In a survey of people I know, 0 out of infinity kept their Facebook accounts deleted.
But lots of people told me they did. Probably 30% of people I know.
Some actually deleted.
Some said they did and didn’t (really weird since you can see their account).
Some thought they did, but screwed it up.
Some said they did but switched to Messenger, or WhatsApp or some other part of Facebook.
Over the past 5 years, not a single friend has stayed off Facebook. Although it would be cool to install an app that actually tracked this to see people who stay off.
I was hoping that this article would talk about how they did the survey through Facebook :)
I don't understand why go through the hassle of actually deleting (particularly since it is so onerous). It changes nothing. There's probably still a shadow account of the data you gave them. Deleting the account doesn't put everything back in pandora's box.
You can just post that you're abandoning the account with where to reach you online, log out, delete the cookies, and block their ___domain (what I did) and have the same effect with the bonus that friends can still reach you if they wonder where you went.
One difference: people who try to invite "you" (i.e. your Facebook profile) to events through Facebook will discover that you don't exist, rather than the event invitation just lingering in your now-abandoned inbox forever.
What I did is turn on email notifications for event invites - I now find I never really goto the site unless an event pops up that I'm wanting to go to.
Haven't really got an alternative and I don't want to be "that guy" but it's made Facebook usable for me.
> There's probably still a shadow account of the data you gave them.
Let's hope not, for Zuck's sake, because he just testified in front of Congress that when you delete your account it's gone from Facebook's servers for good.
Yeah but if they wanted to they could just restore the whole thing and ignore the list. I mean as long as you can't see them deleting everything from everywhere you can't be a 100%
Legally (I believe) they can't delete an account, they can only hide it or deactivate it. There are rules around the data that go beyond Facebook. Think about it. Someone's told the cops I've been using threats using my Facebook account and I hear that and request the service be deleted. Poof it's all gone. Somehow I don't think that's allowed or does anyone think I'm not making a valid and likely assumption here?
Then sure they delete YOUR data, but all the inferencial data such as which sites you clicked like on, which sites you signed into with Facebook, the type of commentary or information you share you made/shared isn't yours and the knowledge gained also isn't the users it's Facebook's so that'll all be there. So sure they won't have your face or name, but they'll know everything else about you that makes you you.
Anyway most people don't even know that Facebook owns Instagram or WhatsApp, so no matter what they say unless they are tech savvy they have up at most an account on Facebook, but not it's subsidiaries (I believe).
Messages from A to B are surely stored in the accounts of both A and B (Or more accurately probably stored in a side table referenced from both accounts). Anyway - I really doubt deleting a single account will delete the messages.
> I don't understand why go through the hassle of actually deleting (particularly since it is so onerous). It changes nothing. There's probably still a shadow account of the data you gave them. Deleting the account doesn't put everything back in pandora's box.
I don't think most facebook users think this way. The big conflict in my experience with the FB scandal is that tech people understand that it's much easier to just keep data around than to track down and delete all of it, whereas users think about it differently.
I believe users conceptualize their access to facebook to be like their access to icloud or dropbox, where they have direct control over their data and when they delete it, it is deleted on the FB servers. (I suppose. Although icloud and dropbox probably keep some records of this data as well.) A coder would be able to intuit that it's much easier to simply flag "deleted" accounts as invisible to other users and keep the data around. Also, using the term "delete" ends up (intentionally or unintentionally) misleading people to think that way, and the 'onerous' nature of deleting leads to a cognitive dissonance where users think that because they worked so hard to 'delete' their account, it was more likely to be actually deleted.
This is part of a culture which is completely pervasive among tech companies of simply keeping all data around forever because until recently there has been zero reason not to, and you might need it later.
I have an account but haven't used it in many years. People say my wall looks weird. I haven't seen it. No reason to delete it or log in at all, IMO. Just walk away.
There's an emotional weight to having social media accounts open. There's a lingering thought of visiting them when they are active. When you delete them that weight eventually goes away. It's like getting clean of an addiction. Did you ever play a video game that you were addicted to? Same idea.
