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Nearly 1 In 10 Americans Have Deleted Their Facebook Account Over Privacy Concerns, Survey Claims (bgr.com) 172

Posted by BeauHD from the survey-says dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report from BGR, summarizing a survey from TechPinions: With the outrage surrounding Facebook's privacy policies reaching a fever pitch over the past few weeks, there has been something of an underground movement calling for users to delete their Facebook account altogether. To this point, you may have seen the DeleteFacebook hashtag pop up on any number of social media platforms in recent weeks, including, ironically enough, on Facebook itself. While Zuckerberg last week said that the company hasn't seen a meaningful drop off in cumulative users, a new survey from Creative Strategies claims that 9% of Americans may have deleted their accounts.

The report reads in part: "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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Nearly 1 In 10 Americans Have Deleted Their Facebook Account Over Privacy Concerns, Survey Claims More

Nearly 1 In 10 Americans Have Deleted Their Facebook Account Over Privacy Concerns, Survey Claims

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  • Hindsight (Score:2, Interesting)

    by fred911 ( 83970 )

    Is 20/20 but, they've already let the cat out of the bag.

  • count me impressed.
    Wouldn't have thought that it would be that much,...

    • I would also be impressed, but I seriously doubt that it's true.

      Sure, it's anecdotal, but I don't personally know anyone who's done more than change their privacy settings.
      It's really hard for me to believe they lost 1 in 10 users in the US.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AHuxley ( 892839 )
        9 out of 10 bot accounts then follow the users to their new social media brands.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by epine ( 68316 )

        This reported number doesn't pass my smell test, either.

        With such a precipitous drop in users, you'd probably hear the entire fabric of the universe groaning and throwing off glowing metallic divots as it passed through some kind of nearly impenetrable Wrong Stuff barrier.

        If true, this story would already be the Mount Krakatoa of the social media era.

        Maxwell Smart: Would you believe "1 in 10 are thinking about maybe deleting their account"?

        • Re:If that claim is true,.. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by epine ( 68316 ) on Thursday April 12, 2018 @10:57PM (#56428973)

          There is actually a way to make sense of this: a lot of people deleting mostly dormant accounts, with hardly any content posted, having almost no discernable impact on Facebook's daily churn.

          Basically, it would be that group of people who only filled their Vicodan Rx once, and never actively sought a renewal to begin with, all suddenly flushing their nearly empty pill bottles, after a news report goes out that the smell of Vicodan pills is a randy Bugblatter aphrodisiac (but no-one else).

          • Pretty much this.
            It's always the same people regurgitating bullshit daily.

            • Re:If that claim is true,.. (Score:4, Insightful)

              by FictionPimp ( 712802 ) on Friday April 13, 2018 @10:13AM (#56431315) Homepage

              I did delete mine. It wasn't due to privacy concerns, but the privacy concerns did cause me to review my social media use. I discovered social media in my life was mostly one way (I posted and never read anyones comments). This was because reading the comments caused me to dislike most every human on social media. So I decided to simplify my life and remove facebook from it (and a few other social media profiles).

              • I'm in the surprisingly long process of getting my FB account deleted, for similar reasons.

                I felt obligated to start a FB account since several acquaintances were using them and talking constantly about things they had seen on FB. My involvement was limited to following half a dozen "friends" involved in a couple of different mutual admiration societies who shared images and quips that reinforced their common prejudices but no real news or information. I took my FB activities dormant after about a year, an

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by rsborg ( 111459 )

          This reported number doesn't pass my smell test, either.

          With such a precipitous drop in users, you'd probably hear the entire fabric of the universe groaning and throwing off glowing metallic divots as it passed through some kind of nearly impenetrable Wrong Stuff barrier.

          If true, this story would already be the Mount Krakatoa of the social media era.

          Maxwell Smart: Would you believe "1 in 10 are thinking about maybe deleting their account"?

          Several reasons this could be actually true

          1) Not really using FB - Many people have long since shifted their social media to things like WhatsApp, Snapchat/Instagram or
          2) Oversharing - Social media is so mainstream there are impacts to over-sharing (even my workplace tells us to be careful to not overshare - contrast with 5y ago that wasn't a big enough concern). With recruiters, employers, heck even banks looking at your "social media index", it's a liability to socialize the wrong things or with the wr

        • This reported number doesn't pass my smell test, either.

          With such a precipitous drop in users, you'd probably hear the entire fabric of the universe groaning and throwing off glowing metallic divots as it passed through some kind of nearly impenetrable Wrong Stuff barrier.

