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“How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

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Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#281

Post by Grangar »

thr0waway1239 wrote: post #258
nostrademons wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard that rather than deleting your FB account, it's better to turn it into a piece of obviously-fictitious performance art. Don't try to remove your data from the Internet (which is futile; you know Facebook still has it on some archive somewhere anyway). Instead, replace it with nonsense. Set your interests to your competitors so that you get notifications everytime they release a new feature, and full inform…

Here is an idea. Get a bunch of cute pictures of cats or babies from the internet. Add text with anti-FB messages and a link to these HN threads. Then write a script to upload the photos to your account, preferably on an endless loop. If FB does not block/delete your account, it will be non-stop hilarity for your friends, who will probably share the pics too and maybe some of them will actually pause and think. If th…

I have a dormant facebook account that I can't be arsed to delete, I need this now.

Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#282

Post by Grangar »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #215
krisa wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you will try to actualy delete your fb account (at least when i did it some time ago). Its a minefield of dark patterns. First you need special link, because you can only deactivate from settings. Then you will have to go through pile of emotionaly draining photos of friends with claims that they will mis you and you wont be able to see what they are doing with their lives. Then few traps with agreeing about del…

I recently deleted an old account, and it was significantly easier than before: I just clicked a link on one of the help pages, entered my password, and that was it. And this was for deleting, not deactivating, my account. It used to be more difficult: I remember following the process you're describing for some other account I had. It might still be that difficult in some cases, I don't know.

They still won't delete your information from their servers, and they'll keep a shadow profile of you as long as you keep sending requests through the like buttons..

Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#283

Post by angry_octet »

0xmohit wrote: post #64
Cozumel wrote: post #11

It's kind of pointless, Facebook owns Whatsapp so they have all that info anyway. 'The Facebook family of companies will still receive and use this information for other purposes such as improving infrastructure and delivery systems, understanding how our services or theirs are used, securing systems, and fighting spam, abuse, or infringement activities.'

Exactly. Moreover, a look at the permissions required by Facebook app would reveal how much information it collects about you: Device & app history retrieve running apps Identity find accounts on the device add or remove accounts read your own contact card Calendar read calendar events plus confidential information add or modify calendar events and send email to guests without owners' knowledge Contacts find accounts…

What happens if you deny it those permissions? (Android >= v6).

Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#284

Post by andai »

voidz wrote: post #269
nostrademons wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard that rather than deleting your FB account, it's better to turn it into a piece of obviously-fictitious performance art. Don't try to remove your data from the Internet (which is futile; you know Facebook still has it on some archive somewhere anyway). Instead, replace it with nonsense. Set your interests to your competitors so that you get notifications everytime they release a new feature, and full inform…

Why not just post a nipple?

Simple and beautiful.

Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#285

Post by loup-vaillant »

harry8 wrote: post #262
oldmanjay wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said a whole lot but never actually articulated your point. I'm assuming it's something about how it's not fair that you find Facebook to be useful. Could you clarify?

You don't have to find facebook useful or like it to be coerced into using it. If your friends and family organise everything by facebook because they find it useful, you have to use it or you'll miss out. Much like if you don't use gmail and hate it, google still have enough of your mail to put you in prison because at least half the people you're emailing do use it. It's like opting out of electricity - pretty theo…

Regulation isn't the only option. Decentralization would work better: it would make impossible for any big company to exploit the information of Billions of people, not just illegal.

We don't need Gmail. We could have Freedom Boxes to host and send our mail instead (and filter whatever spam gets out our infected Windows machines). Right now we can't because of the spam filtering policies of most big players, but if everyone have a Freedom Box that's no longer an issue.

Likewise we don't need Facebook, though since I don't use it unless coerced to I don't know what a replacement should look like.

We don't need Twitter.

We don't need YouTube. Or at least we won't need it when our broadband finally get freaking symmetric as it always should have —not happening any time soon despite making absolute sense on the fibre. Then we could just upload our videos from our Freedom Box with a peer-to-peer protocol.

We don't need Dropbox. Distributed backup is a thing, and keeping those backups secure is easy —except for the master passphrase, but you can at least write it down if you're afraid of forgetting it.

