It just doesn't seem like Zuckerberg is going to let up until all of our personal info, connections, interests, etc. are being sold to the highest bidder. So today, I quit. It's really not that bad. Just 2 clicks, and then 14 days without a login attempt. http://bit.ly/chsPFo I'm curious if anybody else on HN has quit and why.
I was one of Facebook's earlier adopters, back when it was still restricted to a handful of universities. I found it to be a useful tool for getting to know classmates. Then the feature creep started and it turned into a product that I have no use for, so I left. I never at any point gave a damn what their privacy policy was, because it would never have crossed my mind to post something there if I didn't want it to be public.
The problem with Facebook was never what you posted about yourself. The more nefarious thing was that other people, in theory your friends but more like people you know for whatever reason, could post information that was linked directly to your tangibly real identity.
In the era of the freeform Wall this was pretty silly stuff, but by the time it expanded to picture tagging and the news feed it started to get quite a bit out of your control. You could opt out of some of these things, but doing so generally made you seem a little asocial.
The real diabolical thing about Facebook was that it combined general social anxiety with on-by-default feature rollouts to coerce its userbase into feeding more and more personal info to the datamine. Expect it to only get worse as the userbase grows to epic proportions... they are sitting on a Scientology-scale vault containing the personal details of people's lives.
I forget whether picture tagging came along before or after I left, though I know I've seen the feature. It was probably some time in the grey area between when I stopped using it regularly and when I actually deactivated my account. Anyway, I see your point about how you could easily get creeped out about Facebook making it so easy to datamine that stuff. It doesn't bother me personally because I just take the McNealyesque view that any information that I don't make a deliberate effort to control access to is already public. But that's just because I'm a security guy and my brain is correspondingly warped; I make no claim that this mindset is normal or even healthy.
Early adopter here too. I fully enjoyed the linked university concept - before universities started to engage more in their online departments, facebook was the only way outside of email or class to connect to a classmate about the course in question. I was deeply disappointed when they removed the university/courses currently taking, feature.
I am in a similar situation. My school was among the first couple of expansions, if I recall. They pretty much lost me when they stopped requiring a dot edu email address to sign up. I had kept a completely unmaintained presence there since then, but I deactivated my account last night thanks to Open Graph.
I'm deleting my account after I relay to all the friends I want to keep in touch with where else they can reach me at. Its a personal decision and never before have I been so personally offended by any one company's vision of what the internet should be. I disagree with the notion of a "social by default" web so much that I can no longer entertain being part of Facebook.
There's an educational component to this recent bit of news as well. People by and large don't care enough to really cause the critical mass exodus that would make Facebook backtrack on these announcements. I think this may largely be because people don't know anything about the origins of the internet or even how it works on a basic level. It makes me think that knowing these things should be taught in schools in some capacity. I would assert that if people knew more about the internet then they could form more of an opinion when a company tries to hijack it it and change the paradigm.
No one company can or should ever be allowed to change what the "default" of the web is.
You have every right to pull out of Facebook if you disagree with what they're doing, but thinking it has to conform to what your vision of what the web's "basic paradigm" is is just silly. Blogging and commenting changed things before this social stuff took it further. The web is always changing.
Saying people need to learn about the origins of the web before they can use it is arrogant and I don't see how it could affect how anyone views what's happening with this Facebook stuff.
Regardless though, "social by default" is rhetoric. When you launch a site Facebook isn't going to be able to hijack it and start inserting social features without your permission.
In general, I think the concerns are overblown. Facebook is basically the Twitter that my family uses, and that's why I use it.
Facebook has progressively and consistently been trying to "slip under the radar" with privacy time and time again. This is not a one time thing, it's a habit and a consistent assault on users. They've never suggested they've ever "gotten" privacy and their flawed assumption that just because i'm on a social network means I want to share everything with everyone is pretty asinine.
I've spent a long time messing with privacy settings and groups and i've never really gotten the results that I wanted. Social networks badly need to start getting the clue that people don't want to give up control over their information. All Facebook needed to do was look at the stories of people who got fired or never hired based on what was on their Facebook to learn this lesson, but they've proven they don't want to do it.
Facebook has gone way off the rails and continues to go off the rails. One wonders whether anyone there is possessed of clue.
