Every thread about Meta/Facebook always has the save advice to "Just stop using Facebook. Problem solved!"
The HN demographic can follow that but many normies can't because Facebook provides functionality for sharing that can't be replicated by email mailing lists / RSS readers / Mastodon / vBulletin, phpBB boards, etc.
E.g. my friend sees a Youtuber doing some interesting sewing projects to make clothes. To facilitate discussion and collaboration with viewers (sharing photos, videos of projects), the Youtuber created a Facebook group. That's what non-techies do to empower themselves.
Similar situation with normal people using Facebook to share calendars for kids baseball games etc where multiple families can see the same canonical list of upcoming scheduled events.
So the article's recommendations for minimizing data collection can help those people who use Facebook in ways that enhances their lives.
For the folks that only use Facebook to doomscroll an algorithmic newsfeed (a glorified "RSS reader"), that's the type of user that can "just stop using Facebook".
I keep a dummy Facebook account with no followers and nofriends just to access stuff that's exclusively on Facebook. E.g. when I was looking for a tree service to remove some storm damaged trees, it so happened that every tree company I was interested in only used Facebook for up-to-date info. The ones that had their own websites were not maintained and had out of date information. On the other hand, their Facebook pages had the most recent photos of their equipment and their correct phone number. My guess is updating their "real website" requires calling and paying for a web design service to edit things whereas their Facebook page can be updated from the business owner's smartphone for $0.
Because of non-activity on my dummy Facebook account, I worry that Meta will someday flag it as a bot and revoke access.
It's not about normies/techies. It's about recognizing that a Facebook group for a sewing Youtuber provides relatively little value compared to a million other things we can be doing to fill up our entertainment time. You don't need to be tech savvy to recognize this.
Yes. Just stop using facebook. Call your kids' teammates' parents on the phone if you're unsure when the next game is. Call your local businesses on the phone to get info. Join an in person sewing group. Start an in person sewing group if one doesn't exist. These are things "normies" have always done and still do.
The quantity of scam calls means very small businesses can barely operate a phone. Facebook is their only asynchronous messaging. I’ve met these people: they don’t have email addresses and some don’t know what email is. Promoting “in-person” means becoming IT for them and you have my admiration for that.
Indeed, and in the end, these groups are just a marketing platform for the youtuber. In my experience, they bring very little value other than a fake sense of community.
Or we could just live without so much sharing and communication. We did it before social media and we were arguably better off. Why is it necessary to be so “closely” connected to so many people? Aren’t the people in our more immediate orbit enough?
Yes yes, I understand marginalized people need to find each other. Alternative options like Mastodon already solve that problem better than Facebook because they aren’t owned by Big Tech/the US government.
The thing is that shunning WhatsApp and Facebook doesn't put you back to a time before they existed, it cuts you off completely because they've dispaced what used to exist.
Before Facebook there was email and SMS, before that there were phone calls, letters, etc.
None of those really exist any more. If something happens, it goes into the family WhatsApp group, if you're not in the group then you don't find out.
My parents and their generation still answer the phone at least, and I convinced some fairly close people to use Signal, but generally I'm more disconnected from my family than I would have been in another time.
I truly do not use WhatsApp or Facebook, and I do not find myself cut off from the world in the way you describe. For instance, family groups communicate via text messages and/or email threads.
Maybe my family DOES also communicate via Facebook and I am just missing out on it... I genuinely wouldn't know. But I don't feel disconnected.
> it cuts you off completely because they've dispaced what used to exist
It really doesn't though. You remove trivial inputs from distant acquaintances, old co-workers, 5th cousins, and all manner of other individuals you'd traditionally have no input from. Meaningful relationships survive bailing on social media.
This has been my experience after largely leaving social media. I’m much happier with less noise and nonsense in my life. It’s been a significant net benefit.
> Alternative options like Mastodon already solve that problem better than Facebook because they aren’t owned by Big Tech/the US government.
Them not being owned by Big Tech/government does not make them a better solution to the problem. It's a benefit (to some, not all), but if you're trying to recruit "normies" away from social media to, well, a different social media, then that should not be the first bullet point.
If the only way I can interact with a business is through Facebook, that's a business telling me they don't want me as a customer and I'm more than happy to oblige them.
I've very rarely encountered that, though. Most businesses at least have a phone number I can use to talk to them.
>If the only way I can interact with a business is through Facebook, that's a business telling me they don't want me as a customer [...] I've very rarely encountered that,
I encounter it often because I deal with small contractors for home services and repairs and Facebook is how they reach new customers.
I used the word "businesses" but it is giving a false elevated impression that these local services are bigger than they actually are. The "business" is often just 1 guy. And the "business phone number" is just the guy's personal cell number. I hired a father-and-son business to replace some doors in the house and the only "website" they had was their Facebook page. Sure, the "Mr HandyMan" national franchise chains have "real websites" but hiring them also costs more. I'd rather hire the computer-illiterate father&son duo who knows how to replace my doors for a fair price rather than reject them just because don't know how to buy a domain name + website and relies on Facebook for customers to reach them.
Similar situation with other "small businesses" like local yoga instructors, etc. They rely on Facebook pages instead of real websites.
A harder problem is group activities. I keep bees and ride a bike. The local groups that have support, experience, supplies and all the people are on Facebook (the beekeepers) and WhatsApp (the cyclists).
I miss various announcements with the beekeepers but caved last month on WhatsApp with the cyclists, I joined WhatsApp. Being 50km from home with equipment issues, you need to be able to talk to the others and they are on WhatsApp. Cancelled rides or proposed new ones are all on WhatsApp.