          If true, this story would already be the Mount Krakatoa of the social media era.

          Maxwell Smart: Would you believe "1 in 10 are thinking about maybe deleting their account"?

          Sir, you win the "Douglas Adams" award for today.

      • It's possible if most of them are inactive accounts. If I have an account that never use, it's easier to delete it, and also less noticeable.

        • It's possible if most of them are inactive accounts. If I have an account that never use, it's easier to delete it, and also less noticeable.

          An astute theory. If your account is already inactive you might be more inclined to go ahead and just delete your account.

          If I had an account I would delete mine.

          • If you had an inactive account, why would you go through the hassle to log on, probably retrieving/resetting your password first, figuring half an hour how actually do the deleting ... ?

      • "Sure, it's anecdotal, but I don't personally know anyone who's done more than change their privacy settings."

        I saw people being asked on local TV and funnily, all the teens (4-5) said, when asked, Facebook is where old people hang out, not us, so they didn't care.

      • I would also be impressed, but I seriously doubt that it's true.

        Sure, it's anecdotal, but I don't personally know anyone who's done more than change their privacy settings. It's really hard for me to believe they lost 1 in 10 users in the US.

        Yet... Because it's helpful to the narrative, this tripe gets reported, then quoted over and over. Eventually everybody will believe it's true.

        Somebody should give this practice a name.... Hmmm.... Maybe "Fake News(tm)" would be appropriate...

    • Well it's from a survey so it has to be true...
      The whole delete FB is slacktavism at it's finest. Lots of gonna do this but zero actual change.

    • Re:If that claim is true,.. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Friday April 13, 2018 @01:37AM (#56429371) Journal
      It's not the number I'm interested in. I want to know what advertisers are pulling Facebook ads. If you want to hurt Facebook, don't try to make people leave, organise a boycott of any company that uses Facebook for communicating with its customers and of any company that advertises on Facebook.

      • If you want this to happen, don't just make a "consumer group". That shit never flies. Create a webpage and make sure it gets some media attention. Doesn't even matter whether any people follow it, what matters is that corporations think that it has some kind of impact on their bottom line.

        Hey, it worked with YouTube. Nobody I know really gave half a shit about the "outcry" about ads on terrorist videos, mostly because nobody I know really gave half a shit about the ads, all we did was concentrate on the lo

      • You could try and teach people to never click on a Facebook ad.

        If you see something interesting (it happens sometimes) then google it in stead of clicking the ad.

        It's probably never going to happen in the slack-jawed 3rd world of Facebook users, but... worth a try.

    • And probably the vast majority moved to Instagram or WhatsApp as their new center of social interaction~
      Zuckerberg reported to say "meh" in interviews~

    • 1 in 10 doesn't seem such a big hit. I figure well over 1 in 10 people do not use Facebook regularly, all the news hype just reminded people that they don't use the site, so they just deleted their account.

      It is kinda like the subscription model for budget gyms. They make their money from the fact that their prices are so low that people don't feel a financial hit for paying for a gym membership they may never use. So they don't cancel their account, yet they don't go to the gym. So the gym makes money

    • OR they never had a facebook account in the first place for the very same reason!

  • Haven't had privacy since I got my first phone in my name. Everybody knew where I lived and how to contact me. So what? I actually want friends to be able to find me. For non-friends I have a Mossburg Maxi-Combo 500 in 12 gauge, so all's good. No worries.

    • Re: Not That Big A Concern (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Aside from the typical but immense privacy concerns, they are also a platform for foreign interference in local and national elections and they themselves participate in electoral interference by shaping users' feeds based on how the company leans. Not a bad idea to just disconnect from them.

    • Privacy is not restricted to who you are and how to find you.

    • If you think that 'how to contact you' is all that they get from their massive surveillance and psychological profiling engine that you're happy to opt into, then you're incredible naive. That attitude does explain why so many people are on Facebook though.

    • Are you happy for your health-insurance company to know all your life details, too?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pnutjam ( 523990 )
      Some might posit the is an area between people you want to contact you and people you will shoot if they do.

      • And I'm not hiding from them either. Just not gonna get all worried about it. There's certain things that concern me, most of 'em emanate from DC, but this ain't one of 'em.

  • Now were getting it :) Yummm

  • Correction to Headline (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Required Snark ( 1702878 ) on Thursday April 12, 2018 @10:49PM (#56428935)
    "Nearly 1 In 10 Americans Think They Have Deleted Their Facebook Account Over Privacy Concerns"

    If nowhere else, all their personal data is safely stored on a secure server in Russia. Besides whatever Facebook actually has available.

