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Nearly 1 In 10 Americans Have Deleted Their Facebook Account Over Privacy Concerns, Survey Claims (bgr.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report from BGR, summarizing a survey from TechPinions: With the outrage surrounding Facebook's privacy policies reaching a fever pitch over the past few weeks, there has been something of an underground movement calling for users to delete their Facebook account altogether. To this point, you may have seen the DeleteFacebook hashtag pop up on any number of social media platforms in recent weeks, including, ironically enough, on Facebook itself. While Zuckerberg last week said that the company hasn't seen a meaningful drop off in cumulative users, a new survey from Creative Strategies claims that 9% of Americans may have deleted their accounts.
The report reads in part: "Privacy matters to our panelists. Thirty-six percent said they are very concerned about it and another 41% saying they are somewhat concerned. Their behavior on Facebook has somewhat changed due to their privacy concerns. Seventeen percent deleted their Facebook app from their phone, 11% deleted from other devices, and 9% deleted their account altogether. These numbers might not worry Facebook too much, but there are less drastic steps users are taking that should be worrying as they directly impact Facebook's business model."
The report reads in part: "Privacy matters to our panelists. Thirty-six percent said they are very concerned about it and another 41% saying they are somewhat concerned. Their behavior on Facebook has somewhat changed due to their privacy concerns. Seventeen percent deleted their Facebook app from their phone, 11% deleted from other devices, and 9% deleted their account altogether. These numbers might not worry Facebook too much, but there are less drastic steps users are taking that should be worrying as they directly impact Facebook's business model."
Is 20/20 but, they've already let the cat out of the bag.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
count me impressed.
Wouldn't have thought that it would be that much,...
Haven't had privacy since I got my first phone in my name. Everybody knew where I lived and how to contact me. So what? I actually want friends to be able to find me. For non-friends I have a Mossburg Maxi-Combo 500 in 12 gauge, so all's good. No worries.
Now were getting it :)
Yummm
[($)]
If nowhere else, all their personal data is safely stored on a secure server in Russia. Besides whatever Facebook actually has available.
Why is Snark Required?
I never had a facebook account. I do have an Instagram account, i hope facebook doesnt merge the two platforms as i will have to go back to emailling them
"Deleted". Sure. No, Facebook does not delete anything. There is just a flag that is set that says "don't show this to anyone but Facebook employees." All the data is still there and will never be removed. All your photos, all your facial recognition, your relationships with friends. It's still for sale as it ever was, and if you ever get politically active it will be used against you by our scary intelligence agencies.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
about 2 months after I started it. I saw then that it was going to be a disaster, when classmates showed me pictures of other classmates, inebriated, and laying in a puddle of their own vomit. Great stuff to have out there when you're looking for work...
90% of men have an 8" penis. Just ask them.
Scott
Kept pissing off trump voting family members
Facebook has about 2.2 billion users of which less than 220 million are American. So 9% of Americans would be about 0.9% of their users. If it is a local phenomenon, then Zuckerberg isn't that far off in saying the company hasn't seen a meaningful drop off in cumulative users.
And some few of us were smart enough to not jump on FBs bandwagon/death train because we didn't want to let the world into our lives on such a massive scale. And we were mocked.
To borrow a line, who's crying now?
Serious question: Why are there no competitors to Facebook? Even if they charged a few bucks a month, you would think that there would have at least been some entrepreneurs who would have made a go at competing in that marketplace. Why hasn't Google taken the social thing more seriously and tried to make Google Plus more of a thing. You got the sense that their heart was never really in it.
Some of you guys are developers, so what's the story? Is there some technical hurdle that prevents anyone from going up against the Zuck? You'd think this would be a perfect time to take a run at him.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Two big problems with free services on social media platforms: 1) the platform is incentivized to maximum ad impressions and keep you hooked, and 2) they are incentivized to sell user data to third parties. There's a mis-alignment between the user and the platform. No matter what the platform says, the advertisers always seem to take precedence over the users. We need social media platforms that simply charge for the service and are not incentivized to sell your data or maximize ad impressions. When the platform doesn't have incentive to violate privacy, there's much less of a risk of it happening. Rather than rely on promises or good intention, let's use different business models to align users and platforms. But free platforms might lose a lot of money if they switch to paid because with a paid platform, the most the platform can make is what they charge the user. With ads and selling user data the amount has no limit. And since each user has different habits and usage, some users make a platform a lot of money because they have high engagement, and some make the platform only a little. Switching to paid means that revenue from high-engagement users will be truncated, and low-engagement users may not pay at all thus losing revenue from them. And most social media companies take VC funding in order to grow and those VCs expect a high return. That high return is going to come through maximizing ad impressions and selling user data. Facebook has a market cap of somewhere around half a trillion dollars. Do you think they could get anywhere near that by charging people a few bucks a months? People need to take their privacy and attention back and support platforms that flat out charge the user. RealPeople.io (https://realpeople.io) does that and has no ads, no third-party access to your data unless required by law, no bots, no AI controlling what you see, no big investors demanding a Hugh return. The business model aligns with what users want.
