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Why I am leaving Facebook

This is my answer to my Facebook (now ex)-friends who ask me why I'm quitting the blue box.

How

Google, Facebook, Skype and the like are evil. I knew it since a while, since the NSA scandal broke. Yet, I didn't have enough balls, or consciousness, to get rid of it.

I looked for excuses. Thanks to Facebook I met my childhood friends. It helps me keep in touch with my family and friends in my home country. Thanks to FB I can follow my favorite bands' news.

Then I ended up discarding how bad it was and kept feeding it my personal life and my time.

Most people buy this shit. Hell, most people don't even know what the hell it is about.
Evbogue isn't one of them, and after a little chat about Facecrack and social networks, he reminded me of how bad it was. I then came to the conclusion that I need to get the fuck out, for real, no matter what the price is.

I instantly decided I'm gonna leave. Gradually.
Gradually because I recalled that friend of mine who decided to go vegan overnight after watching a video about animal cruelty. He went back to eating meat a month or two later.
Changing life habits out of the blue is not a good idea. Rude changes might scare you and you'd end up chaging your opinion.
Take your time.

In order to not reconsider this decision later, I decided to take action right away, by deleting all my pictures and videos. Of course, I had them all on my computer and my two external hard-drives, safely stored in a TrueCrypt container. I also downloaded a copy of my Facebook profile. My profile picture's gone, I'm only a name now.

Few days later, I deleted all my posts, hoping that after deleting my profile, they won't be stored on FB's database; only, compressed, in one of the millions of hard drives they back their data on.
That was a good opportunity to review what I've been posting in the last 6 years. A lot of stupid shit no one cared about. Here it is: no one gives a fuck about what you're saying. Don't let the Likes trick you.

Of course, I didn't delete everything manually. Of course, I didn't use Facebook's API, these motherfuckers obviously won't allow you to do such a heresy. I thus had to find other ways.
I tried some Firefox plugins that were all outdated because FB often changes its DOM. I tried iMacros which helped a bit in few parts, and sucked hard time in the rest.
I ended up writing few JavaScript scripts that automatically click the right buttons in order to do what I want. It was painful as fuck since I had to correctly handle pauses between each action, because loading a lot of DOM elements makes my already-slow Firefox slower, and because Facebook's UI was broken. Drop me an email if you're interested in these scripts.
Also, this took a lot of time, around 3 days. I don't know if it was worth it.

Recently, after reading Gwen Bell's DANG, I decided to make a step further and delete my "friends".
I started with the close ones, sent them a message telling them they're gonna be unfriended, and explaining how to get my infos if they don't aleady have them and if they wish to.
Not giving my info direcly was a good way to filter those who don't care. The latter won't bother going to my website, finding my email address and writing me few words.

Why

The main reason is obviously privacy.

As I like to say: I've had enough of giving a big part of my life to Mark and his homies from the NSA.

Just as a reminder, here's few things Facebook knows about you: your name, what you look like, where you are, where you hang out, what you're doing, what you like, what you say, to whom you say it, who are your friends, your family, what's your school, where you do work, what you own.
If you don't use anti-tracking browser extensions, Facebook also knows which websites you browse, thanks to the Like button present in half of the websites on the Internet.

I don't know about you, but I find this creepy as fuck. I'm sure you wouldn't like someone to know all these things about you —otherwise please send me all your emails, chat logs and pictures—, so why do you accept Facebook having all of this?

I personally developed some kind of justified paranoia over time. I can't feel comfortable knowing someone or something's know so much about me. I feel like walking in the street naked (actually I'd rather walk in the street naked).

Privacy violation is not only the feeling of being watched, it is something much more real, that FB users are constantly exposed to through ads.
Thanks to your information and activity, advertisers can target you using very specific filters. That's how you get guitar ads when you say you'd like to learn to play music, concert tickets ads when you visist an artist's Facebook page, and viagra ads when you tell everyone you're gonna meet your girlfriend.

You don't need to be an active member in order to be targeted by ads. Some of them pop on the timeline just because a friend liked the page. That friend's name is shown in top of the ad, without his consent.
Of course, no one has been informed when that feature has been introduced.