    • If nowhere else, all their personal data is safely stored on a secure server in Russia.

      I think that you have stated an interesting point right there.

      We don't know where all that data is stored anymore. Facebook doesn't know either.

      Benjamin Franklin wrote:

      "Three may keep a Secret, if two of them are dead."

      Giving access to a university professor is as giving access to the whole world:

      "Hey, here is a link to all the Facebook data, which will help in your research . . . but please don't give the link to anyone else."

      Oops! Who let the dogs out . . . ?

      The US military tries to promote OPS

    • What does FB do when you delete your account? Since they keep shadow accounts on non-users, does it just convert to a shadow account with no discernible effect on your privacy?

  • "Deleted". LOL (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DNS-and-BIND ( 461968 ) on Thursday April 12, 2018 @10:57PM (#56428977) Homepage
    "Deleted". Sure. No, Facebook does not delete anything. There is just a flag that is set that says "don't show this to anyone but Facebook employees." All the data is still there and will never be removed. All your photos, all your facial recognition, your relationships with friends. It's still for sale as it ever was, and if you ever get politically active it will be used against you by our scary intelligence agencies.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Z80a ( 971949 )

      It's probably a bit more complex than that.
      They delete the data itself, but not the generated data from the data.
      No longer has your name, your picture, your posts, but the ghost is still there, with everything that was guessed out of all your pictures, everything that was guessed out of your posts and so forth, and probably can use those to detect you going in other places with the facebook script.

    • Years ago I deleted my Facebook account. I was tired of being "tagged" in pictures that I had little control over. What I found is that it isn't possible to delete myself from Facebook. The US needs German style laws that allow a person to to be "forgotten" by digital services.

      I suspect that future generations will see this era of unregulated digital sharing and use it as an example of how a pattern of foolishness can spread across the entire world.

      • What do you mean by that? Where you expecting Facebook to delete other people's pictures that had you tagged in them and delete every time someone mentioned your name?

        As far as people deleting their profiles... they get 10 days to change their minds so we'll see. And I wouldn't be surprised if allot of those 1 and 10 are just saying they did because they didn't want to look stupid on a survey.

        That said, apparently allot of Hillary supporters are easily swayed by facebook posts if that was enough to make t

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Hasaf ( 3744357 )

          Facebook picture tags link to an existing Facebook user. Following that link led to a face book user (me) that had requested user deletion years ago. When a person has deleted their account, it should not be possible to view their page years later.

          Further, I later needed to use facebook to access a company service page. I simply loogged into the account that I had requested to be closed years before. Very simply, the account was never closed even though I had requested it closed and deleted.

          As far as Hillar

    • Obviously we don't know for sure. But to be fair, Zuckerberg straight up told a senator the other day that when you delete your profile they do delete your data. So either hes lying to them or they do delete it.

      https://www.nbcnews.com/card/f... [nbcnews.com]

  • I deleted my Facebook account in 2008 (Score:3)

    by mark_reh ( 2015546 ) on Thursday April 12, 2018 @11:04PM (#56429001) Journal

    about 2 months after I started it. I saw then that it was going to be a disaster, when classmates showed me pictures of other classmates, inebriated, and laying in a puddle of their own vomit. Great stuff to have out there when you're looking for work...

  • in other news (Score:5, Funny)

    by schematix ( 533634 ) on Thursday April 12, 2018 @11:09PM (#56429027) Homepage
    90% of men have an 8" penis. Just ask them.
  • Kept pissing off trump voting family members

  • 9% of Americans less than 1% of accounts (Score:5, Informative)

    by RhettLivingston ( 544140 ) on Thursday April 12, 2018 @11:11PM (#56429037) Journal
    Facebook has about 2.2 billion users of which less than 220 million are American. So 9% of Americans would be about 0.9% of their users. If it is a local phenomenon, then Zuckerberg isn't that far off in saying the company hasn't seen a meaningful drop off in cumulative users.
    • You're right, but I wonder how their revenue per customer is clustered. I would expect that, on average, Facebook users in the US and EU have significantly more disposable income than those elsewhere (as I understand it, most people with money in China are using home-grown alternatives to Facebook). If it's a 5% drop in people reachably by their biggest advertisers, then that would be cause for concern. If Facebook stops being the ad platform with the biggest reach and is not a brand that has positive re
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Serious question: Why are there no competitors to Facebook? Even if they charged a few bucks a month, you would think that there would have at least been some entrepreneurs who would have made a go at competing in that marketplace. Why hasn't Google taken the social thing more seriously and tried to make Google Plus more of a thing. You got the sense that their heart was never really in it.