I’m in that same social situation. The technological situation is that SMS and Facebook are pre-installed on their phones. In one case, Signal was acceptable. Specifically, Signal only rings when someone is among your contacts. The “do not disturb” feature on their smartphone was not blocking endless scam calls.
In another, because Signal needs to be installed, the amount of time performing as IT eroded the social time.
> If the only way I can interact with a business is through Facebook, that's a business telling me they don't want me as a customer and I'm more than happy to oblige them.
I don’t think this is a reasonable position given what OP correctly said: Facebook makes having a web presence easy for 99.9999% of the population. Not everyone is as technologically literate as those on this forum. By having only a FB presence, they are not telling you they don’t want you as a customer - they just don’t know any better.
I do exactly the same, no follows, no friends. But its still useful to access the marketplace, and some cool groups which I can't find anywhere.
I think we really miss some sort of "community" software (discussion boards won't make it these days), where people can gather around and talk and share stuff. I think Meetup was nice, but the fact that it's way too centered around actual meet-ups, plays against it.
I've thought many times about starting to build something, but the thought of having to market it and make it grow to have an impact demotivates me instantly.
In its high-growth period, Facebook devoured Usenet and forums precisely to defeat that. Low technical barriers meant moderation became important, thus CraigsList is risky.
Several of my friend groups coordinate big events through Facebook events and Messenger. It would be harder to participate if I didn't have an account.
Also, in my area, Facebook Marketplace has totally displaced Craigslist for used goods.
These are the only things I use Facebook for, but they're hard to get away from.
For the life of me Idk why the social graph has not been scraped from facbook yet.
Back in the friendster days I distinctly remember being able to import my friends over to myspace and then later from myspace to facebook years later. We used to have a mass exodus every few years and then we we’re locked into facebook. Facebook should have died many times over. That no competing service has been built that has made migration easy is in my opinion the reason facebook has been allowed to fester for so long.
That such a tactic may be a violation of tos or questionable legally never stopped anyone before… and on the legal front I would argue it’s the users who own their social graph. Before facebook your address book was a thing of immense value. I have multiple friends irl that would sell their contacts for $10k+. That everyone just decided to give that info to facebook still boggles my mind and especially after all the bs they pulled over the years, yet here we are.
> I keep a dummy Facebook account with no followers and no friends just to access stuff that's exclusively on Facebook.
Facebook still provides an API. Wouldn't it be possible to leverage that API to build a proxy service, and then at least mitigate one side of their monopoly?
> The HN demographic can follow that but many normies can't because Facebook provides functionality for sharing that can't be replicated by email mailing lists / RSS readers / Mastodon / vBulletin, phpBB boards, etc.
Then normies should not actively be trying to make the service that is indispensable to them non-viable.
Either you need to use it, in which case you should not try to sabotage it, or you don't, in which case you should not need to sabotage it. So what is the point of attempting to sabotage it?
I don't understand your choice of the word "sabotage". The thread's article is telling users about the official Facebook approved ways to turn off some ad preferences. This isn't UBlock, or Pi-Hole, AdNauseum, etc.
I use Firefox containers for meta controlled domains. I don't trust third party websites to not pass information to Meta or meta to not be greedy. So, a complete absence of meta related cookies and other cruft is the best defense against that. I mostly stopped checking Facebook. I have a few things with social logins tied to Facebook that I open in the same container that I can't be bothered to untangle.
I've de-activated my instagram account ages ago. I just have no interest in what happens there. People sharing images and short videos just annoys me mostly. So, I'm happy to let people entertain each other over there without distracting me. In the same way, I have zero interest in tik tok, youtube shorts, and related nonsense from competitors. My life is rich enough without that.
Whatsapp unfortunately remains a necessary evil because that's what most people I know seem to insist on using. I mostly use it in a browser tab because I hate typing on mobile phones. My thumbs keep hitting the wrong tiny keys. If I type 3 letters, 2 will be wrong. I probably should move whatsapp to its own container. Thankfully it remains ad-free so far (or my adblocker is just that good, hard to tell these days). I think meta mostly walked back controversial plans to do something about that.
It's helpful to pop in to Facebook from time to time just to try to understand the insanity going on in the world. I can see the constant flow of misleading content that's driving the seemingly irrational decision-making and I can then understand it. I steel myself against the propaganda as one does, but if I were spending even one hour a day reading that sewage that's pushed at regular people every day, and I believed in even a fraction of it, I would probably make the same insane decisions as them. So it actually reduces the anxiety, a little bit, to at least know where it comes from.
If I've understood correctly, it might not be necessary to isolate everything in different containers. As long as you block social logins using an adblocker, the total cookie protection in firefox shouldn't allow websites to know what other sites you're visiting.
I have every Facebook owned domain blocked in NextDNS so it's essentially impossible for them to track me. I don't even have a Facebook account but they obviously don't need me to have one to build a shadow profile.
I am in the EU. I opted out of targeted ads a while back when the Facebook app asked me about it and it is now showing me inline ads with a timer. I literally have to wait before I can continue doomscrolling which is just enough time to just put the phone down and go back to work. Thank you, Meta.
Some months ago (years?) I was shown a popup asking me to either agree to be tracked or to pay a monthly fee [1]. I chose neither and haven't logged in since.
I logged in just now and everything seems to be working fine. But then I went to the "Ad preferences" and I'm shown a message saying I have to choose between using Facebook for free with ads or subscribe, and that my information won't be used for ads until I make a choice.
Looks like my account is stuck in some weird middle ground where my data can't used for ads but I also don't have to pay. Did I get away with neither? Or will they ask me to pay next time I log in, two years from now?
