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Get your loved ones off Facebook

salimvirani.com

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Re: Get your loved ones off Facebook

#131

Post by bargl »

khedoros1 wrote: post #121
bargl wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are taking this a little out of context. The best part for me is the feed into other peoples lives. It's a service I'd be sad to loose. It's interesting to find someone on here who maintains all of their files/email/photos/etc locally in a redundantly backed-up manner at home on their own personal server. How did you do that? Can you recommend me a way to do that for a non-technical person? If you don't t…

> It's interesting to find someone on here who maintains all of their files/email/photos/etc locally in a redundantly backed-up manner at home on their own personal server. How did you do that? Can you recommend me a way to do that for a non-technical person? ...You don't do that? If you don't have local "gold master" copies of your files, then you don't own your files. And if you don't copy them onto multiple device…

> It's interesting to find someone on here who maintains all of their files/email/photos/etc locally in a redundantly backed-up manner at home on their own personal server. How did you do that? Can you recommend me a way to do that for a non-technical person?

You missed a very important point I'm trying to make with my question.

Can you recommend me a way to do that for a non-technical person?

Many people on HN forget that there are many non-technical people in the world and that they don't have a data server with raid drives in their house running OwnCloud/Flex for all of their backup needs. Hence why they use the cloud and that shouldn't be appalling.

I mean this analogy can be taken to some extreme places if you start looking at the fact that you trust a bank, the stock exchange, a government, etc. You could minimize how much you trust each of them because your personal happiness is based on them. And PLEASE don't tell me if your bank was all of a sudden taken to a negative balance you wouldn't be sad, mad, angry, etc.

The point is, many people don't like Facebook, Microsoft, etc. and they press that opinion on others in a manner I don't always appreciate. It's a company that offers a service I like. If it goes away I'll be sad, but life will go on.

Re: Get your loved ones off Facebook

#132

Post by ykumards »

aantix wrote: post #67
ykumards wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I share your concerns about losing Facebook data of the past, but frankly you didn't address any of the concerns that were listed in the article. The issue is what they do with our data and whether you'd be comfortable letting them use your data this way. It's also due to their shady practices like not disclosing changes to privacy policy. This is especially worse with non-technical people like my mom using their pla…

>didn't address any of the concerns that were listed in the article. .. >The issue is what they do with our data and whether you'd be comfortable letting them use your data this way I believe that I have addressed these issues by still utilizing the service. They're well known to the HN community. They're not new. They just don't matter to me. Nor to most of the rest of the market, because billions still use it.

That's totally fine, as long as you are aware of the problem and decide that it doesn't matter to you. But they have the moral(legal?) obligation to let us know how they're using our data.

Re: Get your loved ones off Facebook

#133

Post by mnm1 »

exhilaration wrote: post #18

I have a question regarding this: "tracking everything you read on the internet" I recently disabled third party cookies in Chrome and it's had no negative effect. Can someone tell me if this will block the Facebook code that's embedded in nearly every web page from reading my Facebook cookie and identifying me?

All the other things everyone else here said plus: Quick Javascript Switcher (Chrome) or equivalent in FF. They can't track you if they can't run their Javascript (and you don't request pages from them or their friends). You can turn it on for domains you need it on. I truly wish this was the default state of browsers and that it had a counter of lines of JS blocked. I'd probably be in the billions easily by now.

Re: Get your loved ones off Facebook

#134

Post by throwanem »

bargl wrote: post #98
throwanem wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never used Facebook. But if I had, to the extent you have, it would horrify and frighten me to reflect upon the fact that so much of my emotional life were all but inextricably tied into one private company, such that staying in that company's good graces had become a necessary part of maintaining access to my own memories .

I think you are taking this a little out of context. The best part for me is the feed into other peoples lives. It's a service I'd be sad to loose. It's interesting to find someone on here who maintains all of their files/email/photos/etc locally in a redundantly backed-up manner at home on their own personal server. How did you do that? Can you recommend me a way to do that for a non-technical person? If you don't t…

From your prior comment:

> If Facebook were suddenly gone tomorrow, I would feel devastated (so many memories of my kids, deceased father, mom, all would be gone).

What did I take out of context?

And it's worth considering: "Facebook [being] suddenly gone" doesn't have to mean the service shuts down. It could just mean your account's been suspended for what some algorithm, opaque even inside the company and utterly occult from without, calculates is sufficiently probable cause. At best, it's going to take a while to resolve the problem via Facebook's famously helpful and proactive customer service. At worst, your account is gone forever. Maybe you can make a new one and start all over!

From your perspective, there's no distinction to be drawn between "Facebook is gone" and "Facebook is gone from me". Except that, in the former case, you're probably much better off, because in the latter case everyone else is still there - and it feels as much to them like the only way to keep in touch as it feels to you right now, and keeping in touch with anyone who isn't there feels like just enough of an imposition that, over time, they stop bothering.

(And if this seems like something that could never happen - that people would never just forget there are ways other than Facebook to stay tied into one another's lives - well, it can. Ask me how I know.)

