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Facebook Can’t Be Fixed, It Needs to Be Broken Up

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Re: Facebook Can’t Be Fixed, It Needs to Be Broken Up

#101

Post by ionised »

Moru wrote: post #97
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There would be consequences, but I doubt they would be that major. Facebook hasn't really contributed anything of value, other than a platform for people to get tracked mercilessly. FB's business model is based on advertising, and advertising is poison to the mind. But I do think the best solution is very strict privacy regulation, similar to GDPR. The so-called free market has failed to manifest a good solution to p…

I think the modern society has forgotten how it is to not have facebook so if that would be forcefully taken away at this point, there would be a lot of angry people not knowing what to do any more.

I think you are vastly overestimating the value Facebook actually provides to its users.

They would get over it pretty fast and adapt.

Re: Facebook Can’t Be Fixed, It Needs to Be Broken Up

#102

Post by ionised »

peteretep wrote: post #54
paxys wrote: post #45

Broken up into what exactly? If you don't like Facebook don't use it. How about the Senate and the internet outrage machine spend time on companies like Equifax instead, who (1) we literally cannot opt out of, (2) have private data that we didn't choose to share with them, and (3) have broken actual laws but haven't received as much as a slap on the wrist for it.

> If you don't like Facebook don't use it Fine, I won't. That won't stop society in general being surveilled though, and all the attendant ills of that that the article suggests. Further: more and more apps require me to use Facebook to sign in.

What apps require a Facebook sign in?

Re: Facebook Can’t Be Fixed, It Needs to Be Broken Up

#103

Post by ionised »

tyingq wrote: post #63
thejerz wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but there isn't really a way for me to leave. You speak as if you have no agency in the situation. But, you do have agency. Using, or not using, facebook is 100%, entirely your choice . There was a happy (happier?) world before 2005, where families shared photos and stayed in touch, without Mark Zuckerberg.

Yes, I have the agency to lose touch with people I care about, because it's not practical for me to convince them all to use a different medium. It is the FB moat. It's real.

If you care about these people as much as you think, not having Facebook is not going to prevent you from continuing to do that.

Re: Facebook Can’t Be Fixed, It Needs to Be Broken Up

#104

Post by mmsimanga »

kgwgk wrote: post #44
mmsimanga wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, I wish governments would ban something like diamonds in wedding rings instead. Like Facebook, we don't need diamonds to survive. Diamonds have been a the cause of much conflict in Africa.

I wish governments would ban weddings. We don’t need weddings to survive and they cause so many conflicts around the world.

I should have been more specific. I was refering DeBeers through advertising created the myth that diamonds are a girl's best friend. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/ho...

Re: Facebook Can’t Be Fixed, It Needs to Be Broken Up

#105

Post by gorhill »

Moru wrote: post #95
vezycash wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>don't VISIT websites with Facebook like/share buttons. So people should know a site uses Facebook share buttons before opening it through Google search. Then, they should keep closing pages until they find the one that don't have share buttons. Then, memorize a list of "safe sites?"

I know this isn't the best solution but uBlock has a list that blocks all social buttons for you. Very easy to install and use.

The Fanboy Social list is mostly cosmetic filtering, it won't prevent connection to Facebook servers.

For this I suggest dynamic filtering[1], as this guarantees there will be no connection to sites with block rules, and block rules can be easily locally overridden in case it is needed for a specific site.

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-filtering:-to...

Re: Facebook Can’t Be Fixed, It Needs to Be Broken Up

#106

Post by tyingq »

ionised wrote: post #103
tyingq wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I have the agency to lose touch with people I care about, because it's not practical for me to convince them all to use a different medium. It is the FB moat. It's real.

If you care about these people as much as you think, not having Facebook is not going to prevent you from continuing to do that.

That's not fair. Forcing them to update me, and only me, via a second channel isn't "care".

Re: Facebook Can’t Be Fixed, It Needs to Be Broken Up

#107

Post by vezycash »

Moru wrote: post #95
vezycash wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>don't VISIT websites with Facebook like/share buttons. So people should know a site uses Facebook share buttons before opening it through Google search. Then, they should keep closing pages until they find the one that don't have share buttons. Then, memorize a list of "safe sites?"

I know this isn't the best solution but uBlock has a list that blocks all social buttons for you. Very easy to install and use.

I use uBlock, Nanodefender, Adguard and HOST blocks.

Re: Facebook Can’t Be Fixed, It Needs to Be Broken Up

#108

Post by killjoywashere »

tyingq wrote: post #51
killjoywashere wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you would live a longer, healthier life without those pictures, at least as presented in that medium. How many pictures of kids covered in chocolate cake do you need?

I'm guessing you don't have adult children, nieces, nephews or grandkids? There isn't any number of pictures, stories, etc of them I wouldn't look at and that wouldn't please me more than anything else. To be fair, I shared your attitude in my 20's. My mother would snail mail a yearly newsletter with printed pictures and I yawned at the effort.

Fair enough, mine are 16 and 13, so perhaps I'm a little child-worn right now.

Re: Facebook Can’t Be Fixed, It Needs to Be Broken Up

#109

Post by panarky »

partiallypro wrote: post #16
panarky wrote: post #7

A good first step would be to force Facebook to let users easily take out their data in machine-readable form, including their social graph, posts and media.

They have done that voluntarily for years. It's under your settings. One thing they don't currently allow is a complete and utter, real, deletion of your profile and all of its assets. You can delete your account, but it's more or less just held in a suspended state.

> They have done that voluntarily for years.

No they haven't.

Take the case of Paul-Olivier Dehaye. In December 2016 Mr Dehaye, a Belgian mathematician, e-mailed Facebook asking for a copy of the data it had gathered about him through an advertising tool called Pixel.

Organisations based in the EU or which process data of EU residents are required to answer questions like this, known as subject-access requests.

Yet it took 106 days for Facebook to do so. The firm acknowledged the existence of Mr Dehaye’s Pixel data, but declined to provide them, stating that doing so would involve “disproportionate effort”.

The data were buried too deep inside Facebook’s data-analytics warehouse, known as Hive. When Mr Dehaye appealed to the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (DPC), which regulates Facebook’s data processing in Europe, he entered a similar maze of e-mails. The DPC is still assessing the case.

https://www.economist.com/news/europe/21739997-europeans-ask...

Re: Facebook Can’t Be Fixed, It Needs to Be Broken Up

#110

Post by ravenstine »

return1 wrote: post #68
manigandham wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dying by which metric exactly? The billions in USD profit or the billions of monthly active users?

but newspapers say it is dying , so it must be dying. And that's just a taste of what 'objective' news means.

Yes, it's because newspapers are telling me it's dying. Right. Newspapers. I don't know if you mean newspapers in a literal sense, but if you do, well, nobody except my parents reads those anymore. ;)

Profit and number of users are not good metrics for the future of a platform. Facebook the company probably isn't going to die, but Facebook the platform can and will inevitably become a ghost town in short order, just as all its predecessors.

Remember, Facebook is a parent company to other revenue sources. The company will continue to survive. Then again, the same can technically be said of Myspace.

Facebook's user growth in North America is in decline.

https://techcrunch-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/techcrunch.com...

Being someone who works for a media company, we've already seen a significant drop in Facebook followers since the Cambridge Analytica fiasco.

No, I don't think Facebook the social media platform has a bright future. The fact that Gen Z isn't using Facebook is a sign that Facebook has entered the initial stages of apoptosis.

https://amp-businessinsider-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/amp.b...

I can't say I blame Gen Z. Why would any young person want to use Facebook at this point when it's highly censored and your mom and grandma are peering at every post you make or like?

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