Off-Facebook Activity Is a Welcome but Incomplete Move | Hacker News Reader

Off-Facebook Activity Is a Welcome but Incomplete Move

eff.org

133 pointsDiabloD315 comments

I don't use Facebook, but I do use Messenger as I have a couple of close family members who refuse to use anything else. I've just logged into Facebook (which has no history as I've purged it[1]), and still there are 5 apps sharing my activity with Facebook. These 5 apps are all on my phone, so I guess Messenger is also sharing back to FB. :(

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[1] Shameless plug: https://github.com/Jaruzel/DeleteFacebookActivity

You can use Facebook's stripped-down web interface to send messages. It's what I use on my phone. https://mbasic.facebook.com/

Ahah! Thanks for this.

Many a time I've had to temporarily install their mobile Messages app just to reply to someone while away.

yes

In the U.S., for example, three-quarters of adults don’t even know that Facebook’s “ad preferences” page exists

That's just ignorance. It irritates me when a person complains about social media and its data farming, but the person doesn't bother to change some of the settings a website/app has in order to diminish the collecting data activity.

The fact that you found hacker news, created an account here and comment puts you in the category where you poke around with settings and fault others for not doing so. But there are vast numbers of people using Facebook that just aren't going to look at settings. They aren't bad people for not doing this. Default behaviors mean a lot.

I'm not faulting anyone. I said it only irritates me those who complain without taking any action.

But the possible actions we can take are not equally visible to everyone, and this is true for many things in life outside of software as well. Putting an opt-out somewhere deep in settings while doing things people would likely not want technically solves the problem, but effectively does not.

I might agree with the other commenter. If you can't figure it out yourself (understandable for most people), it ought to be as easy as googling "where are facebook's privacy settings?" I don't have an account, so I can't tell whether the facebook help pages that come up are useful.

In general, I am frustrated when the complaint is about how hard a thing is to do, when sticking that complaint into a web search gives you an easy answer. That doesn't seem to be the case here though?

I don’t know if you’ve used Facebook for a long time, but no matter how many times you’ve gone and managed Facebook settings, if you come back a year later you’ll find that you’ve been opted into all kinds of new garbage, you’ll find that certain options are completely gone (for example, no longer being able to opt out of public search or making your profile photo private) - even if you were a layman who did your research, you will still likely fail.

I suppose you've carefully read the EULA of every software product you've ever used, and have taken the time to re-review when their policies are inevitably updated?

Perhaps you should also consider that that FB intentionally buries these pages in their site with the specific intent of making it hard to find for users. And even for users who actually find the page, the weaselly language used there gives no indication if the action you're about to take is permanent. There is always some clause that allows FB to retain the data, for "quality assurance" or "data security" purposes.

So what is the appropriate action for you to take here?

The correct action would be collective anyway. We need laws requiring such settings to be opt in.

I can't really get irritated with this. Privacy is just one thing out of many that people can care about. Maybe online privacy is just low on their list of ethical issues?

People who complain about global warming still eat meat, people who complain about right-to-repair still give Apple hundreds of dollars a year, and people who complain about working conditions in third-world countries don't research every product they purchase.

If I got irritated at everyone who complains about something but does little to remedy the problem I'd be a seething ball of rage 24/7. There isn't enough time in the day for people to make informed decisions about everything they do, the world is far too complex for that nowadays.

I bet if we talked long enough I'd find something you complain about which you could easily remedy but haven't. Similarly, I'm a hypocrite too. We all are.

I hadn't bothered to check mine until just now. It's a bit surprising who has "uploaded and shared a list with your info". The only one I've actually interacted with is Experian, and I have no way to keep them from getting my phone number, for example. I've deleted my phone from Facebook now, I wonder if they'll actually stop linking me to uploaded lists.

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