I agree. The thing is that FB has been designed to be addictive.
The organisers of a FB page, created to document - names, photos etc - a reunion of a group with whom we had worked for several years, thought we were most peculiar when we forbade them to include us. As for WhatsApp, friends are perplexed that I don’t use it, and when I refused to use it to communicate over the booking of a holiday, it made things quite difficult, although I did manage to book and pay, despite being considered a pain!
FB not only hoovers up everyone’s data, it is some people’s main/only platform for getting hold of information, people who probably never read any respectable MSM (if that actually exists). Material is targeted directly to specific groups and even to groups of one. And these people don’t necessarily realise that most of the rest of the world don’t see the same stuff and wouldn’t embrace it even if they did. It concentrates views good or bad and by definition creates division. In fact it is a superb tool for creating dissent and trouble.
Which is working very well. Looking at you elections (Oz, US, UK), Brexit etc I don’t get how so many intelligent people are just so blasé and oblivious to what the reality is. Zuckerberg won’t let his kids use any FB products - telling isnt’ it!
Interesting quote from Justin Rosenstein, a former engineer for Twitter and Google, in The Social Dilemma documentary:
We live in a world in which a tree is worth more, financially, dead than alive. A world in which a whale is worth more dead than alive. For so long as our economy works in that way, and corporations go unregulated, they’re going to continue to destroy trees, to kill whales, to mine the earth, and to continue to pull oil out of the ground, even though we know it is destroying the planet and we know it is going to leave a worse world for future generations.
This is short-term thinking based on this religion of profit at all costs. As if somehow, magically, each corporation acting in its selfish interest is going to produce the best result. … What’s frightening – and what hopefully is the last straw and will make us wake up as a civilisation as to how flawed this theory is in the first place – is to see that now we are the tree, we are the whale. Our attention can be mined. We are more profitable to a corporation if we’re spending time staring at a screen, staring at an ad, than if we’re spending our time living our life in a rich way.
I sometimes find myself having knocked out a pithy [sic] comment or two to find they can’t be added to a discussion because it requires signing in via FB. Moneysavingexpert, a valuable resource of ‘user knowledge base’, has this restriction. So my words of wisdom go unseen. The world still turns…
Never mind. I won’t do FB. Add me to the list #11 ?
One of the best quips for the reason why not is, “Before FB nobody gave a damn what you had for breakfast. They still don’t”
Believing Instagram majored on images, being a photographer, I signed up and put up a selection of my smudges. I now get encouraged to ‘follow’ all sorts of people I don’t know from a hole in the ground. It’ll have to go.
I do find wazzapp really useful. What FB could find worthwhile in any data they might extract from my use of wazzapp, apart from maybe being able to clean out the paltry sums in my bank accounts, I can’t imagine and don’t much care about.
My own website is complete apart from some galleries requiring captions. If I impose upon the world yet another blog, tho’ that’s hardly necessary, people might fall by and have a look.
This was kind of my point, if you are using Instagram or WA you are in effect using FB, giving up the right to privacy / not having your details sold etc.
Each persons online data profile is worth about $40. You may not have anything you are worried about anyone being aware of you doing but they have the right to access ALL your contacts details (and apparently do, storing them all and eventually profiling / putting numbers / friends etc together). so even if someone in a contacts list of a WhatsApp user is vehemently opposed to FB having their name / number etc the use of WA by their friend hands them over with no say so!
I’ve no strong feelings either way, but I do find FB a handy way to keep in touch with particular friends in the UK.
I maintain a tiny group of friends (7) and rigidly exclude anyone else. I never see fake news or similar crap, I have a minimal profile and I use a “one-off” email address for FB purposes.
It works fine for me.
Good setup advice. In addition, I use FB only in Firefox on my Linux laptop (no app on phone or tablet) with the Firefox addon called Facebook Container. This addon isolates FB in a “gated environment”, not allowed to see anything else you’re doing.
Yes this is my arrangement too Krister.
In general, there’s a lot you can do with settings and various add-ons and applications to increase privacy - and on my home computers I’m on top of this.
But it’s more difficult on phones, isn’t it? Any tips on this anyone?
I would also recommend NextDNS. Basically it does secure DNS but built-in is protection against ads, tracking, malware, etc. We have it installed on all devices (Linux, iMac, Android, iPad). Very good.
I don’t get how so many intelligent people are just so blasé and oblivious to what the reality is. Zuckerberg won’t let his kids use any FB products - telling isnt’ it!