Steve Wozniak says he's leaving Facebook

Small Victories. If we can get people away from Facebook into a more open ecosystem, that's already a step in the right direction.

>But nope. These same people deleting their facebook accounts are still using gmail, still using Apple's app store, and switching to using Discord or Slack or the like to talk and organize.

I get what you're saying: Google still reads everything sent/received through gmail, Apple still provides very little transparency over the appstore etc

That all said, I still use these services because they actually provide usefulness to me. Gmail has been my persistent email provider for a decade now. If I didn't want a free email service, I could get a domain name that looks professional enough and set up my own email server, but I can't be bothered to maintain it when I don't use email that much. I could stop using the Play Store, unlock my bootloader, get a custom ROM with privacy built in, compile FOSS apps and all but it's far too convenient for me to search for an app's name and hit download. I've weighed up the tradeoffs between privacy, security and convenience and with the services you've mentioned, convenience outweighs the negatives.

However with Facebook I just don't see the point anymore. To begin with I was fine with the lack of privacy. I knew that anything I post would be analysed by a FB server and a profile built up on me for targeted ads, which was a valid tradeoff for a free service that gave a lot of functionality: pages were great for seeing what bands were doing, private groups were great for shit-talking with people, events were and still are one of the best features FB introduced, and I could see an unfiltered stream of posts from friends which was essentially uncensored. Now there's better services for all of those features (except for events). Facebook is a cluttered mess of spaghetti code which slows down any device it touches and has features nobody uses than features they do. Messenger is completely useless to me since not only is the app a mess, but the privacy implications of having all my messages read by Facebook are too severe. I never check my news feed anymore since FB started filtering what people see. In the end, all I use it for nowadays is events and a couple of private groups. And then of course there's the increased the level of snooping they do on your private life, to the point where severe world changing incidents like Cambridge Analytica are inevitable.

I spent a few days of last week writing a script to purge everything I've liked, commented, and posted on Facebook. I would have left it at that if I only had issues with Facebook's lack of privacy of its users, but since I just have no use for the service anymore I'm going to be deleting my account also.

It's a shame, because Facebook could have been an incredibly useful and reasonable service if they didn't expand as rapidly as they did. But it is no longer useful to me at all, and a lot of people I've spoken to about this say the same: it's no longer a website with any novel purpose, but one they keep using because everyone else is on it and there's nowhere else to go.

Generalizations are always bad.

I have come to believe the biggest mistake Facebook made is not hiring the right lobbyists.

The disproportionate attack on Facebook versus, for example, Experian is stunning.

IMO Facebook got caught up in the media Trump hysteria over the "hacked elections" narrative and at that point they were SOL. PR in that context is ineffective, because Facebook's message would be going against deep-set beliefs of the authors and convincing them otherwise would obviously introduce cognitive dissonance. (ie if the only way you can comprehend reality is that the elections were manipulated, then facebook must be culpable in this malfeasance). Scott Adams has a bunch of articles on how cognitive dissonance tends to impact judgement.

That's honestly my best take on the situation, otherwise it's rather difficult to explain articles like the one below, that talks about the very same facebook issue with a completely opposite bias:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-...

...which is dangerous, because it makes them rather less likely to leave in the future, while giving them the satisfaction of having "left."

I'd say the difference is how essential your user account is to the service. You might say you're "leaving Youtube". You'd definitely say you're "leaving Gmail".

Which touches on the point that saying that you're "leaving Google" is unclear because there's a huge family of products and services that you might mean.

You can use Google's search anonymously.