You can personally decide not to use Facebook, which is good. But you can't convince everybody to do that. So if you or your family members do use Facebook, at least install an ad blocker for all of them.

Not for privacy, but to deny them revenue. I block Google ads on every single site I visit, period. I don't care if the advertising is non-obtrusive. If it's being run through Google, part of that revenue is going to fuel Google's tracking. I support creators directly instead. And if creators refuse to give me a way to support them, that's not an excuse to expect me to contribute to Google's bottom line.

Huge props to the people who are working on blocking trackers and protecting privacy. I'm very glad they exist, and I don't think their efforts are worthless. But, it is currently a losing battle to fight these companies on the privacy front, because the tracking model is so profitable that they will always be pushing more resources into it than we are. Collectively, the people fighting for privacy don't have enough resources to win.

But there's an easy, completely legal solution to that problem; the one thing companies haven't figured out how to get around is ad blocking. And a good ad blocker will block even native ads. For a company like Facebook, all of this boils down to getting you to click on ads. If enough people target that chokepoint, then the advertisers will start pulling out of the system, and there'll be less financial incentive for these companies to undermine people's security and privacy.

And we have evidence that this works. Even Google, which is the powerhouse for getting their ads to actually show up, is starting to devote more resources into trying to figure out how to stop mainstream people from installing adblockers. That's where all the autoplay stuff came from, that's where the acceptable ads initiative came from. They desperately want your roommate to say, "I'm not going to mess around with these weird Chrome extensions or whatever, that's too complicated. Chrome blocks this stuff itself, anyway."

Install adblock on every browser you get access to, tell ordinary people who aren't on HN to use it, and let the advertising industry kill itself. Make it very obvious to companies that buying ads on Facebook is a complete waste of time because even non-technical users just won't see them.