Er, nope. This doesn't concern or phase me in the least. Assuming I don't say/do anything stupid on Facebook, can someone explain to me why I should be worried about this? I just don't get the outrage. I'm happy to have the entire world know everything I post on Facebook.
I may be out of the prime facebook demographic by several years but even I understand the significance of this for a huge number of facebook users. A lot of people view facebook as something in the same genre of livejournal or blogger, a tool that allows you to keep in touch with friends but that is nevertheless still fairly public and limited. However, a huge number of people have taken facebook far more into their private lives. They use it as a replacement for email, for example. These people's entire digital lives are in facebook. Every sordid detail of their personal relationships. Every little bit of letting off steam about coworkers and bosses. Every piece of personal information from their home address and phone number to the sex toys they bought last week. For these people facebook's privacy settings are critically important.
To put yourself in their shoes imagine if your email provider or phone company made an announcement that they were making a change to their privacy settings. If you thought that there was a serious chance of your email, text messages, or phone conversations accidentally becoming public because you failed to tick the right checkbox somewhere you might demonstrate just the slightest bit of consternation at that prospect.
For myself I've been lucky since I hardly use facebook, and then only grudgingly (more out of a hatred for the UI than anything else), but for many of it's heaviest users facebook does not appear to be operating in, let alone even considering, their best interests.
Becuase it's not just what you put on there, it's what others put on there about you.
Plus - do you really want _anyone_ who feels like it to be able to find out stuff about you? Insurance companies, potential employers, the tax man, debt collectors and so on?
Or how about a scorned ex-gf/bf, someone you've had a dispute with etc etc.?
Thinking about it. I don't want to have to manage my privacy setting every time FB decides that this small component of the app will be exposed to non friends on these sites. It starts becoming something you worry about and is a huge turn off. 2006 member
Privacy concerns where the reason why I never joined Facebook in the first place.
But still they do know me. As some people typed my email address into it, to request my friendship...
I am part of one social network that is more about professional relationships. As I got many contracts through this network, I am a happy paying customer and the benefits outweight the privacy problems.
Joining a social network that is mostly about private stuff is a no go for me. I just do not see a benefit in putting that kind of information into other peoples hands. I do not want my future customers to know that I am friend with 'Beer-Bong-Bob'. But as I just turned 30, I will listen to PG-13 and keep my mouth shut now. :)
I mainly use Facebook to keep updated on family and close friends, and don't use anything besides status updates and some photos/videos. I don't see myself changing how I use it based on these latest changes.
Like Google, Facebook and privacy all depend on how you use it, not the tool itself. Also, like anything other 3rd party app, I don't rely on it and would be happy to walk away from it at any point if need be. I currently doing that with Google search using duck duck go.
My big beef is that it becomes a hassle to have to go in and opt-out every time Zuckerberg decides to opt me in to some new information-sharing service that I don't want to be a part of. So yes, you can disable it, but the trend seems to be to make it a convoluted process to disable these things, followed by new "features" in a few months that force me to jump through a few more hoops. It's just become more of a headache than it's worth.
Yes, but I believe there's a "feature" that allows your friends to share your photos and other content without your permission. This is separate from the "feature" that was just helpfully introduced that allows other websites to identify you or whatever the hell it was.
Seriously, I'm finding this Facebook thing more and more of a bother. It's great for connecting with old friends and keeping in touch with family, but if I have to be on edge all the time keeping an eye on the thing to make sure it doesn't breach my privacy then it's just pointless. Everything that affects privacy should be opt-in, not out. But FB can't resist the siren call of those billions of pieces of personally identifiable information they are sitting on.
The individual in a tribe of hunter-gatherers has a very different concept of privacy. In his/her world everyone pretty much knows everyone else's 'business'.
The whole concept of privacy is relatively new to humanity. This doesn't mean its not important. Its actually an emergent property of a scaled civilization.
Its an unavoidable situation there but, of course, in that case 'everyone' is a fairly small number.
The Internet is revolutionizing privacy and proximity for the FIRST time since the rise of organized agriculture.
This isn't going to be an easy transition and will require revisions in law, credit-creation and finance, governance and especially cultural norms.
I don't know how it will turn out but I suspect it will be a deal 'maker or breaker' for humanity's future development and the role and rights of the individual.