In a survey of people I know, there are many who claim that they "only use it very rarely", most who say they "should use it less", several who quit (incl. me many ca. 2012) and three who never had an account. Those three also never had whatsapp. Those who do not have fb accounts agree that it did not have a noticeable impact on our social lives. We use mail and calls to keep in touch, and we have more to talk about when we see each other, as we have not seen and read about most of each others' experiences already before we meet. The one thing I missed in the beginning was the simplicity of organizing events with people in common networks who I was not close with, e.g. study groups, student parties, study trips, I hear now for parents this also includes kindergarden activities etc.
A good friend of mine, his wife, his parents and their extended family all decided to (and did) delete their Facebook as a result of this furor. I deleted mine after a few months of first making it, and I’d say all told I know more than a dozen other people who either never had them, or deleted them. They’re not using Messenger or WhatsApp. Some use email chains, others are using Signal, and only two reverted to Facebook.
I guess we know different people? It’s probably one of the challenges when talking in terms of anecdotes.
No but they mention #deletefacebook "trending" (i.e. on Twitter, without even mentioning Twitter and apparently without seeing the irony).
You might know a lot of people who want social cred for deleting their accounts, without actually deleting them. But it's also possible that Facebook is keeping those accounts active on purpose so others will continue interacting with them, which is a tool of temptation they can use to get those users to come back.
100% of the people I am deleted their Facebook account long ago, based on a fairly dispassionate assessment of the user experience and the loss of productivity when saddled with it.
Ironically, being able to keep track of who deletes their accounts disappeared when they closed that hole in their API that was used to extract friends lists (it broke this app I wrote years ago):
Because I've lived in so many places and different countries, there are a lot of people who I can only communicate with over Messenger. I usually use the purple-facebook and purple-hangouts plugins.
I never read status updates. I only update my status to promote my other blogs/websites.
I guess I could switch to sending international texts or ask people for their e-mails (which also means asking them to remove my e-mail from spam since I run my own e-mail server and Google/Microsoft don't really use DMARC/DKIM/SPF and always mark my stuff as spam), but messenger is just easier.
I think we'll only see people get rid of Facebook when there are better alternatives to connect on. Even then it's dumb to delete a Facebook account; just stop using it like people did with MySpace.
I have unfollowed everyone, except for a few pages that post interesting events. This way I stay abreast of what's happening, yet suffer little consequence of attention-poisoning effects of FB.
Gil Scott-Heron had a great many songs and poems where I sometimes think what modern analogues would take the form of, esp when it comes to people's behaviors with internet connected applications, though reading through them today still gets the message home.
If only we lived in a world where this were more common than the present one, where many have the expectation that someone else to wipe our assess for us when it comes to things like this…
I've done this in the past and am considering doing it again. Facebook is a good way to get updates on companies, products, organizations, etc that you are interested in. Kind of like Twitter but IMO much better.
I deleted my Facebook account 2 years ago and haven't been back since, so not sure if the above is still true.
Deletion is too extreme for most people. Facebook is a monopoly for users and in an oligopoly for advertisers. This is a market failure [1].
More reasonable: escalating partial dis-engagement. Here's what I did, sequentially, over the years:
1. Turn off notifications for the Facebook app on your phone;
2. Turn off notifications for the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps on your phone;
3. Delete the Facebook app from your phone;
4. Delete the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps from your phone; and finally
5. Log out of Facebook on your desktop.
It took me 2 years to go through from step 1 to step 5. It has made me happier and more productive. I still have a Facebook account. But the friction of grabbing my laptop and logging in forces me to consider "is this what I want to do? Or am I thoughtlessly reaching for the crack pipe?"
I am a little unsure whether Facebook truly isn't as addictive as heroin, or that it couldn't ultimately be as the algorithms improve. I find it as pernicious as alcohol, for my personal, subjective, experience.
Have you done heroin yourself? I haven't, but it's a mistake to assume that Heroin is the most addictive drug ever.