I mean seriously, is it a huge surprise that invasion of privacy is a concern on Facebook. That's the whole point of the site, sharing private moments with the public or with their "friends".
I think the main issue with this whole thing is that even after the the Cambridge Analytica disclosures, the general public remains uneducated. They don't understand how Cambridge Analytica acquired their data, many are under the allusion that representatives of Facebook made a specific deal.
In truth the data was acquired by means any one of us could use without doing any kind of deal with Facebook, other than agreeing to the TOC for their graph API. And after that it's simply a matter of duping fools into granting your Facebook apps access to their private data. e.g. fill out this personality quiz, see what you look like as someone from the opposite sex..... the fool goes click, click, click.... not reading any the parts about ...oh and in exchange for this gimmick you agree to give us access to EVERYTHING we can possibly get our hands on through your Facebook account.
It reminds me of the late 90s when people just discovered there possibility of trojans and malware on the internet. Same old same old, idiots and technology... it gets messy.
just so I can delete it and join the crowd. Seriously I'm glad I never signed up but I'm sure they still have a lot of data on me anyway.
Having an account is just one of multiple vectors that a company like Facebook uses to track and profile you. The bit about the "Facebook pixel" must have sailed clean over Joe/Jane Sixpack's head.
90% of Americans do not give a single fuck about it.
There is no real technical hurdle that is keeping others from being a "real" competitor for Facebook. There have been those who have tried, but they just haven't been successful "enough". There are lots of alternate social networks out there, even other Facebook style proprietary ones - some are for general use and some are for one particular group of people or another. LinkedIn of course is supposed to be a "serious professional networking" social network, but we see how it becomes headhunters, ads, fakes, and other nonsense. Google Plus had a chance to dethrone Facebook but they made some foolish decisions at a crucial point in time etc.
Facebook exists where it does more or less for two reasons. Money, and "first-ish mover momentum". They have an obscene amount of money thanks to generally unscrupulous and monopolistic decisions (big data sales, advertising, etc) and because of that became one of the de-facto ways people communicate. Consider that not that long ago many businesses would have personal web pages and if you needed to sign up with them, you'd send your email. Now they all have Facebook pages and Twitter handles, and you need to use those media to be able to communicate with them with any degree of haste . Hell, I can remember about the time signing up for promotions even for video games and the like no longer took an email address (because that's too easy to make a throwaway) but instead required you to like/friend them on Facebook + Retweet/Friend them on Twitter etc. Then these companies install social media managers to deal with this presence! Thanks to Facebook (and to some extent, Twitter in a kind of duopoly) they have centralized lots of the communication on the Internet - a major problem. This brings me to the second, major reason that Facebook competitors have'nt been ultra successful - Inertia.
People stay and use Facebook (and Twitter, and Instagram/WhatsApp..owned by Facebook by the way) because their friends and relatives do. These sites have taken such deep root in our communication that to break away from them takes a sort of social escape velocity - you have to be the kind of person who 1) knows of other alternatives 2) has reason to use them 3) and is willing to switch, despite the fact that others might not. Facebook became the dominant major social network in succession to MySpace as it was dying off, which in turn arose when Friendster sort of prototyped the whole thing for the average person. Now its the place people go to make sure the know about all their friends and relatives....but they also stay to do things like play games, check out "apps" (including that cool personality test..), and read the news which they then not only absorb with little question to the source, but forward the message to everyone. Getting people to give up on the social network where their old friends, new friends, family members, those in their political "bubble" etc... exist, takes real momentum.
Hopefully this national spotlight on the problems of Facebook (and I hope, Twitter. Honestly, the President of the United States should not be making proclamations or communicating with the electorate primarily through a proprietary, centralized, corporate medium) will combine with a number of other sociological phenomena (such as Facebook perhaps finally not being "cool" with the younger crowd as their parents are on it, so they'll consider switching to the next thing etc) to power an exodus. The great thing is that we already have several worthwhile alternatives; open source, privacy-and-security-focused, often federated alternatives. Such as...
https://diasporafoundation.org... - Diaspora: Full featured, open source and federated. Not a bad transition for Facebook users
https://friendi.ca/ - Friendica - Evolving and interoperating with most other open social networks here, federated. Lots of plugins and even those to let it work with proprieta
What are you illuding to?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
they only "deactivate" an account and its related content, they don't actually delete (as in scrub from all their servers and backups) any of it, nor can they do anything about various archives and caches that preserve content even when it 'goes away'.