It's a true evolutionary landscape and its design whether arising by accident or intent will determine the nature of our future evolution.
Unhindered Speech and Association must be maintained as inherent qualities of this developing landscape. And the information inherent in this speech and association, if it is to have ownership at all...
Must be owned by the Commons!
The Individually-controlled / Commons-dedicated Account, I believe is an essential element necessary as part of this transition.
But I'm an anthropologist and not a computer whiz just trying to understand this new landscape and provide a suggestion or two...
Someone else (in some other similar thread that I've forgotten) pointed out the similarity to "the olden days" when everybody knew everybody else's business.
To which the reply was: Yeah, but you knew exactly _who_ knew your business. This new brand of everybody-knows-everybody's-business is entirely different because it's asymmetrical: everybody knows everything about me but I don't know shit about "them", who they are, where they are, how many of them there are, etc...
I never have despite frequent requests, and not all automatically generated (at least by conventional criteria). I'm beginning to worry about whether people get that not joining Facebook could be a conscious choice rather than a mere oversight.
A lot of people seem to share the same opinion about quitting Facebook but are hesitant because there aren't many better alternatives. Does this mean there's a market for a secure, more private social network? Maybe one where everything is completely private, unless you decide to make it public to other members.
If people want/need something like that it sounds like a fun weekend (or two) project.
If you want an alternative that will never disrespect privacy, you will need to make it distributed. This is because the only way to control your data is to lock it up on your machine, or encrypt it.
I wonder if there are standards (protocols) related to distributed "social network".
Yeah, it what properties/features such a protocol would require. Distributed is the only way to go, where YOU host your data, or at least get to choose a third-party hoster a la e-mail.
I joined Facebook this year for a class in Facebook app development. I never really wanted to join the network - like some of the posters here, I saw something like this coming and told myself it wasn't worth the investment to join Facebook.
After four months of using it, I've come to several conclusions.
1) Facebook is a huge timesuck. Time I used to spend reading on the Internet, or programming I now spent watching stupid videos on Facebook itself. What Facebook needs is a noprocras feature (but even then - the content isn't worth the time).
2) Related to point 1: I began to think that what Facebook really does is to use my need for connection to keep me returning to the site. And I didn't like that. It felt as if ... well it feels as if they're trying to use my friends for their benefit.
3) Superficial communication != valuable communication. There is no centralized discussion on FB, and your profile page tends to be this highly decentralized echo chamber. How many people, if ever, argue against your (bad) ideas on your very own profile page?
4) Privacy has always been and will always be an issue on a social site this big. It's too easy to mess things up.
I tried to quit last year and then my wife started an argument with me, rationalizing that people would think she's single if I quit. I'm still on Facebook, it's still completely useless, and and I still want to quit. However I need some ammo if I'm going to approach this subject with her again.
I stopped using Facebook because it's useless. If I want to talk to my friends, I just msg them on IRC. Why bother with ads and "identity verification"!?
This is mildly sensationalist. Useless to you != useless to others. As an aside, I doubt most of my non-engineering friends know what IRC is (ignoring that IRC and facebook are two completely different platforms with different use cases).
Nah, I made a concious decision to open up my Facebook account "publicly" about 18 months ago. So in my mind it is just like my public facing blog (with a handy added address book).
Once you have it in your mind like that it is easy to remember not to post private stuff in there.
I also thought of doing that but I don't know if it's a good idea. Because it's not just up to you to not post private stuff. What about the private stuff your friends post about you on your wall?
On the other hand, limiting my profile also has only limited privacy benefits because my friends and family don't understand and can't be bothered to tweak fifty different checkboxes to get their privacy settings right. So anything I say or do on their Facebook pages is out in the open.
I'm wondering if it's even worth thinking about so much. Ugh.
About the only thing I do really limit is the privacy of things friends post on my wall etc.
In terms of other stuff they do (controlled by their privacy settings) I think you just have to be aware of what's going on. I've de-tagged a few photo's etc.
I'm definitely tempted to quit. I don't like the way Facebook is going for sure, nor do I like the idea of one company, a foreign one at that (I'm Canadian), having so much control and power over my digital identity. Though I fear I may be too addicted to quit.
