21–30 of 119 posts
Nice. This is the post I needed to read, as I am on one-week fasting from Facebook (in fact, I am fasting from all kinds of email/group, facebook interactions). It is hard work, but much needed. I tend to believe, as humans in this age and time, we are losing our fundamental ability to delay gratification.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> because you can't actually delete it You can. At least, this seemed to work effectively for me: http://deletefacebook.com/
It's hidden from public view. They hold on to all of your data, which the page you linked says.
1) Obfuscate the private view by liking everything. This raises the signal-to-noise ratio exponentially and surely makes it hard(er) for "them" to characterize you. The longer you do this for, the more effective this strategy will be I would think.
2) Delete from public view.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's hidden from public view. They hold on to all of your data, which the page you linked says.
So the steps would be: 1) Obfuscate the private view by liking everything. This raises the signal-to-noise ratio exponentially and surely makes it hard(er) for "them" to characterize you. The longer you do this for, the more effective this strategy will be I would think. 2) Delete from public view.
So if you like everything on Facebook, the result is political extremism and the most insipid pop culture trash. What frightens me is what if this has nothing to do with Facebook, but is instead about human nature? Does this also describe what happens to a person's life when they stop caring, when they are no longer motivated to put forth the effort to be discerning, when they give up trying to make anything but the…
>Also, as I went to bed, I remember thinking “Ah, crap. I have to like something about Gaza,” as I hit the Like button on a post with a pro-Israel message.
>By the next morning, the items in my News Feed had moved very, very far to the right.
[...]
>Rachel Maddow, Raw Story, Mother Jones, Daily Kos and all sort of other leftie stuff was interspersed with items that are so far to the right I’m nearly afraid to like them for fear of ending up on some sort of watch list.
[...]
>While I expected that what I saw might change, what I never expected was the impact my behavior would have on my friends’ feeds.
This article has so much modern anxiety in a nutshell. We have the pervasive surveillance society, and having our behaviour affected by algorithms.
What this really highlights, to me, is the extent to which Facebook exerts editorial control over the news that you're subjected to. This has all sorts of other effects on how media dollars are spent and as a result the shape of discourse - I'm immediately reminded of http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/05/22/facebook_s_mi...
This is not to say that there haven't _always_ been pernicious incentives at work; but before you could at least question those incentives and motivations instead of shrugging, and pointing to there's an unexplainable, mysteriously biased, support vector machine et al pulling strings.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> because you can't actually delete it You can. At least, this seemed to work effectively for me: http://deletefacebook.com/
It's hidden from public view. They hold on to all of your data, which the page you linked says.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only up to the limits of Google being able to track you anyway. There's IP address, user agent, and any other HTTP header information your browser leaks.
A VPN + Incognito should be enough. Not to truly anonymize you, but probably enough to disable the personalization layers. It doesn't make economic sense to waste engineering hours and computing time trying to show ads to the 0.0001% of paranoid users, which are likely blocking them anyway, even if the data is there. Of course, there's no such thing as the vanilla user. You'll still be targeted on generic features (l…
I wish there were more discussion venues where the quality of your participation was based on the value to the discussion, not as to whether or not you supported what that person said.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> because you can't actually delete it You can. At least, this seemed to work effectively for me: http://deletefacebook.com/
It's hidden from public view. They hold on to all of your data, which the page you linked says.
Be interesting to see if any of the Facebook privacy lawsuits help Facebook to delete that data when they're asked to.