Nearly 1 In 10 Americans Have Deleted Their Facebook Account Over Privacy Concerns, Survey Claims (bgr.com) 172
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."
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."
Hindsight (Score:2, Interesting)
Is 20/20 but, they've already let the cat out of the bag.
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If that claim is true,.. (Score:2)
count me impressed.
Wouldn't have thought that it would be that much,...
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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.
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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)
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).
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Pretty much this.
It's always the same people regurgitating bullshit daily.
Re:If that claim is true,.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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).
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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
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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
Douglas Adams would be proud! (Score:2)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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 ... ?
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"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.
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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...
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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)
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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
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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.
Moved to where ? (Score:2)
And probably the vast majority moved to Instagram or WhatsApp as their new center of social interaction~
Zuckerberg reported to say "meh" in interviews~
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WhatsApp is owned by facebook ...
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which would be why zukerberg says "meh". The Facebook platform may lose a user, but Facebook the company hasn't lost a user.
Losing users (Score:2)
..."Oh, snap !" cried the users~~
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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
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Not That Big A Concern (Score:1)
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)
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.
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3). I am not that stupid
The problem with liberals is that they truly believe people are that stupid, epically those on the right. I had a discussion on FB this morning with a liberal who *started* the debate by calling me and my views stupid, made a comment that amounted to class envy (deriding the 1%) but not actually discussing the subject (the economic effects of the tax cuts and how they effect the national debt.).
I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but this kind of thing exemplifies the REAL issue these days, talk
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What you just said sounds sort of stupid. Why would anyone with half a brain allow themself to get involved in a "debate" with a person who is pushing an agenda rather than "actually discussing the subject"? Wouldn't you be better served by using your online time to google for meaningful debates on your topic of interest?
FB is for people who enjoy arguing rather than debating, and who seek "me-too"s who reinforce their sense of righteousness by mirroring their own opinions. It is not a place for reasoned d
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Privacy is not restricted to who you are and how to find you.
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Are you happy for your health-insurance company to know all your life details, too?
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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.
To serve man... (Score:1)
Correction to Headline (Score:5, Insightful)
If nowhere else, all their personal data is safely stored on a secure server in Russia. Besides whatever Facebook actually has available.
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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
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"Deleted". LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
Exactly, I deleted mine and it's still there (Score:2)
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.
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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
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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
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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]
Re:"Deleted". LOL (Score:5, Informative)
No he hasn't, he never claimed that people requesting deletion of their accounts weren't being deleted all he said was "if they fully cancel their account" we will delete the data within 90 days. There is simply no option to delete the account other than sending a lawyer down to Facebook HQ with a judge's order in hand.
This is Facebook's official position (after you remove all the fluff):
Some information isn't stored in your account.
Copies of some material may remain in our database.
We share this data with our advertisers (de-identified but specific enough to re-identify a person with a modicum of effort).
I deleted my Facebook account in 2008 (Score:3)
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)
Re:in other news (Score:5, Funny)
How can they live with such small dicks?
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How can they live with such small dicks?
You're assuming we're not talking width
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Some don't even have any! :O
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If you pull on it hard enough, you too can achieve this measurement!
I did mine earlier (Score:1)
9% of Americans less than 1% of accounts (Score:5, Informative)
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Mr Zuckerman, are you a monopoly? (Score:2)
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
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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.
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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?
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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.
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Wut:
https://makeawebsitehub.com/so... [makeawebsitehub.com]
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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)
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)
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
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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.
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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
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https://news.vice.com/en_us/ar... [vice.com]
It's time to pay for social media (Score:1)
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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
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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
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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)
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.
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What are you illuding to?
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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.
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Well my point is Facebook didn't sell them down the river. They sold themselves down the river. Firstly they signed up to Facebook then they signed up to sites and apps affiliated with Cambridge Analytica and granted them access to their Facebook data.
Although Facebook does bare some responsibility, they created the API/ecosystem on which this occurred. They really should have a vetting process to protect "the idiots" on their platform from the sharks like Cambridge Analytica.
Currently all you need is a
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Definitely not a trump supporter. I dont think you actually understand what I've said
Maybe I should sign up for a Facebook account ... (Score:2)
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.
In other words.. (Score:2)
90% of Americans do not give a single fuck about it.
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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.
That ship sailed long ago... (Score:1)
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
The think they deleted (Score:2)
their account, but FB probably keeps a backup of their data just to be save if they decide ti come back ;)
Get a "Facebook Likes transplant" (Score:2)
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)
Motivation (Score:2)
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But how many bots? (Score:3)
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1 in 10 quit... (Score:2)
just to rejoin a few weeks/months later.
A good start, but . . . (Score:2)
A good start, but still 91% left.
Survey says (Score:2)
Instagram? (Score:2)
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
I didn't delete my account (Score:2)
I am the 10% (Score:2)
irrelevant may be subjective (Score:2)
it will probably be another decade before Facebook is totally irrelevant.
Yet you keep coming to Slashdot.
Surprise, Facebook has not deleted them (Score:2)
That's what they think (Score:2)
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Whether the UI is merged or not is completely superfluous, you can be guaranteed that your data from Instagram is used to profile you in much the same way as it is on Facebook and that whilst the data is presented as being separate, if it has not already done so, Facebook will be will be working to amalgamate these systems on the back end which creates a common pool of data on everyone.
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And then there's the possibility that some asshole who wants to slander you creates a fake page in your name and offers some photoshopped pics of you showing off your bizarre sexual fetishes if you don't already control the FB-page with your name.
Even more important if you have a globally unique name.