I was on facebook for a while. One day, I realized I was publicly linked to my boss, my colleague, all my x's and everyone I went to high school with. The next day, I deleted my account. I was never particularly interested in it in the first place.
I signed once, I checked the settings and had a quick glance but didn't add people. After that I canceled my account and whit recent developments I think I will never again make a FB account.
If something like XMPP was made for social networking it would be awesome and if data portability was added it would be even better.
<will probably never happen>
Lots of independent social networks that are compatible with each other so that you only have to be a member of one but can still interact with everyone you wish to and can easily switch to another network.
<will probably never happen>
This open source project might be (or not) a good start.
I'd go win might not. Last time I checked elgg does not scale well and the code is really REALLY awful as in not optimized and not conducive to customization. It is kind of a toy IMO
I've always viewed Facebook as a self-updating address book. I never got into all the other crap it offered and I loathed at their app platform when it was released years ago.
I put my account in the delete queue a few days ago. I shouldn't have to keep an eye on HN and Valley blogs to find out that they've tweaked privacy settings again and more of my information is "public."
Getting out is a whole lot easier than I thought. I had as friends on Facebook a lot of former high school and university classmates, as well as coworkers from prior jobs. Part of me was worried I'd lose touch with them, but then it dawned on me that the extent of our interactions was mashing "like" buttons on each other's posts -- for example, if one of them were in town, I probably wouldn't bother to catch up with them for a beer.
The people I actually care about, well, I can email, call them, or even tap them on the shoulder and say "Hey." Having to do that also makes me think twice about what I'm sending, and to only share with people the things that actually matter. Facebook's "news feed" makes it way too easy to share things that probably should be left unsaid.
And man, my productivity has skyrocketed since I don't feel compelled every hour to check my Facebook feed. The last couple days I've gotten lots more work done thanks to cutting out this huge distraction.
I quit Facebook late last year. I have no patience for the games they are playing.
Sadly, this seems to be the way of Web 2.0 sites: build an audience and ruin it by trying to make money with it. I've seen it with Myspace, Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, and Facebook. I really like Tumblr but I would bet that the same thing happening with them at some point in the future.
Not sure this counts, but I quit Gmail over privacy concerns. My mail and my web site are currently hosted on a remote virtual machine on which I am root. But this is not enough. I eventually plan to use a real personal server, one that will be locked behind my walls.
I'd like to, but everyone I know (almost literally) uses it. The feed really is a great feature. If I could get everyone I know to move over to Buzz or anything else with The Feed that isn't evil, that would be nice, but it's not going to happen. Facebook owns me.
Shutting down FB account might be a solution to privacy issues, which can be easily solved by starting to use FB from something like TweetDeck. That's not big of a deal.
But, the mere fact that people are feeling "friction" from shutting accounts leads to a more profound problem here - portability of personal data on the cloud. For a 'social' web to happen in reality and for 'everything to move on cloud' to happen anywhere out of Web 2.0 conferences, this feature is required.
You can't shift 'everything on cloud' when 'everything' is tied to one privately held entity. This goes for every 'social' services provider out there. If I can change my cellphone provider, why not my social network provider?
I found.. you don't. But that's not such a bad thing, because if you're associating with people who you wouldn't otherwise keep in touch with except for some stupid Web site, are they people worth keeping around?
I am not associating. Many of these are contacts from my school, college, internships. No all of them are on lickedin or such websites. It seems FB is ubiquitous....
I started using it as soon as it was opened to high schools. I deleted my account around a year ago. I quit because of privacy concerns but also because it was a time sink, at it had really lost it's focus.
Yes, I really am. The only use I will miss if being able to contact a targeted group of people when I make my own ads. Which is a sick reason to not want to leave.
But I feel as though my rights as a user of their service have been violated not just this time, but many more (the frequent privacy policy changes, Beacon, now Connect etc etc.)
It's bullshit.
(Plus keeping in touch with people is easier on Facebook, I suppose. And it's a sort of asynchronous chat toy as well, which is fun.)
It is not what you post, it is what they post about you.
A friend of mine decided to give facebook a try and he was received with a warm welcome of "Bring the cocaine, snuffy is here finally!"
Closer to home, a cousin went to a bachelorette party and posted pictures of her and everybody doing their stuff, you know, sucking fake cocks and stuff. Totally inappropriate for the world to know, but they thought that was just funny.