I deleted my accounts long ago. There is simply nothing to be had as being a member of a creepy community.
Why re YOU still THERE?
Jesus, it is like 2018 and you are still too stupid to defend your privacy?!?!?!
Seriously... we should sell you like a slave. You certainly are dumb enough, and it seems you are so stupid as to like it.
YOU are global warming. So stupid you aren't worth humanity's time, but we can't kill you so you are the herpes of global warming. Gah, I loathe liberals. If we got rid of you and people like you we might solve the cloud above LA.
their account, but FB probably keeps a backup of their data just to be save if they decide ti come back ;)
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
Fuck Zuck! Zuck sucks! He blows ducks!
Instead of deleting your account you could also play with how algorithms perceive you. For example, if you are gay or depressed you could copy the Facebook likes of straight and upbeat people. Small hacks like this would influence how the algorithms of databrokers categorise you.
That matters, because algorithmic background checks are everywhere now.
This week I launched a website for this: https://www.cloakingcompany.co... (not a real company, it's meant as an awareness project, but it actually works)
Have nothing but a photo of yourself, and a link to any other page or resource you have.
If an actual person looks for you personally on Facebook, is that most likely a) someone you want to be found by, b) someone you don't want to be found by? I'd say alternative a) usually.
Of course, they don't give a **** about it.
WilliamReview.com
My concern is that these deletions are happening not out of a genuine concern for user privacy on the Internet, but rather as yet another outlet for the culture of social political, and cultural outrage upon which many (if not most or all) are continuing to draw sustenance. That would not be constructive.
I am willing to wager a lot of "users" on facebook are not human at all.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
And probably the vast majority moved to Instagram or WhatsApp as their new center of social interaction~
Zuckerberg reported to say "meh" in interviews~
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I know plenty of people who have a Facebook account but hardly use it. I think maybe the privacy concerns just pushed many to simply delete their account they never used anyway. I have not resorted to deleting my Facebook account, but I had concluded a while ago that Facebook and Zuckerberg could never be trusted to keep my information secured. Zuckerberg to me is just doing what any CEO would do with so much data. He sells it to benefit Facebook.
just to rejoin a few weeks/months later.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
A good start, but still 91% left.
We can only deactivate accounts. I deleted photos, posts, friends, but could not delete my account. Only disable it. Why can it only be deleted if someone says were are dead ? Bullshit. I think this is a class action suit waiting to happen. It keeps me up at night. That's pain and suffering..
the truth is this is how social media makes money. It sells demographic information to marketers, also creates demographic information for political parties. Police can use public information to see who is associated with who. The best we can do to destroy this information is write scripts that will create bogus social accounts, post bogus information, draw in bogus friends... with enough false postings the data that was collected would be garbage.
Does Google Maps/Places haunt you with questions about a location ? Instead of deactivating I always give a bogus answer. If a place is great I say it was horrible, if a place was horrible I say it was awesome and give it 5 starts.
Eventually I'm going to dump my smartphone. My Moto Z Force 2 is the last smart phone I'll get. After that.. it's going to be a dumb flip phone, no gps.
maybe a dumb flip phone burner phone.
Fuck the Zuck! https://www.facebook.com/FukTheZuck/
Seems more likely that 1 in 10 people *claimed* to have deleted their facebook account, regardless of if they took any action at all, or if such action had any useful effect whatsoever.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
It's unfortunate that so many people in tech adopt such an easy, condescending attitude. People are not idiots. Mostly they just assume that common decency and laws prevent companies like Facebook and Google from selling them down the river. It needs to be recognized that companies like Facebook and Google go to great lengths to support that misconception by hiding the mechanics of their spying.
I just got a "party invitation" from punchbowl.com and asked the sender to please not give out my email address. She doesn't understand and thinks I'm just cranky. The email was bounced through a tracking domain and contained 29 (!) hidden web bugs, plus one extra web bug at the end. But it's difficult to explain that kind of thing to people. They see a festive email with pictures of party balloons. Should they understand? Should people be required to know HTML and MIME format before they can have an email account? Obviously not. Calling them idiots is just an arrogant, cheap shot.
Spoken like a true moron.. I bet you're a Trump supporter too.
Years ago I deleted my Facebook account. I was tired of being "tagged" in pictures that I had little control over. What I found is that it isn't possible to delete myself from Facebook. The US needs German style laws that allow a person to to be "forgotten" by digital services.
I suspect that future generations will see this era of unregulated digital sharing and use it as an example of how a pattern of foolishness can spread across the entire world.