Anecdotally, I'm had several friends completely had their lives ruined by benzodiazapene addiction (usually in the form of street-pressed xanax [alprazolam]), so personally I would probably rather be addicted to heroin than benzos (not that I would want to be addicted to either)
These kinds of surveys are notoriously unreliable. There is no way for the interviewer to verify, no penalty for the participant lying, and you're talking to a complete stranger over the phone, further reducing the barrier for lying. There's also possibly a motivation to "send a message" to FB such that they improve their policy without the interviewee personally having to pay a price.
Would be amazed if even half the "yes" responders actually did. Wouldn't be surprised if literally none of them had.
Probably the best way for most people to "resist" would be to block FB tracking, and anyone who sells it to them, at the browser level. If enough people did, that swing the "materially hurt FB" vs "keep my personal utility of the platform" balance into the positive.
Go on your friends list and look at all the deleted profiles. Facebook no longer deletes the profile from your friendlist. If you have 900 friends and 50 delete, it still shows 900 and the names of deactivated profiles are still in friend list, but with no avatar.
I went to my Facebook and found 8% of my friend list deactivated. I would be surprised if this entire hoopla resulted in more than 1% deletion but even 1% in NA is 1.8M accounts. That is around $200M a year loss for fb. Not a big deal, but their valuation is based on forward growth, so not tiny either
Note that they'll also have no avatar if they never set an avatar, and further if they deleted their account in the past, before the latest hoopla. So this way of estimating the number of people who have deactivated lately necessarily provides only an upper bound on the total number of deactivations.
Either this survey is biased, or Zuckerberg and FB are outright lying when they say they have not seen a noticeable increase in deletions. My money is on the survey and media who push these headlines being BS.
I did this years ago to claims even here on HN that people think when you say "I deleted FB" or "I haven't used FB in years" are bragging.
I think it's important to spread the message that life goes on outside of FB. If you delete, you'll be in good company.
In a less extreme version, try not using it for 10 days and notice how you feel. There will be withdrawal, but if you can't pause a behavior for 10 days, you're probably addicted. Maintaining relationships outside of FB is like riding a bike and it'll feel awkward not to be involved in the "Did you see on FB" conversations at first, but you'll be past it in no time and back to more present conversations.
For the most part I really dislike FB, and have no meaningful relationships on it. But unfortunately many local restaurants, breweries, and biking/activity clubs post activities on FB which I would likely completely miss out on. Until there is a competitor which is able to provide this I'm stuck on FB for the foreseeable future. However my profile is pretty minimal, I haven't shared anything for several years, and I run an adblocker. I don't think this is much more of a privacy concern than not having one as you are still tracked.
If any number of people have your phone number in their contact list, and any number of those use Facebook/WhatsApp/etc, then at the very least it's highly likely that Facebook has a shadow profile containing a portion of your social connections.
I actually deleted my facebook account because I felt like it was negatively affecting me mentally. I've never been the most social person (although I'm working to change that), and I would spend a lot of time alone reading my facebook feed, thinking about how I don't do as much cool stuff as all the people I'm friends with. I realized that I would only really post things to seek affirmation. Initially I just changed my password to something long that I couldnt remember, to keep me from logging in, knowing that I could reset the password if I needed to login. I never did though for the next 6 months.
I also deleted the instagram app from my phone, and blocked reddit on all my PCs. Hackernews might be next I'm afraid - I just don't see that it's a good use of my time anymore. I've even been considering getting a non-smartphone next time I need a new phone. Maybe it's just a reaction to everything going on online, but I'm enjoying being free from social media.
You can't delete 'Search', a lesson for 'Social' and why it will always lose to Search. Just ask AOL, Geocities, friendster and MySpace. Doing something that's easy to duplicate makes it easy to exploit and rarely pays off in the long term.
On Facebook, create a targeted ad, targeting people who have secret property "X"; the ad should be about a product "Y" not involving X.
Wait for people to click the ad, visiting your website, and buying the product Y. Now you know the identities of these people coupled to the fact that they have property X.
According to FB, it takes 90 days for an account to actually be deleted. If you 'delete' your account and then login before the 90 day period has passed your account is just reinstated. I'd love to see what percentage of these users stay off of FB long enough for their accounts to actually get removed.
I deleted my facebook account with all my content eight years ago after I was told some eastern European accessed my account, which made me realize what a liability facebook is, not to mention your page is the first thing an employer looks at when hiring.