I deleted my Facebook account yesterday. I quit Google search 2 years ago. With Wikipedia, Stackoverflow, Github and Bing, I don't miss Google search much.
I canceled my account this morning. I never had any information on there that I wanted to be completely private but I don't like where Facebook is going.
Do you know what was the name of this project which lets you, with a firefox extension, post your facebook messages using PGP or something similar ? I can't find it again, still there was some buzz about that some months ago..
edit : this software was aimed at creating short life messages. After some time the data was deleted from the net.. It was using some P2P technology
I just spent 30 minutes going through all my privacy settings and switching everything to "Friends only". It was time consuming, and given the number of config pages, I'm sure I've missed stuff. And there's still stuff visible on my profile.
I'm just so pleased I signed up with an alias. Only my actual friends know it's me.
Nope. I've been a member since 2004, when they opened it up to my school just before my freshman year. I just keep in mind that Facebook isn't private and I can't rely on anything I put on it to be private. But even under the stipulation that everything I put on Facebook is public, it's useful to me.
It wasn't a privacy concern for me. It was boredom. FB slowly became boring. I joined around the time when the poke was invented and FB was something new. Every time i logged in, i'd find something interesting to do. Doesn't feel like that anymore. It feels stale. There's no app for that.
Clickable link to delete your account. Deleting is different from deactivating; deactivating keeps all your data there. Deletion is supposedly permanent. http://bit.ly/chsPFo
There are a few issues with the "I have very little to hide" attitude. One problem is that the information you provide may not be what you want to hide, but the information that could be inferred from it may be problematic for you.
For instance, what if some financial institution computes a credit score based on the profiles of the people you are connected with and makes you pay more for a loan because you have some friends with a bad credit rating?
What if health insurance providers sift through your data to find out about your lifestyle and adjust rates accordingly?
What if a potential employer or their HR service provider computes some kind of loyalty/reliability/risk score based on lifestyle data you provide?
What if none of that is possible based on your current facebook data but when facebook gets acquired in the future their datasets are combined with other data about you?
All of the conclusions drawn from such analyses may be completely wrong. But they are nonetheless information about you and they may have an effect on your life. Was that the kind of information you were thinking of when you said "I have very little to hide"?
Good point, though I have one argument: if the insurance and healthcare companies are adjusting rates by online identity, and they are doing so legally, then they'll just charge a higher rate for someone they can't 'infer' due to lack of a descriptive online identity. Scary thing is these sorts of inferred decisions may be considered morally OK by some :(
I don't see how you would have an expectation of that data being private when you put it on facebook. The whole point of facebook is to publish your identity, and you are a fool if you think somehow what you post to your friends will never get around.
And how does what happens to your data after an acquisition have anything to do with their current privacy policies? If that's you worry, there is nothing they could do - it's your choice to put data there.
He wasn't talking about Facebook at all. He merely questioned the "I have little to hide" line of thinking. Also, if you sincerely think that privacy is dead, I suggest you see this video: http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2010/feb/01/freedom-clou... Pay particular attention to the points you may disagree with, and why.
I'm not going to quit, I'm connected to my family on there. I just don't post stuff there, except for some family pictures and videos, which I can do from iPhoto. I post everything to my tumblr blog which reposts it on Facebook and Twitter so I never have to log in to FB unless someone comments. Also I work on apps that I integrate into Facebook so I'll use it for that.
I'd like to know the ages of the people "quitting" Facebook and how much you actually used it in the first place. Most of Hacker News is too old to actually use Facebook the way young people use it. You're just there so you can feel as though you're in tune with tech trends or whatever. You have never really used Facebook, which is why almost all the comments on here about Facebook are so bad. You sound like old people screaming at kids to get off the yard. If you were a real Facebook user (hundreds of photos documenting years of your life), you wouldn't be able to just quit like that over something like this. I seriously don't understand why anybody over 30 even bothers to write things about Facebook, something that isn't meant for them, and something they clearly don't understand.