    Some of you guys are developers, so what's the story? Is there some technical hurdle that prevents anyone from go

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by guruevi ( 827432 )

      There are, you just don't know they exist or they aren't targeted at your social group or country. Facebook is just the more pervasive one but if you'd live in Asia, you probably wouldn't be on Facebook.

      • There are, you just don't know they exist or they aren't targeted at your social group or country. Facebook is just the more pervasive one but if you'd live in Asia, you probably wouldn't be on Facebook.

        OK, so there are competitors overseas, so why not in the US?

        You would think one of the Asian social media sites would try to adapt their product for the US market. Or something. I'm still not getting why there isn't an alternative. Does Facebook have the idea locked down via intellectual property?

        • You would think one of the Asian social media sites would try to adapt their product for the US market.

          They have. For instance, you can download WeChat in English. I use it almost everyday. It works fine. I use it to communicate with friends in China, but also to communicate with Chinese Americans, who almost all have the app on their phones. It has over a million users in America, although that is a small fraction of the billion total WeChat users.

        • Network effects. As Google learned, the service provided by Facebook has almost no value. The fact that other people are using the same service is the sole reason that Facebook seems useful. Imagine trying to start a new phone network now, if you weren't allowed to connect to the existing one. Think you'd get many users?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by guruevi ( 827432 )

          Wut:
          https://makeawebsitehub.com/so... [makeawebsitehub.com]

          • https://makeawebsitehub.com/so... [makeawebsitehub.com]

            My Blogger? Really?

            The only thing even within shooting distance of Facebook in that image is Google Plus, which got left to die on the vine (get it? die on the vine?)

            I still think that with all the shit Facebook is going through right now and the general sense of dislike/unease with the platform, that someone would take a run at it.

    • Inertia, primarily (Score:5, Insightful)

      by RanceJustice ( 2028040 ) on Friday April 13, 2018 @12:50AM (#56429265)

      There is no real technical hurdle that is keeping others from being a "real" competitor for Facebook. There have been those who have tried, but they just haven't been successful "enough". There are lots of alternate social networks out there, even other Facebook style proprietary ones - some are for general use and some are for one particular group of people or another. LinkedIn of course is supposed to be a "serious professional networking" social network, but we see how it becomes headhunters, ads, fakes, and other nonsense. Google Plus had a chance to dethrone Facebook but they made some foolish decisions at a crucial point in time etc.

      Facebook exists where it does more or less for two reasons. Money, and "first-ish mover momentum". They have an obscene amount of money thanks to generally unscrupulous and monopolistic decisions (big data sales, advertising, etc) and because of that became one of the de-facto ways people communicate. Consider that not that long ago many businesses would have personal web pages and if you needed to sign up with them, you'd send your email. Now they all have Facebook pages and Twitter handles, and you need to use those media to be able to communicate with them with any degree of haste . Hell, I can remember about the time signing up for promotions even for video games and the like no longer took an email address (because that's too easy to make a throwaway) but instead required you to like/friend them on Facebook + Retweet/Friend them on Twitter etc. Then these companies install social media managers to deal with this presence! Thanks to Facebook (and to some extent, Twitter in a kind of duopoly) they have centralized lots of the communication on the Internet - a major problem. This brings me to the second, major reason that Facebook competitors have'nt been ultra successful - Inertia.

      People stay and use Facebook (and Twitter, and Instagram/WhatsApp..owned by Facebook by the way) because their friends and relatives do. These sites have taken such deep root in our communication that to break away from them takes a sort of social escape velocity - you have to be the kind of person who 1) knows of other alternatives 2) has reason to use them 3) and is willing to switch, despite the fact that others might not. Facebook became the dominant major social network in succession to MySpace as it was dying off, which in turn arose when Friendster sort of prototyped the whole thing for the average person. Now its the place people go to make sure the know about all their friends and relatives....but they also stay to do things like play games, check out "apps" (including that cool personality test..), and read the news which they then not only absorb with little question to the source, but forward the message to everyone. Getting people to give up on the social network where their old friends, new friends, family members, those in their political "bubble" etc... exist, takes real momentum.

