Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook Lies

iain.learmonth.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 204 posts

Re: Facebook Lies

#41

Post by yeukhon »

bmelton wrote: post #36
yeukhon wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see why that isn’t expected. Next time try deactivate it instead of uninstall the app, then there is an option to opt out communication. In your account settings, you can also opt out. I have not received a single email from facebook since then (although I am back on it again).

I did not expect them to ramp up the amount of notification spam 100-fold as I engage with the service less. I've no intention of logging back in to check my notification settings, but when I was using Facebook, I would get a push notification maybe once or twice every couple of days. Now, I get more than a dozen SMS messages a day. I've built notification systems in the past, and in every instance, respecting the fa…

Hmm that is odd. I get the phone notification because I had thst problem if I didn’t remove the app and if I haven’t been on facebook for more than a day.

I think the “user is idle let’s poke the user” is a supposedly a “nice” user engagement to get users back on the system. I hear your concern.

I think at this point:

* opt out notifications before deactivate your account (go to account settings)

* deactivate and opt-out notification at the time of deactivation

* set facebook email as spam or something (although you’d miss any potential real security notifications.)

Or you can also remove your phone number and change the account’s email address. I own a dozen gmail accounts, one for mailing list, one for billing, one for personal, one for school, one for important tech accounts like digital ocean/aws, one for banks, one for general garabge I don’t care and so on. I also run a YouTube channel with a friend so I also own a separate gmail account to be added as a manager of the channel.

Much neater than labels (amazon emails can fuck me up easily, ugh).

I highly recommend this multi-email account approach. I can ignore 50 emails sitting in other accounts most of the time. All of them have second auth and some accounts have different passwords for additional security. Not hard to manage because the address format is always .@gmail.com. Consistency!!

Re: Facebook Lies

#42

Post by Evgeny »

bmelton wrote: post #26

I've tried (and failed) to delete my Facebook a couple times in the past, so this most recent go, when I quit using Facebook, I just quit using Facebook -- I uninstalled the apps from my phone, and mapped 'facebook.com' to localhost in my /etc/hosts files. The result was... amusing. Facebook kept emailing me the "Hey, did you see what so and so posted?" emails, knowing full well that I didn't see them. But then, afte…

It is fairly easy to configure Facebook notifications the way you want them to be (for example, I want to know when someone logs into my account, but nothing else). I post on my timeline less than once a month, and receive no notifications. Not to defend Facebook, but notifications are hardly its biggest annoyance.

Re: Facebook Lies

#43

Post by gruez »

ape4 wrote: post #35

What if you fill your Facebook profile with bogus info? Like writing random bytes on a drive to wipe it.

They probably keep a history on all the changes you made, so I doubt it would help

Re: Facebook Lies

#44

Post by Fnoord »

IshKebab wrote: post #25
trishmapow2 wrote: post #19

https://haveibeenpwned.com Make sure that you don't have any insecure accounts or reuse passwords that have been exposed through breaches.

Really annoyingly though they don't provide the hashes. I'd really like to know which passwords have been leaked. Does anyone know of a similar site that provides hashes? I don't need the complete list - just the hashes for my email.

I agree however then I reminded myself I shouldn't reuse passwords and ended up using unique passwords everywhere I remembered I reused passwords. A password manager makes it feasible to do that. Also enabled 2FA as much as I could (pref with an application on phone, otherwise SMS).

Re: Facebook Lies

#45

Post by dwringer »

AndrewStephens wrote: post #15

I wrote this several years ago - it is still true: https://sheep.horse/2013/10/the_seven_realities_of_social_ne... You do not have a Facebook page. You never did. Facebook has a page on you.

At the time Facebook was created, there was a lot of talk about how private organizations already had such dossiers on the general public. Facebook is more like the "tip of the iceberg". At least it gives users some control over how they are presented (though less and less every day as they filter timelines and use our names to endorse their ads)

Re: Facebook Lies

#46

Post by intoverflow2 »

Twisell wrote: post #17

Actually I think that an extra step is required to fully "delete" while the standard procedure only "deactivate" accounts. I've permanently delete back in 2014 but actually needed a "ghost account" in 2016 to access some FB walled garden content. I used the same email as my former one and data was gone, no restauration was proposed. (However friend suggestion based on email showed up due to some probable shadow accou…

I did similar with a good 6 years between and with two different emails on different domains and it's friends suggestions both in it's own app and Instagram (not linked to FB account but sharing an email) manage to reference people I only ever knew during the time of the first account and never even interacted with on Facebook.

e.g a guy I interned for 10 years ago who I never spoke to/added on FB keeps showing up in my Insta suggestions. It's actually a bit unnerving and makes me worry who my account is suggested to.

Re: Facebook Lies

#48

Post by nmg »

chirau wrote: post #32

The closest thing you can do to deleting your account is actually manually deleting all your posts and albums first... the using their so called delete/deactivate option.

Try it for yourself. After a number of deletions, response time will slow, an error will occur. You'll reload your page and items you thought were deleted, are not. I've tried many, many times.

Re: Facebook Lies

#49

Post by _jal »

bmelton wrote: post #26

I've tried (and failed) to delete my Facebook a couple times in the past, so this most recent go, when I quit using Facebook, I just quit using Facebook -- I uninstalled the apps from my phone, and mapped 'facebook.com' to localhost in my /etc/hosts files. The result was... amusing. Facebook kept emailing me the "Hey, did you see what so and so posted?" emails, knowing full well that I didn't see them. But then, afte…

I set one up with my primary email address probably 10 years ago just to block someone else doing it. I keep their IP space blocked on my local network (but not my mail server - I try to be a good netizen). I have probably seen a facebook.com page three or four times since then - misclicks at work, etc. And never while 'logged in'[1].

I still get an endless stream of spam from them.

"Facebook - more AOL than AOL ever was."

[1] whatever that means, wrt them.

Re: Facebook Lies

#50

Post by _jal »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #27
nathantotten wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least for European customers. This won’t help everyone.

The US needs to grow some backbone and pass equivalent privacy (and antitrust, while they're at it) laws. If something is a certain way in both the US and EU, most tech companies won't bother doing any differently worldwide.

It isn't a matter of backbone. Legislators are simply representing the interests of their customers, such as Experian and Facebook.
Post reply on HN