Old wantrepreneurs on here are so bitter about Facebook's success. I remember someone giving career advice actually recommending Google over Facebook. You have to be completely out of touch to even think such a thing. Google is yesterday's news. They are a bloated company filled with talentless individuals, people who would kill for the chance to have the skills necessary to work for Facebook, but their brains just aren't good enough
If you're over 30, please stop posting your "opinion" on Facebook. Your opinion on Facebook is about as insightful as an 80-yr-old's opinion about the internet. Instead, you guys should be begging the real users of Facebook, i.e. people who actually understand social media, to explain these things to you so that one day, with significant effort and training, you might be able to understand it.
I'm 36, all of my friends and I use facebook at least daily. Photos, events, links, news, feed, chat, all of it.
I'd say for the majority of us, it is our main form of communication.
Don't forget PG-13, it was us 30+ year olds who built much of the foundation which made Facebook possible.
We're thankful to the 40+ who developed the technology and environment for us to do that.
Understand the concept of 'Standing on the shoulders of Giants', and you'll have more respect for those who made what you build and dream of today possible.
Along the way, you'll hopefully realize age has very little to do with anything. As much as I am appreciative of what Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreessen have created, I am equally in awe of what Zuckerberg has been able to envision.
You know how you can't leave it because all your photos, connections, status messages, groups and all that won't come with you? That's called data portability. Facebook doesn't have it, and has no incentive to provide it.
That's exactly why you shouldn't use it today, because in 20 years, ideally you'll be able to choose which social provider you host your data at on the open web. The decentralized model works beautifully for the web and is democratizing because of it. The social web should be the same way.
Closer to 20 than I am to 30, have 700+ 'friends' chronicling most of the people I met in college (and then some), tons of wall chatter between friends and family over the years, almost 900 photos tagged of me (though I don't let anyone else see those) and a few hundred pictures I've posted myself. I use it almost daily to share interesting links / photos / news stories I read throughout the day, and to keep in touch with people since I've moved
I'm seriously considering account deletion because Facebook is making me uncomfortable. In the past, I've tried to give them the benefit of the doubt -- like when they responded to user feedback and killed beacon. I thought "Gee, maybe they aren't Evil, just a little misguided."
Now, I think they're Evil. The only thing they learned from the Beacon disaster was that they can't roll out all of the privacy erosion at once; you have to do it slowly, so nobody realizes it, or a least their anger never really reaches critical mass. Taking a hint from the government perhaps.
So I'm "hip," as you kids say. But here I am, weighing the benefits of simple and wide-reaching communication against a provider that keeps proving it's willing to sell my information without much warning.
"Your opinion on Facebook is about as insightful as an 80-yr-old's opinion about the internet."
What about a 66-yr-old's? I wonder if Vint Cerf would have an insightful opinion. Or Bob Kahn - he's over 70.
Maybe Marc Andreessen could beg a real Facebook user to explain these things to him before he sits in the Facebook board meetings. He's almost 40, after all - his opinion might be worthless.
By the sound of your reasoning, if you were older, I'm pretty sure you would of signed up for an AOL account and would still have it today because you are a 'real' AOL user.
I'm 23, signed up for Facebook my freshman year of college (when it was only college students and had ~40 schools). I use Facebook frequently but will no longer be doing so. Good riddance if you ask me.
I agree that 'older' people don't use facebook the same way as younger people. If you've been using FB since your were in your teens, it's a part of your life. It's going to take a generation, but our society will adjust to the lack of privacy in trade for the tools it provides.
Unfortunately, no one is going to listen to you when you're insulting your audience.
Ok, so younger people use Facebook differently from how older people use it (or, from your point of view, think they use it). Could you explain some of the ways in which these usage patterns differ? What about Facebook do you understand that is hard for people over 30 to get, and that makes talk of "quitting" Facebook naive?
Is there a sharp division at 30 between people who get it and don't get it, or is there a gray area between, say, 20 and 30, where people sort-of get it? Why do you suppose that is? Why 30?
Don't worry about being downvoted with a throwaway account. The people downvoting are most likely over 30, paranoid as fuck, and have no hand in creating today's internet. These are the same people that gave me -4 for saying "Yahoo is a rotting carcass on the landscape of the web". I get a kick out of these people, and offending them, because they are sooooo out of touch.
I think the vast majority of people of any age will never have a hand in anything because they are incapable of doing anything other than follow the crowd and trot out a bunch of stereotypes. You just confirmed this believe for me.