      Hopefully this national spotlight on the problems of Facebook (and I hope, Twitter. Honestly, the President of the United States should not be making proclamations or communicating with the electorate primarily through a proprietary, centralized, corporate medium) will combine with a number of other sociological phenomena (such as Facebook perhaps finally not being "cool" with the younger crowd as their parents are on it, so they'll consider switching to the next thing etc) to power an exodus. The great thing is that we already have several worthwhile alternatives; open source, privacy-and-security-focused, often federated alternatives. Such as...

      https://diasporafoundation.org... [diasporafoundation.org] - Diaspora: Full featured, open source and federated. Not a bad transition for Facebook users
      https://friendi.ca/ [friendi.ca] - Friendica - Evolving and interoperating with most other open social networks here, federated. Lots of plugins and even those to let it work with proprieta

    • Re: Mr Zuckerman, are you a monopoly? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by sanf780 ( 4055211 ) on Friday April 13, 2018 @01:19AM (#56429335)
      There is a critical mass on that Facebokok that makes it hard for users too migrate. It is not social if there is no other people around, is it? It reminds me of some bloggers trying Google ecosystem of Apps for one week and then complaining that friends and relatives did not even want to try Hangouts, Duo or Allo. As such, they could not give an opinion on the tools.

      I liked the idea of Google Plus, I liked how circles work, I liked how you did not give a perpetual license to anobody for anything you upload. However, nobody else does. And Facebook will be popular as long as companies use it as a channel with their users: comic shops having updates on Facebook only (treat Facebook as blog), Tinder using your Facebook profile, games publishing on your wall, contests run on Facebook only, Slashdot allowing to login with your Facebook account, etc

    • Serious question: Why are there no competitors to Facebook? Even if they charged a few bucks a month,

      No, stop. If they charged even one cent per month, statistically nobody would use it because of the hassle.

      Some of you guys are developers, so what's the story? Is there some technical hurdle that prevents anyone from going up against the Zuck? You'd think this would be a perfect time to take a run at him.

      The problem is not technical, it is social. You can't get people to use the second most popular thing in significant numbers, let alone the third, fourth, etc.

      • No, stop. If they charged even one cent per month, statistically nobody would use it because of the hassle.

        WhatsApp grew to a few hundred million users charging $1/year. They were free for the first year, but most people were happy to pay after that. $1/year actually buys a surprising amount of hosting if you're buying in bulk. Cloud storage is now about $2-4/TB/month, so that's about 3GB/user of storage (more for content that hasn't changed for ages) and transfer costs on top of that are negligible for most users.

        I think you underestimate the number of people willing to make in-app purchases. You and I

  • Two big problems with free services on social media platforms: 1) the platform is incentivized to maximum ad impressions and keep you hooked, and 2) they are incentivized to sell user data to third parties. There's a mis-alignment between the user and the platform. No matter what the platform says, the advertisers always seem to take precedence over the users. We need social media platforms that simply charge for the service and are not incentivized to sell your data or maximize ad impressions. When the pl
    • Three more very important things:

      First, like email, it needs to support federation. If there is a single provider, then it's still a data-mining goldmine. We've seen from Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp that strong privacy policies can be eroded after a takeover and users don't like to leave the network that everyone else is on. That's less of a danger if there are hundreds of interoperable providers. Don't like new GMail policies? Move to Hotmail, Fastmail, Yahoo Mail, or one of a few hundred othe

      • Three more very important things:

        First, like email, it needs to support federation.[...]Second, it needs data and identity portability.[...] Finally, it needs well-documented protocols.

        Usenet. The system you're referring to is Usenet. It's federated, it has data and identity portability, and NNTP is a well documented protocol.

        However, you'll note that the number of currently active Usenet participants is a rounding error compared to Facebook. There are a few problems that a social network meeting the three listed critera suffer from. First, the obvious one, is spam. E-mail battles with it with the use of reputation and blacklists, which are retained by Spamhaus and Google and Barracuda, a

        • Usenet. The system you're referring to is Usenet. It's federated, it has data and identity portability, and NNTP is a well documented protocol.

          Not Usenet. Usenet doesn't have any notion of identity and doesn't have any form of authentication. The federation mechanism doesn't provide any mechanism for attestation of original identity, so it is trivial to forge. It doesn't have any form of restricted sharing other than creating a private group (which is then not federated and so everyone must be using the same server to use it). It also doesn't provide any standard mechanism for sharing things that are not 7-bit ASCII, though there are lots of n

  • Shows that 1 out of 10 people don't have a clue... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Darkling-MHCN ( 222524 ) on Friday April 13, 2018 @12:09AM (#56429175)

    I mean seriously, is it a huge surprise that invasion of privacy is a concern on Facebook. That's the whole point of the site, sharing private moments with the public or with their "friends".