Search engines… well, we don't know how to decentralise them yet. The rest is a solved problem: we only to get the logistics and usability straight –a rather daunting task unfortunately.

Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#286

Post by Joeboy »

mercer wrote: post #278
Joeboy wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having to look in half a dozen apps to track down information is not a hypothetical inconvenience.

Oddly enough I expected to run into that problem, but in practice it's hardly ever been an issue. I think in my particular case it helps that I generally insist on using email or telegram for communication where it's important to find it again later. But you're right. At times I've had to search for information because I didn't remember which communication tool we used.

I work on lots of projects with lots of people, and I end up with hundreds of conversations spread over Email, SMS/Signal, Facebook, Skype and WhatsApp. It frustrates the hell out of me. The great thing about Signal for me is that it also handles SMS so there's no extra app to check. But yeah, no group chats, no desktop client, most conversations are unencrypted anyway because normal people don't care about privacy. If anybody were to ask me to use Telegram I'd be pleased they had an interest in encrypting our communications but annoyed about having to install yet another app.

Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#287

Post by mst »

steve19 wrote: post #252
mst wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you could achieve this easily by feeding your facebook account's updates from a markov chain bot set to train on the @realDonaldTrump twitter feed.

Then you get fired/don't-get-that job when someone takes offense at something "you" have written. Going random is risky. See Microsoft's Tay: http://gizmodo.com/here-are-the-microsoft-twitter-bot-s-craz...

I was expanding on how to achieve "Make your political views insane. Post status updates generated by Markov-chain or recursive neural net". Did you mean to reply to the grandparent rather than me?

Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#288

Post by ino »

nanospeck wrote: post #276

I thought an SSL encryption would not let 'anyone' else read your messages. So that means even if whatsapp promises SSL encryptin, they can read our messages? Is it technically possible? Forgive my ignorance.

from https://www.whatsapp.com/legal/

- Your messages are yours, and we can’t read them. We’ve built privacy, end-to-end encryption, and other security features into WhatsApp. We don’t store your messages once they’ve been delivered. When they are end-to-end encrypted, we and third parties can’t read them.

So they can share location, phone number, contact book, maybe chat group names if they're not encrypted, and maybe the people participating in those groups, the online/offline status, who and when you call, what else am I missing?

Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#289

Post by erlehmann_ »

whyever wrote: post #208
erlehmann_ wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author of Signal (Moxie Marlinspike) seems actively hostile to not only federation efforts but also compatibility with other clients, even one that only removed the dependency of Signal on Google Play Services: http://news.dieweltistgarnichtso.net/posts/signal-lock-in.ht...

Why don't you just link his blog post on federation instead of misrepresenting his opinion? https://whispersystems.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

I did not know that blog post. However, it does not give evidence that Moxie Marlinspike is friendly to federation and third-party clients. If anything, it shows that he opposes open, interoperable protocols as well.

Moxie Marlinspike asserts that federation needs standardization and that standardization inhibits changes. He also asserts that protocols have to change to keep up with changing requirements. His unspoken assumption is that it is impossible to create real-world forward-compatible protocols.

While I agree with the first assertion, I strongly disagree on the latter two. Consider that protocols and data formats that do not have to change exist. An encoding like UTF-8 will probably never have to change to keep up with new codepoints. Also consider that forward-compatible protocols and data formats exist. HTTP seems to be a very good example for that.

Re: “How do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?”

#290

Post by jasonkostempski »

nostrademons wrote: post #203
krisa wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you will try to actualy delete your fb account (at least when i did it some time ago). Its a minefield of dark patterns. First you need special link, because you can only deactivate from settings. Then you will have to go through pile of emotionaly draining photos of friends with claims that they will mis you and you wont be able to see what they are doing with their lives. Then few traps with agreeing about del…

I've heard that rather than deleting your FB account, it's better to turn it into a piece of obviously-fictitious performance art. Don't try to remove your data from the Internet (which is futile; you know Facebook still has it on some archive somewhere anyway). Instead, replace it with nonsense. Set your interests to your competitors so that you get notifications everytime they release a new feature, and full inform…

I thought about trying something like that to get my HN account deleted.
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