Did they also delete their Whatsapp and their Instagram, their browser cache and their current mobile phone number? Otherwise it probably doesn't matter much.
>1 in 10 Americans in survey say they deleted their Facebook account over privacy
So, we might not have gained more hope on privacy issues, but at least we now know that a lot more people will outright lie and BS when polled on the matter, than we previously thought....
MySpace was a thing my friends and I resisted, but Facebook entered my life around age 15, when an attractive classmate invited me. I could be criticized for a lack of willpower when I joined the tool at that age, though I think that'd be unfair. Shortly thereafter, the service atomized every in-person form of social interaction I had once held dear, into a set of in-person interactions which were the footnote to an online logbook. I'm not sure how to qualify the negative impact the "social internet" had on myself and my peers, but I think it's probably immeasurable and not dissimilar from epidemic narcotic use.
This continued through my young adulthood, during which time the traditional media was covering the suicide of Tyler Clementi and later Aaron Schwarz. I noticed the tool routinely used for cyberbullying, outing classmates of alternate sexualities, contact with strangers and subsequent dysfunctional communication, race hate, other forms of anomic and disinhibited communication, abusive surveillance of individuals within human courtships, and the routine use of aliases. Violence associated with online "socialization" continues to escalate in countless communities. Later, the implementation of Facebook Live would popularize its worldwide use for live video broadcast of interpersonal physical violence. Knowing the marketing effects of most other media, the deployment of that particular functionality was probably a given after the Clementi suicide.
The effects of the tool upon partly-or-entirely political processes such as election, incarceration, hiring, policing, etc., are still for-profit and poorly-characterized. With a user count in the billions, billions in value, contracts with data mining firms, use as a media outlet by municipalities in lieu of traditional public media, its probably safe to say they are sizable and wholly-undemocratic. It is comedic that the idea of "democratization" is used in conjunction with a technology whose aim is to recontextualize friendship as an interaction which occurs at an extreme distance and with intensive record-keeping, as opposed to the chance in-person encounter of individuals with their spoken narratives in an agora, square, etc.
The sort of behavior for which Facebook exists and continues to exist is the exact behavior legislated against upon the now-decommissioned ARPANet. The internet was never open or free. To say now, "The internet should neither be commercial nor political, but can be free" is too late, a lie, and unfair. The Kindle is a great device. Text messaging may be a small improvement to the human condition, like the lightbulb, or motor cartage. Remarks on Facebook are likely confined to the realm of observation.
Media is not inherently social. For it to be social, its purpose has to be removed from a dominant narrative and subsequent revenues upon this narrative, which is necessarily impossible. Community farming, in spite of its tremendous cost, is social. Healthcare, in spite of its tremendous cost, is social.
I post these remarks only to document my experiences for posterity. I cannot undo the damage these tools and their attached profit motives have done to my life, but I can note them publicly.
Having spoken to a number of friends and people I haven’t met on the Facebook groups I was in (theme was all car enthusiasts) - not one of them cared. Their arguments were that Facebook knows everything about them anyway. My flatmate also gave he same opinion when I asked her. I can only assume that the general public just don’t care or feel that they have bigger things to worry about.
We can all be ignorant. I would never have thought so many people would consider this a new concern and felt the time to act was now, in April 2018.
Although I don't personally use Facebook I think most people who like it should just continue using it but just think more carefully about the information they share. Deleting now isn't going to bring back the data that has already been shared.
The problem is that "the information they share" and "the information Facebook collects" are two very different things. During the recent hearings, Zuckerberg kept stressing the fact that users "choose what they share", while conveniently dodging addressing the fact that Facebook collects much more than that.
But lots of people told me they did. Probably 30% of people I know.
Some actually deleted.
Some said they did and didn’t (really weird since you can see their account).
Some thought they did, but screwed it up.
Some said they did but switched to Messenger, or WhatsApp or some other part of Facebook.
Over the past 5 years, not a single friend has stayed off Facebook. Although it would be cool to install an app that actually tracked this to see people who stay off.
I was hoping that this article would talk about how they did the survey through Facebook :)