    I think the main issue with this whole thing is that even after the the Cambridge Analytica disclosures, the general public remains uneducated. They don't understand how Cambridge Analytica acquired their data, many are under the allusion that representatives of Facebook made a specific deal.

    In truth the data was acquired by means any one of us could use without doing any kind of deal with Facebook, other than agreeing to the TOC for their graph API. And after that it's simply a matter of duping fools into granting your Facebook apps access to their private data. e.g. fill out this personality quiz, see what you look like as someone from the opposite sex..... the fool goes click, click, click.... not reading any the parts about ...oh and in exchange for this gimmick you agree to give us access to EVERYTHING we can possibly get our hands on through your Facebook account.

    It reminds me of the late 90s when people just discovered there possibility of trojans and malware on the internet. Same old same old, idiots and technology... it gets messy.

    • many are under the allusion that representatives of Facebook made a specific deal.

      What are you illuding to?

    • That's the whole point of the site, sharing private moments with the public or with their "friends".

      That's the whole point of all social media. Facebook just did it the most effectively and the quickest. Just wait until people realize the Twitter tantrums from their 20s can prevent them from getting jobs in their 30s.

  • just so I can delete it and join the crowd. Seriously I'm glad I never signed up but I'm sure they still have a lot of data on me anyway.

  • 90% of Americans do not give a single fuck about it.

    • 10% is already way more than I'd have expected.

      Remember: It's 10% of those that didn't already know it in the first place. 10% of Americans CAN actually get smarter when facing evidence that they were stupid.

  • I deleted my accounts long ago. There is simply nothing to be had as being a member of a creepy community.

    Why re YOU still THERE?

    Jesus, it is like 2018 and you are still too stupid to defend your privacy?!?!?!

    Seriously... we should sell you like a slave. You certainly are dumb enough, and it seems you are so stupid as to like it.

    YOU are global warming. So stupid you aren't worth humanity's time, but we can't kill you so you are the herpes of global warming. Gah, I loathe liberals. If we got rid of you and p

  • their account, but FB probably keeps a backup of their data just to be save if they decide ti come back ;)

  • Instead of deleting your account you could also play with how algorithms perceive you. For example, if you are gay or depressed you could copy the Facebook likes of straight and upbeat people. Small hacks like this would influence how the algorithms of databrokers categorise you.

    That matters, because algorithmic background checks are everywhere now.

    This week I launched a website for this: https://www.cloakingcompany.co... [cloakingcompany.com] (not a real company, it's meant as an awareness project, but it actually works)
  • My concern is that these deletions are happening not out of a genuine concern for user privacy on the Internet, but rather as yet another outlet for the culture of social political, and cultural outrage upon which many (if not most or all) are continuing to draw sustenance. That would not be constructive.
    • If it damages Facebook's business model to the extent that they go out of business, then that is a GOOD thing.

  • But how many bots? (Score:3)

    by wjcofkc ( 964165 ) on Friday April 13, 2018 @04:35AM (#56429785)
    I am willing to wager a lot of "users" on facebook are not human at all.

  • just to rejoin a few weeks/months later.

  • A good start, but still 91% left.

  • Seems more likely that 1 in 10 people *claimed* to have deleted their facebook account, regardless of if they took any action at all, or if such action had any useful effect whatsoever.

  • What about Instagram? I bet most Instagram users don't even realize they're using Facebook. So 1 out of 10 Americans didn't really delete their Facebook account if they didn't also delete Instagram. Also, while I understand this is anecdotal, my teenage niece has informed me that Facebook is for old people and her classmates only use Instagram. With all the facial/location recognition software, Instagram may be more invasive than regular Facebook. They were smart to never put their logo on it because most p

  • Because I never had an account to start with (same goes for Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, ad nauseum)
  • I held out for many years without getting a Facebook account, finally gave in a couple years ago and created one to keep track of the people I graduated with in '78, but I deleted my account this April. I look forward to Facebook going the way of MySpace and Yahoo, but that will be a slow, drawn out process, it will probably be another decade before Facebook is totally irrelevant.
  • Facebook has built shadow profiles of people who never even created a facebook page. So if you delete your account, it just gets moved to a very rich shadow account that is all. Anyway the data that has been exfiltrated out of facebook is the proverbial horse that got stolen, while facebook servers are the stables those horses had been at some point in the past.
  • They haven't deleted shit... they've just deactivated them. They're also still going to be tracked via FB API on other websites.

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