There's indeed a middle ground now, as far as I can tell. It's called "show less personalized ads" or something like that, but in effect I think it's showing ads related just to the page you're currently looking at. I'm perfectly fine with this model, and I'd rather we collectively go back to it, instead of ad trackers following you around on the Internet and serving you ads based on your browser history instead.
Of course that doesn't mean I trust Meta/Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp, but at least on the surface it seems they understood the assignment.
That's one way to break the doomscrolling habit! Meta unintentionally doing you a favor. Maybe they should market it as a -productivity feature- instead of an ad strategy
I remember in 2012-13 facebook didnt even have a delete account option only deactivate. I dug deep enough to stumble across a facebook delete link in their community support or something.
I made sure to change all my details and then i used that link to delete my account. Used my friends account to verify if it was actually deleted or not.
Even better: just stop using their services. Given that these settings are presented to you by a party you already don't trust, why should you believe they don't do the opposite of what they say?
There are regions in this world where the majority of business and online interaction with friends and family are conducted through Facebook. It's easy for you to say "just stop using their services" if you live in the western bubble.
Things like this are just rationalisations to keep doing something unhealthy with a better conscience. Sure, it probably helps a tiny bit, but if you're aware enough of how bad facebook is for the world, just stop using their services.
People were able to live without facebook before it existed, and you can again. Just arrange to interact with the people you care about face to face or via a call.
The people you "keep in touch with" by sometimes pressing like are not real relationships
This is a simplistic and not helpful form of advice. Often we need to use a thing that is not altogether good, but we can take steps to reduce the harm.
People were able to live before houses and apartments existed. And a lot of grandmas and grandpas only get their birthday remembered thanks to Facebook, sad as that may be it's the truth, those and many other relationships are keep alive because their counterparts check FB and only FB, by talking there not only clicking "like" or any other reductionisms alike.
I'm not talking about me, but about the millions that use the platform.
BTW I do still use Facebook but for different reasons, mostly because it's the only platform many local musicians use to publish events among other info, yeah I know people lived without such privilege before, I couldn't care less.
> Yes, we get it. Uninstall Facebook/IG/WhatsApp..., but no. Most people in the world use these, and you're still targeted without using them.
Whenever I go into Facebook itself, I see how poorly they target me.
Boob surgery and dick pills.
Lawyer specialising in giving up a citizenship I never had for those living in a country I left in 2018. Announcements from that country's government that a breed of dog I've never heard of is now banned.
Recommendations to join groups about teams I've never heard of in sports I don't follow in states I've never even visited in a country I've never lived in.
Misunderstanding: The advert is to renounce US citizenship that targets Americans living in the UK. I left the UK in 2018, I've never had American citizenship.
The main reason I've done this is to make myself less profitable to Meta. A drop in the bucket, I know, but the more people who do this, the less money Meta makes, which can only be a good thing for the world.
1) I don't particularly care beyond possibly being less targeted for manipulation
5) I wouldn't have thought it was a campaign or effort by Warner Bros, likely just the show itself which seems to have pretty wide editorial freedom (and obviously EFF does have a known position on these matters)
6) Good luck getting timely and well thought-through regulations through the EU / any regulation through the US
I have an ad blocker that removes all ads so I indeed don't care what ads are displayed to me. But I do want to minimize what data companies collect about me and will use whatever means necessary to do so.
Why just Meta is a false dichotomy. Privacy-aware users tend to adjust the settings and use privacy-enhancing extensions for all companies.
Yes, I think this should be regulated and companies within the EU need to be forced to respect privacy and other EU laws. The current penalties are too low. Data theft is a serious crime.
5: Probably John Oliver still at it, I used to watch when I still had time to watch videos about a country that's not mine, it was both insightful and funny. I'd bet his program did that (they did set up a church to show how easy it was to evade taxes or something a few years ago)
I actually sorta wonder if "No, don’t make my ads more relevant by using this information" makes you more valuable, as they'll just display the most valuable ads they can to you.
Having worked a little bit in ads, impressions like that won’t get you as much money. Ads usually will bid for a spot, the more targeted info you can present to an ad, the higher the bid for the slot. Random ads don’t have that much to offer.
On top of that, a lot of advertisers have tighter budgets and therefore want the ad on a specific segment to max out ROÍ. So the pool of ads that get shown to you go down. Which means you’ll be shown the same ad repeatedly. And FB does not make as much money off repeat impressions.
And on top of that engagement brings more revenue to the company as compared to just impressions. The whole reason meta exists as a much more profitable business over something like TV or radio for ads is that targeting brings better engagement metrics. And the difference is huge.
Now I am not sure how meta’s ad internals work, but the only way I see them recouping some value out of your selection is by showing you more ads. Maybe you go from seeing ads after every 3 user generated content items to every other item being an ad.
TLDR; turning off preferences doesn’t make you more valuable, but the company could squeeze out as much value from you as other users.
I live in Ireland, but I speak an African language natively. I changed my facebook language to my native language, and I get basically zero ads, because the Algorithm can't figure out how to show me Irish ads in a language that the ad does not support.
tl;dw he found a 1992 recording of an art auction involving a series of paintings of humanoid rats being intimate, and he really wanted the person who bought one of the paintings to sell it to him.
if only that was a solution that was effective. while theZuck may not be able to monetize your eyeballs directly, he can still make his yacht payments off of the data you generate for him free of charge from every other website using his SDKs
Sure, but if we believe the conceit of the article that making some settings within facebook reduces your value to them, stopping altogether must reduce your value even more.
After one weird trick, Facebook became a lot of more valuable to me... Including its ads. Tldr: be radical about your interests and Facebook will become interesting.
I literally unfollowed all of my friends with the exception of a handful of family members; this means I stopped receiving updates for stuff like "look how cute my baby is in the dinosaur costume". Then I joined dozens of groups narrowly focused on my interests.