As for the rest of your comment - I don't know to whose claims you're responding, but I'm pretty sure they're not ones I've ever actually made...

Re: Get your loved ones off Facebook

#135

Post by berdario »

iak8god wrote: post #116
Animats wrote: post #97

Useful hints: - Put anything on Facebook you're willing to have on a public web page. Stop there. - Don't use Facebook's messaging or email. - On desktops and laptops, run Ghostery and Privacy Badger. This keeps Facebook's "like" buttons from tracking your browsing. - Don't run Facebook's phone app. It's way too intrusive; it gives your contact list to Facebook, just for starters. - Remember, sharing is spamming. Don…

> - Don't use Facebook's messaging or email. I'd love to not use FB's messaging, especially since they recently changed the email message notifications to say "you have a message. log in to see it" instead of giving a preview of the message like it used to. However, I can't figure out a way to keep a minimal FB account and not use their messaging. Some of my friends do have the vile Messenger app on their phones and…

My solution is:

go through every chat that you had in the last 2 years, and "mute" it.

That way you won't get the red dot notifying you about it when you log into Facebook, and you can blissfully ignore any message there. You might still want to check messages there every once in a while (every couple of weeks, maybe)

If you have other contacts (advertised on your Facebook about page, even!) and you let your friends know to avoid contacting you on Facebook, I think they shouldn't expect you to be alert and quick to reply to their messages on such a platform

Re: Get your loved ones off Facebook

#136

Post by lbstr_ftw »

joshstrange wrote: post #128

It won't be a popular opinion here but here it goes: Well if it all goes to hell we will all be in the same handbasket. I'm simply not willing to cut people out of my life and miss out on things that are important to me because my data is mined and might be used against me. All these distributed platforms are a joke, no really they are technically cool but no one I care about is on them. Maybe if your entire social c…

It's amusing and sad that you honestly think leaving Facebook is the same thing as cutting people out of your life.

I've been Facebook free for several years now. It feels great, and I didn't have to cut anyone out of my life to do it (who I wasn't otherwise already communicating with). Much less noice, more productive, both in my life and in my relationships.

Re: Get your loved ones off Facebook

#137

Post by [deleted] »

jasonkostempski wrote: post #78
unabst wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. The military has secrets, but should have no privacy. Same with the government. Privacy is the opposite of transparency. We can have secrets while we know exactly what we are keeping secret, such as Private Keys and passwords. Secrets do not hinder transparency.

"We can have secrets while we know exactly what we are keeping secret" I'm not sure that's true. You might think you know what I'm doing in the bathroom. I don't think privacy and secrecy are truly separate things.

[deleted]

Re: Get your loved ones off Facebook

#138

Post by Fezzik »

joshstrange wrote: post #128

It won't be a popular opinion here but here it goes: Well if it all goes to hell we will all be in the same handbasket. I'm simply not willing to cut people out of my life and miss out on things that are important to me because my data is mined and might be used against me. All these distributed platforms are a joke, no really they are technically cool but no one I care about is on them. Maybe if your entire social c…

But what's the advantage of Facebook over email and/or texting? I feel like for anything other than wasting time Facebook is sluggish compared to either. If you're a Facebook user you have a cellphone and/or a computer, and can do everything Facebook does: share pictures, plan events, check-in with friends, family, and groups of people. And not share data* or be peppered with garbage advertisements.

* I personally pay for Fastmail and have migrated all my communcations to email and texting (and feel the better for it). Obviously it is a personal decision, but realize everything you do is a vote towards a certain state of things.

Re: Get your loved ones off Facebook

#139

Post by Jtsummers »

stevewillows wrote: post #129

A good number of people I know have left facebook for everything but the events. Its still the one central location where pretty much everybody is. I would love nothing more than a standalone events app that not only had future events, but a, 'hey, I'm at %location%, anyone want to meet up?' that allowed for multiple degrees of social interaction --- e.g. just friends, anybody.

This is the primary reason I use it. It annoys my girlfriend (who posts regularly) that I don't read what she posts (sometimes I do, but that leads to a time sink when I see everything else I've "got" to read). 99% of my use is to post event announcements, and respond to event invites from friends.

If I could trust people to properly respond to emailed invites, I would, but most people I know have 1k+ unread emails. They'll never notice it. FB replaced my email+SMS+(various messaging app) approach from before, but caught almost all my intended audience in one place. There may be other services I could use, but people would have to create yet another account, which isn't likely.

Re: Get your loved ones off Facebook

#140

Post by nvr219 »

cylinder wrote: post #56
nvr219 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accroding to FB help: "When you delete your account, people won't be able to see it on Facebook. It may take up to 90 days from the beginning of the deletion process to delete all of the things you've posted, like your photos, status updates or other data stored in backup systems. While we are deleting this information, it is inaccessible to other people using Facebook." https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674

That doesn't answer the question as to whether they are still using the data internally.

It mentions deleting data stored in backup systems so I'm interpreting that as the data goes away.
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