Yes, You Should Delete Facebook
How we respond to Facebook today will inform the startups of tomorrow
I deleted my Facebook a few weeks ago, but it started scaring me last March.
A friend and I ran into one of his investors in a café in San Francisco, and the investor asked if we’d heard of a Soylent competitor, Ample. He was curious what we thought of it, and of meal replacement companies in general.
I hadn’t heard of Ample, but I shared my concerns with Soylent, and why I personally would never put my money into one of those companies. My friend, for the most part, agreed.
The conversation ended and we left. I didn’t think about Ample again, look it up, or talk about it online with anyone. But less than 24 hours later, there were ads for it in my Instagram feed.
It was spooky, to say the least. I was used to getting ads for products whose sites I’d visited, and for products I’d mentioned on Facebook, but products that I’d only talked about? That was weird.
After a bit of digging, I discovered I wasn’t alone. There were dozens of stories online about people getting freaked out by ads that seem like they only could have come from Facebook eavesdropping on their conversations.