The result is an online service were I only read stuff I like, very few reels (unfortunately they don't yet allow you to fully disable reels, but you can still indirectly downvote them) and even the ads are interesting and relevant. I've clicked on a few of them, which fed back to the algorithm and showed me even more products I actually want to buy and news I want to read.
You can also remove yourself from ad topics, and even if you don't want to remove yourself from them it can be interesting to take a look and see what meta has associated you with - https://accountscenter.facebook.com/ads/ad_topics
It won't stop you getting ads, of course, and I have yet to find the holy grail of fictional facebook settings "Never show me reels or suggest groups you think I might be interested in, stick to my actual friends".
On Facebook, if you go to 'Menu' > 'Feeds' > 'Friends' you will see a feed of only your contacts' activity and none of the suggested posts & random pages on the normal Feed
While this will probably help for people still tied to Facebook and related services, this unfortunately does little to stop their shadow profiling capabilities (which Facebook is known to do).
If you don't have a Facebook account, make sure to get an ad blocker[0] and activate the anti-annoyance, privacy and social widget lists in the settings. That should stop most of the passive site tracking that Facebook does. It's a much ruder way of stopping it, but to be frank, I'd argue that this form of tracking is inherently rude in and of itself (and therefore an adequate response.)
You should also absolutely install Consent-o-Matic[1] which automatically handles any cookie banners for you. The extension is unfortunately a necessity because most corporations (Facebook included) refuse to comply with the GDPR as it's written and make opting out unnecessarily difficult, with many hidden buttons you'd need to manually reject. Unlike other cookie form handlers, this one defaults to "most private" and will give you control again if it fails to reject the entire form. (This is unlike IDCAC, which just takes the shortest path to closing the form, even if it compromises your privacy to do so.)
Both of these extensions will of course also help against way more than just Facebook, and they're pretty much a default whenever I'm configuring a PC these days.
[0]: I can only recommend ublock origin, most other ones are running extortion schemes to show you "acceptable ads" anyway. https://ublockorigin.com/
Being in the Apple ecosystem for over a decade now as a former android person, is custom patches to proprietary app binaries to strip out ad calls actually a thing? Kind of blew my mind that people will jump through hoops like this but maybe it’s actually not that hard to do because the tooling is quite good?
It's definitely a few hoops, but not more than a few. The hardest part is that you have to download the right APK file from apkmirror[1] or the likes. It'll open the the right search for you though, but you still need to know a little bit about apk formats.
You also can't just auto-update the app anymore. You have to manually update and patch again.
Other than those two points, it's just pressing a few buttons.
I only do it for YouTube, because the ad load on that app is insane. For others it's not really worth the trouble, I find. Does iOS have a better way for YT?
[1] Ironically, apkmirror has an adblock-blocker, so if you use a DNS based adblock, you have to disable it.
Every thread about Meta/Facebook always has the save advice to "Just stop using Facebook. Problem solved!"
The HN demographic can follow that but many normies can't because Facebook provides functionality for sharing that can't be replicated by email mailing lists / RSS readers / Mastodon / vBulletin, phpBB boards, etc.
E.g. my friend sees a Youtuber doing some interesting sewing projects to make clothes. To facilitate discussion and collaboration with viewers (sharing photos, videos of projects), the Youtuber created a Facebook group. That's what non-techies do to empower themselves.
Similar situation with normal people using Facebook to share calendars for kids baseball games etc where multiple families can see the same canonical list of upcoming scheduled events.
So the article's recommendations for minimizing data collection can help those people who use Facebook in ways that enhances their lives.
For the folks that only use Facebook to doomscroll an algorithmic newsfeed (a glorified "RSS reader"), that's the type of user that can "just stop using Facebook".
I keep a dummy Facebook account with no followers and nofriends just to access stuff that's exclusively on Facebook. E.g. when I was looking for a tree service to remove some storm damaged trees, it so happened that every tree company I was interested in only used Facebook for up-to-date info. The ones that had their own websites were not maintained and had out of date information. On the other hand, their Facebook pages had the most recent photos of their equipment and their correct phone number. My guess is updating their "real website" requires calling and paying for a web design service to edit things whereas their Facebook page can be updated from the business owner's smartphone for $0.
Because of non-activity on my dummy Facebook account, I worry that Meta will someday flag it as a bot and revoke access.
It's not about normies/techies. It's about recognizing that a Facebook group for a sewing Youtuber provides relatively little value compared to a million other things we can be doing to fill up our entertainment time. You don't need to be tech savvy to recognize this.
Yes. Just stop using facebook. Call your kids' teammates' parents on the phone if you're unsure when the next game is. Call your local businesses on the phone to get info. Join an in person sewing group. Start an in person sewing group if one doesn't exist. These are things "normies" have always done and still do.
The quantity of scam calls means very small businesses can barely operate a phone. Facebook is their only asynchronous messaging. I’ve met these people: they don’t have email addresses and some don’t know what email is. Promoting “in-person” means becoming IT for them and you have my admiration for that.
Indeed, and in the end, these groups are just a marketing platform for the youtuber. In my experience, they bring very little value other than a fake sense of community.
Or we could just live without so much sharing and communication. We did it before social media and we were arguably better off. Why is it necessary to be so “closely” connected to so many people? Aren’t the people in our more immediate orbit enough?
Yes yes, I understand marginalized people need to find each other. Alternative options like Mastodon already solve that problem better than Facebook because they aren’t owned by Big Tech/the US government.
