Becoming a Deletist
Part 2: Deleting Facebook
I deleted my Facebook account. I don’t miss it.
I can’t think of a company that has received as much negative news as Facebook has in recent times. The big privacy concern you’ve probably heard of is the Cambridge Analytica breach.
Before that: allow me to rant about how I think Facebook has changed for the worse regardless of data breaches…
I joined Facebook in 2007 (a little late to the party). I shared status updates with friends about what was going on and weekend plans. I posted photos of special occasions or events (which I think were limited to 60 for an album at the time, if you can remember such a time 🤓) and tagged friends in them. We all commented and shared our banter online. It was fun. Oh, you poked people too.
Today, Facebook has grown a lot. All that content is now mashed together into the never ending Feed! Photos aren’t special albums anymore, they’re documentaries of people’s lives in real-time. Some people even do live videos. Not much is private these days. Everyone is doing it and it’s not just your close mates anymore, it’s everyone you’ve ever met because they’re all on Facebook and they all want to be your “friend”: old school friends you weren’t really friends with, people at work you’re not really friends with and Aunties and Uncles you really really aren’t friends with and can’t even remember the last time you saw them in real life.
Facebook has become some weird social norm that you can’t escape (unless you actually do). You aren’t connected to people in a meaningful way. You’re connected in a way that is almost devoid of all meaning. It’s effortless. People don’t invite you to anything anymore, they just create an event and expect you will or won’t come [whatever]. People don’t tell you about important things anymore, they expect you’ll have seen it already on Facebook and that was your opportunity to comment or react.
Interactions that require zero-effort dilute friendships. It stops becoming about the friendship and becomes about the number of friends we have and how many likes we receive. We live in a time when mental health problems are at their highest—especially in teens—and [social media like] Facebook has had a big hand in that. It’s the time we spend connected with people away from platforms like Facebook that build meaningful relationships.
Human interaction is something we all crave, yet we try to medicate this need through an electronic device. It’s the device that becomes the friend and we the robot; slaved to its notifying calls.
Back to the privacy bit
The Cambridge Analytica story as I understand it: some Facebook users connected with an app. Since you can use your Facebook account to authenticate with other companies it stops you having to think about setting up new accounts. You simply give the new thing permission to access your Facebook data. Easy. Too easy.
In the case of Cambridge Analytica, what those users were granting access to was not just their data, but also the data of all of their connected friends. This enabled Cambridge Analytica to access the data of 50,000,000 people from only 270,000 authenticating their account. The other 49,730,000 didn’t explicitly give permission for Cambridge Analytica to access their data. Or did they?
Implied vs explicit consent
People who had no knowledge or interaction with this app had their data accessed because one of their friends used it. This is the problem with privacy permissions in these big tech companies. The majority of the time permissions are enabled by default and your consent is implied.
If anyone ever explicitly asked you if it was OK if your mate shares your data when they sign up to some new thing you’d say no (or certainly have a lot of extra questions to ask). It’s this implied consent to privacy permissions—enabled by default—that is the most important problem to be solved.
We can take measures to become more aware of the problem and make sure our settings are accurate, but the real solution would be for these companies to disable these privacy permissions by default unless they receive explicit consent.
I am threading the ethical line that ticking a box that says you read a Privacy Policy you didn’t isn’t explicit, it’s implied. However legally, you’re screwed and you’re supposed to read the Privacy Policy which [un]clearly outlines your explicit consent to share everything unless you change things later in settings.
There’s rumours that the Cambridge Analytica data was used to target subliminal advertisements that swayed a UK vote to leave the EU and brought Donald Trump into power. I don’t know if this is true but it sure is scary.
If you’re still not convinced, check out this Sign up for Facebook app that brilliantly outlines everything you should have to grant explicit consent to before you can sign up for an account. If you were shown this level of transparency in the first place would you still have signed up?
Download your data
Whether you’re ready to leave Facebook or not, I ask, that everyone downloads their Facebook data and has a look at just what they hold on you and then make a decision.
Having all the data locally accessible on your computer is actually pretty cool. In seconds you can scroll to the first ever thing on your timeline or reminisce in old conversations from very beginning without waiting for load times.
My wife and I enjoyed reading through the first every messages we sent to each other 10 years ago. It was a simpler time. It was fun.
It’s the power of these moments that made Facebook so special at the start. It’s these moments they need to focus on again if they want to rebuild trust. Start connecting people in meaningful and memorable ways. Stop feeding the Feed!
#BeADeletist 🚫
Originally published at https://deletist.xyz/facebook where you’ll find a series of advice and delete-guides on how to reduce your digital-data footprint, become anonymous and make more time.