> Nearly 1 In 10 Americans Have Deleted Their Facebook Account
Think that should read "Nearly 1 In 10 Americans Have Temporarily Set The "Active" Flag On Their Facebook Account To False."
As any ful kno once they've got the data you can't ever delete it !
Benjamin Franklin wrote:
"Three may keep a Secret, if two of them are dead."
and some song writer wrote "2 out of 3 ain't bad"
This reported number doesn't pass my smell test, either.
With such a precipitous drop in users, you'd probably hear the entire fabric of the universe groaning and throwing off glowing metallic divots as it passed through some kind of nearly impenetrable Wrong Stuff barrier.
If true, this story would already be the Mount Krakatoa of the social media era.
Maxwell Smart: Would you believe "1 in 10 are thinking about maybe deleting their account"?
Sir, you win the "Douglas Adams" award for today.
Just stop using them for anything non-public.
It is also a good idea to stop oversharing. Don't be like wiggy107.
Only people have overshared should delete an account.
I have a few types of facebook/tweet/insta/goog accounts.
* business
* family
* friends
They are dry since I don't really share. I have a monthly reminder to login to each to see if anything interesting happened. Usually the answer is no. Kid's birthdays just aren't my thing. Real people's lives just aren't all that interesting. Neither is mine, BTW.
What about Instagram? I bet most Instagram users don't even realize they're using Facebook. So 1 out of 10 Americans didn't really delete their Facebook account if they didn't also delete Instagram. Also, while I understand this is anecdotal, my teenage niece has informed me that Facebook is for old people and her classmates only use Instagram. With all the facial/location recognition software, Instagram may be more invasive than regular Facebook. They were smart to never put their logo on it because most people don't bother to learn about the services they use.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Hmm... I deleted my account years ago because I got sick of annoying friends and relatives. I have yet to see a downside. Privacy from marketers and scammers is a nice bonus though.
Well my point is Facebook didn't sell them down the river. They sold themselves down the river. Firstly they signed up to Facebook then they signed up to sites and apps affiliated with Cambridge Analytica and granted them access to their Facebook data.
Although Facebook does bare some responsibility, they created the API/ecosystem on which this occurred. They really should have a vetting process to protect "the idiots" on their platform from the sharks like Cambridge Analytica.
Currently all you need is a Facebook account and sign up for a developer account then you can just start creating Facebook apps with no vetting process of any kind and then publish this to the general public with Facebook havubg bi review of what the developer is offering Facebook users, and what Facebook data they're attempting to access.
Facebook should have some sort of system for reviewing apps similar to what Microsoft, Apple and Google have where you submit your app for review, they check it out and then grant you public access if it looks reasonable. e.g a personality quiz that attempts to get facebook users to grant them permission to access everything they have should be getting caught and rejected before any of "the idiots" have a chance to click OK lets go with that one.
Because I never had an account to start with (same goes for Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, ad nauseum)
Definitely not a trump supporter. I dont think you actually understand what I've said
Facebook is full of those retards who used to send chain emails.
I abandoned the platform in 2013 for privacy reasons. Shame that not even the Snowden leaks could wake people up to this.
I held out for many years without getting a Facebook account, finally gave in a couple years ago and created one to keep track of the people I graduated with in '78, but I deleted my account this April. I look forward to Facebook going the way of MySpace and Yahoo, but that will be a slow, drawn out process, it will probably be another decade before Facebook is totally irrelevant.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
1 in 10 Facebook Users just realized that social media is not private. XD XD XD
it will probably be another decade before Facebook is totally irrelevant.
Yet you keep coming to Slashdot.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Facebook has built shadow profiles of people who never even created a facebook page. So if you delete your account, it just gets moved to a very rich shadow account that is all. Anyway the data that has been exfiltrated out of facebook is the proverbial horse that got stolen, while facebook servers are the stables those horses had been at some point in the past.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
They haven't deleted shit... they've just deactivated them. They're also still going to be tracked via FB API on other websites.
That's the whole point of the site, sharing private moments with the public or with their "friends".
That's the whole point of all social media. Facebook just did it the most effectively and the quickest. Just wait until people realize the Twitter tantrums from their 20s can prevent them from getting jobs in their 30s.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
So, they've deleted their Facebook account. Did they delete the data? Did they opt out of all of Facebook's cross-site pixel tracking? I didn't think so.
That's right according to the latest scientific study that I just made up, 1 in 10 Americans are racist. Also 1 in 10 Americans are sexual criminal. So don't be a racist sex offender. Stick with face book
Those who donâ(TM)t know about technology delete Facebook, those who have something to hide delete Facebook.
..."Oh, snap !" cried the users~~
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]