The thing is that shunning WhatsApp and Facebook doesn't put you back to a time before they existed, it cuts you off completely because they've dispaced what used to exist. Before Facebook there was email and SMS, before that there were phone calls, letters, etc. None of those really exist any more. If something happens, it goes into the family WhatsApp group, if you're not in the group then you don't find out. My parents and their generation still answer the phone at least, and I convinced some fairly close people to use Signal, but generally I'm more disconnected from my family than I would have been in another time.
I truly do not use WhatsApp or Facebook, and I do not find myself cut off from the world in the way you describe. For instance, family groups communicate via text messages and/or email threads.
Maybe my family DOES also communicate via Facebook and I am just missing out on it... I genuinely wouldn't know. But I don't feel disconnected.
Sir you just said phone calls and letters don't exist anymore. Do you know how happy your mom would be if you gave her a call or sent her a letter?
Get off Facebook!
> it cuts you off completely because they've dispaced what used to exist
It really doesn't though. You remove trivial inputs from distant acquaintances, old co-workers, 5th cousins, and all manner of other individuals you'd traditionally have no input from. Meaningful relationships survive bailing on social media.
This has been my experience after largely leaving social media. I’m much happier with less noise and nonsense in my life. It’s been a significant net benefit.
> Alternative options like Mastodon already solve that problem better than Facebook because they aren’t owned by Big Tech/the US government.
Them not being owned by Big Tech/government does not make them a better solution to the problem. It's a benefit (to some, not all), but if you're trying to recruit "normies" away from social media to, well, a different social media, then that should not be the first bullet point.
If the only way I can interact with a business is through Facebook, that's a business telling me they don't want me as a customer and I'm more than happy to oblige them.
I've very rarely encountered that, though. Most businesses at least have a phone number I can use to talk to them.
>If the only way I can interact with a business is through Facebook, that's a business telling me they don't want me as a customer [...] I've very rarely encountered that,
I encounter it often because I deal with small contractors for home services and repairs and Facebook is how they reach new customers.
I used the word "businesses" but it is giving a false elevated impression that these local services are bigger than they actually are. The "business" is often just 1 guy. And the "business phone number" is just the guy's personal cell number. I hired a father-and-son business to replace some doors in the house and the only "website" they had was their Facebook page. Sure, the "Mr HandyMan" national franchise chains have "real websites" but hiring them also costs more. I'd rather hire the computer-illiterate father&son duo who knows how to replace my doors for a fair price rather than reject them just because don't know how to buy a domain name + website and relies on Facebook for customers to reach them.
Similar situation with other "small businesses" like local yoga instructors, etc. They rely on Facebook pages instead of real websites.
A harder problem is group activities. I keep bees and ride a bike. The local groups that have support, experience, supplies and all the people are on Facebook (the beekeepers) and WhatsApp (the cyclists).
I miss various announcements with the beekeepers but caved last month on WhatsApp with the cyclists, I joined WhatsApp. Being 50km from home with equipment issues, you need to be able to talk to the others and they are on WhatsApp. Cancelled rides or proposed new ones are all on WhatsApp.
I’m in that same social situation. The technological situation is that SMS and Facebook are pre-installed on their phones. In one case, Signal was acceptable. Specifically, Signal only rings when someone is among your contacts. The “do not disturb” feature on their smartphone was not blocking endless scam calls.
In another, because Signal needs to be installed, the amount of time performing as IT eroded the social time.
> If the only way I can interact with a business is through Facebook, that's a business telling me they don't want me as a customer and I'm more than happy to oblige them.
I don’t think this is a reasonable position given what OP correctly said: Facebook makes having a web presence easy for 99.9999% of the population. Not everyone is as technologically literate as those on this forum. By having only a FB presence, they are not telling you they don’t want you as a customer - they just don’t know any better.
I do exactly the same, no follows, no friends. But its still useful to access the marketplace, and some cool groups which I can't find anywhere.
I think we really miss some sort of "community" software (discussion boards won't make it these days), where people can gather around and talk and share stuff. I think Meetup was nice, but the fact that it's way too centered around actual meet-ups, plays against it.
I've thought many times about starting to build something, but the thought of having to market it and make it grow to have an impact demotivates me instantly.
In its high-growth period, Facebook devoured Usenet and forums precisely to defeat that. Low technical barriers meant moderation became important, thus CraigsList is risky.
Several of my friend groups coordinate big events through Facebook events and Messenger. It would be harder to participate if I didn't have an account.
Also, in my area, Facebook Marketplace has totally displaced Craigslist for used goods.
These are the only things I use Facebook for, but they're hard to get away from.
> I worry that Meta will someday flag as a bot and revoke access.
You shouldn’t. Meta will always find a way to count users like you in the MAU. If they didn’t, they would destroy their statistics.
There are just too many accounts like yours on FB now.
The right answer is still the right answer even if it would cause inconvenience to "normies".
For the life of me Idk why the social graph has not been scraped from facbook yet.
Back in the friendster days I distinctly remember being able to import my friends over to myspace and then later from myspace to facebook years later. We used to have a mass exodus every few years and then we we’re locked into facebook. Facebook should have died many times over. That no competing service has been built that has made migration easy is in my opinion the reason facebook has been allowed to fester for so long.
That such a tactic may be a violation of tos or questionable legally never stopped anyone before… and on the legal front I would argue it’s the users who own their social graph. Before facebook your address book was a thing of immense value. I have multiple friends irl that would sell their contacts for $10k+. That everyone just decided to give that info to facebook still boggles my mind and especially after all the bs they pulled over the years, yet here we are.
Graph API sat at v1.0 until Cambridge Analytica. The answer to your question is related to the amount they paid Facebook.
> I keep a dummy Facebook account with no followers and no friends just to access stuff that's exclusively on Facebook.
