, if still someone would not be convince about facebook, google etc., here it is:
Shoshana Zuboff on surveillance capitalism | VPRO Documentary (50 min)

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I share the above as it is relevant to the topic here.

:anjal:

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From the article, this is devastating:

many of the co-creators of global platforms including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest and others reveal they are so concerned about the harms of social media that they ban or severely restrict their kids’ use.

Social psychologist and New York University professor Jonathan Haidt notes a “gigantic increase” in depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicide among pre-teen and teenage children, Gen Z, who have been on social media since mid-primary school.

He says numbers of teenage girls admitted to hospital for self-harm including cutting were stable until around 2011-13, but in the US these have risen 62 per cent for 15-19-year-olds and 189 per cent for pre-teen girls; “that is horrifying”.

“We’ve seen the same pattern with suicide,” he said. In older teen girls it’s up 70 per cent compared with the first decade of this century and “in pre-teen girls, who had very low rates [previously] it’s up 151 per cent and that pattern points to social media.”

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