Now let's look at this from another perspective: what happens when you are that friend who liked the page, and want to be discrete about it?
This question raises privacy related questions on a social level: beside FB, who sees what I do, what I see, what I like? Controlling what others see is difficult given the inefficiency of Facebook's privacy settings, their default values (everything's public), or simply how unclear some features are.

How many problems including breakups, friendships loss, firings and arrests did that cause?

Facebook is giving me a useful service, I'm giving it my data. Win win.

What this basically means is I'm weak, and I prefer comfort to tranquility.

I used to say this kind of bullshit when talking about Google few months ago.
I'm not weak anymore. I'm not willing to sell my ass for few convenient services.

If you think this way, not only you are weak but also a dumb fuck.

I can't fight mass surveillance, if they want to get my data, they'll do.

Sure they can, to some extent, but that's not a reason to throw your data and personal info in Facebook's face.
You can make access to your data impossible, or at least very hard, and you should.

Talking about mass surveillance, as an average internet user, you might think you're not concerned. Anyone might be, just ask activists, politicians or anyone who's a threat for a government.

The side effects of my decision

They're all positive. I can honestly not see a negative one.

The reason I mentioned above is the main one. There's many others.

Being clean

Facebook's a drug. If you don't believe me, try living withou it a single day.

Time

How many times a day you click that Facebook bookmark on your browser?
How many hours do you spend infinitely scrolling down?
How many hours to you spend stalking people?
How many selfies you take before you get perfect one?

Sorting your friends

How many friends do you have?
How many of them do you really know?
How many of those care about you?
How many friends do you speak to?
How many friends come looking after you?

What next?

Where do I start?

If you read until here, you should have realized that Facebook is harmful and that you should leave. Not someday, but right now.
Here's few things you can do instead of scrolling your friends' timeline:

  • Remove Facebook from your bookmarks bar and you browser's home page.
  • Deleting your picures, videos, and "About" information; these are the easiest information to get rid off.
  • Delete people you don't care about.
  • Inform those with whom you're like to be in touch, then delete them too.

How am I going to keep in touch with people?

  • Email: Electronic mail, most commonly referred to as email or e-mail is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients.
  • Phone
  • Telegram: It's basically a WhatsApp alternative, but more secured and privacy friendly (and not owned by Facebook).

I can also mention Jabber, IRC and BitMessage.

What you should not do

One of the few friends who emailed raised few interesting points.

It really bothers me to delete everything. I have my teachers and everyone in it... :( So I started creating a new clean account with no likes, etc. But I think it's not great

Creating a new "clean" Facebook account is not a good idea, because:

  • You're still giving Facebook you data.
  • You can choose not to be active (e.g. not sharing and liking anything), but you cannot choose what your "friends" will do to/with your profile. They can send you private messages with private information, tag you in pictures (so FB can do it automatically the next time), fill information about you, and so on.
  • Where's the red line? How can you tell what to do and what not to? When you see a post you like, the temptation to click "Like", or post "lol" will be too big. I doubt you'll resist.
  • You can still open your Facebook and indefinitely scroll down.

Regarding your friends, the real ones will manage to keep in touch with you, your family will do it better than your friends, and your teachers don't give a fuck about you; their place is LinkedIn/ResearchGate/Twitter.

So I'm using Google+ now

Giving your data to Google is worse in my opinion.
The problem isn't Google+ itself, where there's almost no activity beside what's publicly available, but the fact that it's linked to your already-full-of-data-about-you Google profile.
This is really really a bad idea.

When these bastards give you beautiful, neat, smart and well connected service, it's for a reason (hint: knowing everything about you).

Final words

Even if I haven't left yet, I'm happy I made the most important steps to prepare my escape and I already feel clean, productive and in control of what I share with the world.
I know a lot of people think they can't live without Facebook, it's too hard to leave, or it is simply not worth it; therefore I hope this post showed them that by making small and irreversible steps, leaving Facebook is definitely doable.

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