Facebook still provides an API. Wouldn't it be possible to leverage that API to build a proxy service, and then at least mitigate one side of their monopoly?
> The HN demographic can follow that but many normies can't because Facebook provides functionality for sharing that can't be replicated by email mailing lists / RSS readers / Mastodon / vBulletin, phpBB boards, etc.
Then normies should not actively be trying to make the service that is indispensable to them non-viable.
Either you need to use it, in which case you should not try to sabotage it, or you don't, in which case you should not need to sabotage it. So what is the point of attempting to sabotage it?
>to sabotage it?
I don't understand your choice of the word "sabotage". The thread's article is telling users about the official Facebook approved ways to turn off some ad preferences. This isn't UBlock, or Pi-Hole, AdNauseum, etc.
Similar to official Google method to turn off some ads settings in Chrome: https://www.techlicious.com/images/computers/chrome-enhanced...
If users have those 3 advertising settings in Chrome turned off, is that also "sabotage"?
I use Firefox containers for meta controlled domains. I don't trust third party websites to not pass information to Meta or meta to not be greedy. So, a complete absence of meta related cookies and other cruft is the best defense against that. I mostly stopped checking Facebook. I have a few things with social logins tied to Facebook that I open in the same container that I can't be bothered to untangle.
I've de-activated my instagram account ages ago. I just have no interest in what happens there. People sharing images and short videos just annoys me mostly. So, I'm happy to let people entertain each other over there without distracting me. In the same way, I have zero interest in tik tok, youtube shorts, and related nonsense from competitors. My life is rich enough without that.
Whatsapp unfortunately remains a necessary evil because that's what most people I know seem to insist on using. I mostly use it in a browser tab because I hate typing on mobile phones. My thumbs keep hitting the wrong tiny keys. If I type 3 letters, 2 will be wrong. I probably should move whatsapp to its own container. Thankfully it remains ad-free so far (or my adblocker is just that good, hard to tell these days). I think meta mostly walked back controversial plans to do something about that.
It's helpful to pop in to Facebook from time to time just to try to understand the insanity going on in the world. I can see the constant flow of misleading content that's driving the seemingly irrational decision-making and I can then understand it. I steel myself against the propaganda as one does, but if I were spending even one hour a day reading that sewage that's pushed at regular people every day, and I believed in even a fraction of it, I would probably make the same insane decisions as them. So it actually reduces the anxiety, a little bit, to at least know where it comes from.
Container tabs are so valuable. I have a bunch of Google apps domains that I look after, so I isolate them by container.
Same for meta and ebay, plus all my financials, I don't want them knowing what I visit.
If I've understood correctly, it might not be necessary to isolate everything in different containers. As long as you block social logins using an adblocker, the total cookie protection in firefox shouldn't allow websites to know what other sites you're visiting.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/how-firefoxs-to...
I mean it should, but I'm weary.
the test is to go on ebay and search for something specific, and see how the advertising changes when you navigate the web.
It might be overkill, but I am old enough to know that sometimes you need to use a sledgehammer when a normal hammer might work ok.
You've got a solid system in place. Completely agree on the social media front, feels like a lot of noise with little actual value
I have every Facebook owned domain blocked in NextDNS so it's essentially impossible for them to track me. I don't even have a Facebook account but they obviously don't need me to have one to build a shadow profile.
They will still track you, via server-side events sent by their accomplices, the sites you visit. https://www.facebook.com/business/help/702509907046774
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I am in the EU. I opted out of targeted ads a while back when the Facebook app asked me about it and it is now showing me inline ads with a timer. I literally have to wait before I can continue doomscrolling which is just enough time to just put the phone down and go back to work. Thank you, Meta.
I'm also in the EU and I am mildly confused.
Some months ago (years?) I was shown a popup asking me to either agree to be tracked or to pay a monthly fee [1]. I chose neither and haven't logged in since.
I logged in just now and everything seems to be working fine. But then I went to the "Ad preferences" and I'm shown a message saying I have to choose between using Facebook for free with ads or subscribe, and that my information won't be used for ads until I make a choice.
Looks like my account is stuck in some weird middle ground where my data can't used for ads but I also don't have to pay. Did I get away with neither? Or will they ask me to pay next time I log in, two years from now?
[1] https://www.voanews.com/a/meta-risks-fines-over-pay-for-priv...
There's indeed a middle ground now, as far as I can tell. It's called "show less personalized ads" or something like that, but in effect I think it's showing ads related just to the page you're currently looking at. I'm perfectly fine with this model, and I'd rather we collectively go back to it, instead of ad trackers following you around on the Internet and serving you ads based on your browser history instead.
Of course that doesn't mean I trust Meta/Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp, but at least on the surface it seems they understood the assignment.
Same, I love it because it will stop me from mindlessly scrolling. My only complaint is that if I actually wait, the next ad doesn't come soon enough.
That's one way to break the doomscrolling habit! Meta unintentionally doing you a favor. Maybe they should market it as a -productivity feature- instead of an ad strategy
Instagram helps us in the same way, yay for breaking bad habits - with (against?) the help of technology giants!
I changed a setting a decade ago to make myself less valuable to Facebook and that was close my account.
Unfortunately it's not sufficient. Facebook tracks you from bits of js embedded in many (you have no idea) pages you visit nowadays.
Only if you're letting it run on your machine. You don't have to allow it. You being the royal you here
The royal "you" is "Your Majesty".
Yeah you remind me to change my dns on all devices :) definitely cat and mouse
meta is really hard to block effectivly.
I once tried to block the app from running on my home network, as an experiment.
Blocking the DNS didn't work, and even when I blackholed the various ASNs to make the route not work, I still managed to get the app to work.
closing an account is a datapoint.
