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> I wouldn't particularly discourage the rumor. You might as well just admit to encouraging disinformation campaigns against things you don't personally like.
It's not really disinformation, just a slight inaccuracy. For years they were collecting text messages and call logs: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/03/faceb... Not quite "listening to calls," but not too different either. It shows you where their heart is.
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I have seen this first hand. At one point, I think I had figured this out because I the Facebook app had access to "Siri results", and "Siri results" is just about anything you do on your phone. We turned off Siri results, but we would still be discussing something out loud like "maybe we should go to Bali some day" and lo and behold, my wife would see ads for Bali in her Facebook stream within 1-2 hours.
I want to add one more thing. The ads weren't just for a travel destination. It would be something totally out of character for us like "Let's build a tree house and rent in out on AirBnb" and there would be ads for renting out tree houses.
I have heard this anecdote many times but I don't believe Facebook is actually recording everything we say. Mostly because I don't think our phones have that kind of battery life. I do think they have data on essentially everything you do online.
Why is HN so eager to document the downfall of facebook? First, realize that for a large part of its demographics, facebook is the internet , and when they quit they 'll leave the internet altogether (provided that there 's not another new platform that absorbs them). Second, other social media are having far bigger leakages (snapchat) but that doesn't seem to concern anyone.
Facebook never clicked for me. I deleted it, went back, still couldn't make it work, deleted it again, started a new account and was banned. Whatevs. It seems to not click for a lot of folks inclined to hang in spaces like HN. Some folks who never really got it and perhaps felt left out that "everyone else was on it" may take glee in watching it fall and may feel some sense of vindication or the like.
There are truly terrible things being fostered by Facebook in some parts of the world, such as some developing countries. If you care about human rights, it's not unreasonable to feel like Facebook is a pox upon humanity and deserves to die.
(Complete 180 from the last point:) Facebook is a seemingly trivial thing. Taking glee in watching it burn can be good distraction from worse things happening in the world.
Finding a "bad guy" to blame things on helps a lot of people feel better about their own life choices, whether that is reasonable or not.
Humans just aren't monoliths. There is no single uniform answer here. There are around 5 million visitors a month to HN and however many of them are happy to see FB go down, each will have myriad different reasons for feeling that way.
Speaking of focus, one thing I want to focus less on is the continual security/privacy nightmare of using Facebook to post content. Either I want to know 100% it's public (Twitter/Instagram/Blogs) or it's essentially[0] 100% private and hopefully short lived (private insta, snapchat).
[0]: Obviously not PGP private and etc. But from a practical perspective. On Facebook you can do graph searches to identify someone based on a few pieces of data. On snapchat you have to already know their username and be added to see anything on their story or in messages to you. etc.
Additionally, we're still vulnerable to a lot of the same attacks that impacted us in the 2016 election.
These networks still hold your private connection graph, know what you're reading, can target you precisely with ads, etc.
I'm building an app named Polar which is an offline-first document management system for people that read large numbers of PDFs and technical documentation.
I want to integrate social support and while I will probably support posting to Twitter + Facebook for people who want to I also want to work on building out some sort of distributed IPFS and / or filecoin style storage and collaboration.
Unfortunately, I think the space is still a big early for this. Another approach could be to just build a security protocol using group encryption. You could see your public data by others and anything that was shared socially but NO ONE ELSE could see your social data.
Right now the problem is that Facebook can see ALL your private and semi-private data and that's INSANELY dangerous.
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This is exactly how my leaving facebook started. After a few months without the app I logged out on desktop, and then it wasn't long until I deactivated my account. I'd like to delete it entirely but at the moment too many people still use messenger to contact me.
Wait, you can deactivate your account and still use messenger?
Re-activating the Facebook side of the account resolved the issue. Caveat deactivator.
What we need are VIABLE solutions to social platforms... While people are deleting Facebook they're NOT deleting Instagram. Additionally, we're still vulnerable to a lot of the same attacks that impacted us in the 2016 election. These networks still hold your private connection graph, know what you're reading, can target you precisely with ads, etc. I'm building an app named Polar which is an offline-first document m…