What i do is completely ignore facebook, and the rest of their properties (including whatsapp now).
ublock origin to block out the social media links/badges, and make sure to never visit facebook site directly.
Hopefully, what this means is that my "account" and whatever they identify as me, looks like an inactive user with zero potential to be advertised to.
I remember in 2012-13 facebook didnt even have a delete account option only deactivate. I dug deep enough to stumble across a facebook delete link in their community support or something. I made sure to change all my details and then i used that link to delete my account. Used my friends account to verify if it was actually deleted or not.
Never visited facebook since. Its great!
<this is the way>
Even better: just stop using their services. Given that these settings are presented to you by a party you already don't trust, why should you believe they don't do the opposite of what they say?
There are regions in this world where the majority of business and online interaction with friends and family are conducted through Facebook. It's easy for you to say "just stop using their services" if you live in the western bubble.
Things like this are just rationalisations to keep doing something unhealthy with a better conscience. Sure, it probably helps a tiny bit, but if you're aware enough of how bad facebook is for the world, just stop using their services.
People were able to live without facebook before it existed, and you can again. Just arrange to interact with the people you care about face to face or via a call.
The people you "keep in touch with" by sometimes pressing like are not real relationships
This is a simplistic and not helpful form of advice. Often we need to use a thing that is not altogether good, but we can take steps to reduce the harm.
People were able to live before houses and apartments existed. And a lot of grandmas and grandpas only get their birthday remembered thanks to Facebook, sad as that may be it's the truth, those and many other relationships are keep alive because their counterparts check FB and only FB, by talking there not only clicking "like" or any other reductionisms alike.
Put your grandma's birthday in your calendar
I'm not talking about me, but about the millions that use the platform.
BTW I do still use Facebook but for different reasons, mostly because it's the only platform many local musicians use to publish events among other info, yeah I know people lived without such privilege before, I couldn't care less.
If you don't want Meta to be viable as a company, the best approach is to stop using their services altogether.
I've got a couple of thoughts.
1) Why do you guys care what ads are being displayed to you?
2) Do you even allow ads to be displayed in the first place (ad blockers etc.) ?
3) Yes, we get it. Uninstall Facebook/IG/WhatsApp..., but no. Most people in the world use these, and you're still targeted without using them.
4) Why just Meta? What about Google, YouTube, Bing and many other ad providers?
5) Is this a political campaign by Warner Bros., EFF or someone else?
6) Shouldn't this stuff just be regulated instead? I'm sure the EU has some regulations at least. What about the US?
> Yes, we get it. Uninstall Facebook/IG/WhatsApp..., but no. Most people in the world use these, and you're still targeted without using them.
Whenever I go into Facebook itself, I see how poorly they target me.
Boob surgery and dick pills.
Lawyer specialising in giving up a citizenship I never had for those living in a country I left in 2018. Announcements from that country's government that a breed of dog I've never heard of is now banned.
Recommendations to join groups about teams I've never heard of in sports I don't follow in states I've never even visited in a country I've never lived in.
>Lawyer specialising in giving up a citizenship I never had for those living in a country I left in 2018.
I mean it kind of sounds like they've correctly pegged you for being an expat of that country.
Misunderstanding: The advert is to renounce US citizenship that targets Americans living in the UK. I left the UK in 2018, I've never had American citizenship.
Dick surgery and boob pills?
I mean I have friends who would want both combinations
> 3) Yes, we get it. Uninstall Facebook/IG/WhatsApp..., but no. Most people in the world use these, and you're still targeted without using them.
Eat healthy and exercise? No, most people in the world don't, and it doesn't guarantee you'll never fall ill
The main reason I've done this is to make myself less profitable to Meta. A drop in the bucket, I know, but the more people who do this, the less money Meta makes, which can only be a good thing for the world.
1) I don't particularly care beyond possibly being less targeted for manipulation
5) I wouldn't have thought it was a campaign or effort by Warner Bros, likely just the show itself which seems to have pretty wide editorial freedom (and obviously EFF does have a known position on these matters)
6) Good luck getting timely and well thought-through regulations through the EU / any regulation through the US
I have an ad blocker that removes all ads so I indeed don't care what ads are displayed to me. But I do want to minimize what data companies collect about me and will use whatever means necessary to do so.
Why just Meta is a false dichotomy. Privacy-aware users tend to adjust the settings and use privacy-enhancing extensions for all companies.
Yes, I think this should be regulated and companies within the EU need to be forced to respect privacy and other EU laws. The current penalties are too low. Data theft is a serious crime.
5: Probably John Oliver still at it, I used to watch when I still had time to watch videos about a country that's not mine, it was both insightful and funny. I'd bet his program did that (they did set up a church to show how easy it was to evade taxes or something a few years ago)
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>Do you even allow ads to be displayed in the first place (ad blockers etc.)
It's extremely difficult to use Facebook in any form on mobile in a way that lets you block ads.
Is it? I've been trivially doing it for a long time. Web browser and an ad blocker just works.
I actually sorta wonder if "No, don’t make my ads more relevant by using this information" makes you more valuable, as they'll just display the most valuable ads they can to you.
I don't think so, if they had an ad that's untargeted and more valuable than any targeted ad, they could show it to you either way.
Having worked a little bit in ads, impressions like that won’t get you as much money. Ads usually will bid for a spot, the more targeted info you can present to an ad, the higher the bid for the slot. Random ads don’t have that much to offer.
On top of that, a lot of advertisers have tighter budgets and therefore want the ad on a specific segment to max out ROÍ. So the pool of ads that get shown to you go down. Which means you’ll be shown the same ad repeatedly. And FB does not make as much money off repeat impressions.
And on top of that engagement brings more revenue to the company as compared to just impressions. The whole reason meta exists as a much more profitable business over something like TV or radio for ads is that targeting brings better engagement metrics. And the difference is huge.
Now I am not sure how meta’s ad internals work, but the only way I see them recouping some value out of your selection is by showing you more ads. Maybe you go from seeing ads after every 3 user generated content items to every other item being an ad.
TLDR; turning off preferences doesn’t make you more valuable, but the company could squeeze out as much value from you as other users.
the value of the ad itself is relative to the targeting of the audience.
That's what they were doing before, always showing the most valuable ad.
Don't use any apps with Facebook integration. They phone home even if you aren't logged in.
I live in Ireland, but I speak an African language natively. I changed my facebook language to my native language, and I get basically zero ads, because the Algorithm can't figure out how to show me Irish ads in a language that the ad does not support.
What about recommended posts, do you still get all that junk in your feed?
> johnoliverwantsyourraterotica.com
well ... now I obviously have to find out about the joke behind this. i've missed watching angry puffin/penguin man.
edit --
might be a non-USA / UK localisation thing but for the first two items, "Manage info" is actually called "Ad settings"
also, on the third one, you can also clear any previous activity from your account on top of disconnecting future activity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jxb-Szj8jVU 22:00 onwards, and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1D0kkEi9JI4 25:00 onwards.
tl;dw he found a 1992 recording of an art auction involving a series of paintings of humanoid rats being intimate, and he really wanted the person who bought one of the paintings to sell it to him.
I know, that is quite the URL
It's wild how much effort it takes just to opt out of being tracked
Oh thanks. I had already done the first two. Didn't know about the third.
One step solution, delete your account.
if only that was a solution that was effective. while theZuck may not be able to monetize your eyeballs directly, he can still make his yacht payments off of the data you generate for him free of charge from every other website using his SDKs
Sure, but if we believe the conceit of the article that making some settings within facebook reduces your value to them, stopping altogether must reduce your value even more.
Maybe, but if the settings get you down to the completely targeted level there’s not really any lower value you can go.
Just tap every ad you come accross until every advertiser leaves the platform
That’s why I use AdNauseam (https://adnauseam.io/) instead of uBlock
Send them an invoice for the rental of your screen space to display ads.
After one weird trick, Facebook became a lot of more valuable to me... Including its ads. Tldr: be radical about your interests and Facebook will become interesting.
I literally unfollowed all of my friends with the exception of a handful of family members; this means I stopped receiving updates for stuff like "look how cute my baby is in the dinosaur costume". Then I joined dozens of groups narrowly focused on my interests.
The result is an online service were I only read stuff I like, very few reels (unfortunately they don't yet allow you to fully disable reels, but you can still indirectly downvote them) and even the ads are interesting and relevant. I've clicked on a few of them, which fed back to the algorithm and showed me even more products I actually want to buy and news I want to read.
You can also remove yourself from ad topics, and even if you don't want to remove yourself from them it can be interesting to take a look and see what meta has associated you with - https://accountscenter.facebook.com/ads/ad_topics
It won't stop you getting ads, of course, and I have yet to find the holy grail of fictional facebook settings "Never show me reels or suggest groups you think I might be interested in, stick to my actual friends".
On Facebook, if you go to 'Menu' > 'Feeds' > 'Friends' you will see a feed of only your contacts' activity and none of the suggested posts & random pages on the normal Feed
While this will probably help for people still tied to Facebook and related services, this unfortunately does little to stop their shadow profiling capabilities (which Facebook is known to do).
If you don't have a Facebook account, make sure to get an ad blocker[0] and activate the anti-annoyance, privacy and social widget lists in the settings. That should stop most of the passive site tracking that Facebook does. It's a much ruder way of stopping it, but to be frank, I'd argue that this form of tracking is inherently rude in and of itself (and therefore an adequate response.)
You should also absolutely install Consent-o-Matic[1] which automatically handles any cookie banners for you. The extension is unfortunately a necessity because most corporations (Facebook included) refuse to comply with the GDPR as it's written and make opting out unnecessarily difficult, with many hidden buttons you'd need to manually reject. Unlike other cookie form handlers, this one defaults to "most private" and will give you control again if it fails to reject the entire form. (This is unlike IDCAC, which just takes the shortest path to closing the form, even if it compromises your privacy to do so.)
Both of these extensions will of course also help against way more than just Facebook, and they're pretty much a default whenever I'm configuring a PC these days.
[0]: I can only recommend ublock origin, most other ones are running extortion schemes to show you "acceptable ads" anyway. https://ublockorigin.com/
[1]: https://consentomatic.au.dk/
1. Install ublock origin
2. Spend less time on their website. Go touch grass or something
3. Mobile apps are right out
If you must use mobile apps, patch them with ReVanced Manager.
Being in the Apple ecosystem for over a decade now as a former android person, is custom patches to proprietary app binaries to strip out ad calls actually a thing? Kind of blew my mind that people will jump through hoops like this but maybe it’s actually not that hard to do because the tooling is quite good?
It's definitely a few hoops, but not more than a few. The hardest part is that you have to download the right APK file from apkmirror[1] or the likes. It'll open the the right search for you though, but you still need to know a little bit about apk formats.
You also can't just auto-update the app anymore. You have to manually update and patch again.
Other than those two points, it's just pressing a few buttons.
I only do it for YouTube, because the ad load on that app is insane. For others it's not really worth the trouble, I find. Does iOS have a better way for YT?
[1] Ironically, apkmirror has an adblock-blocker, so if you use a DNS based adblock, you have to disable it.
Why would I want to do this?