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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."
Aside from the typical but immense privacy concerns, they are also a platform for foreign interference in local and national elections and they themselves participate in electoral interference by shaping users' feeds based on how the company leans. Not a bad idea to just disconnect from them.
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?
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"?
There is actually a way to make sense of this: a lot of people deleting mostly dormant accounts, with hardly any content posted, having almost no discernable impact on Facebook's daily churn.
Basically, it would be that group of people who only filled their Vicodan Rx once, and never actively sought a renewal to begin with, all suddenly flushing their nearly empty pill bottles, after a news report goes out that the smell of Vicodan pills is a randy Bugblatter aphrodisiac (but no-one else).
"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!
Privacy is not restricted to who you are and how to find you.
Never happened. True story.
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
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.
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"?
Several reasons this could be actually true
1) Not really using FB - Many people have long since shifted their social media to things like WhatsApp, Snapchat/Instagram or
2) Oversharing - Social media is so mainstream there are impacts to over-sharing (even my workplace tells us to be careful to not overshare - contrast with 5y ago that wasn't a big enough concern). With recruiters, employers, heck even banks looking at your "social media index", it's a liability to socialize the wrong things or with the wrong people.
3) Quality - FB has gone some drastic shifts due to how they control who sees what you share, and their advertising model. People are getting wise to this (just by asking around - they find their family/friends' posts aren't being shown or family/friends not seing their stuff)
I know a dozen people personally who stopped using FB months/years ago and have told me they are either planning on shutting down their accounts, have already done so, or are simply waiting (because they're EU based) will do so once GDPR comes into effect, allowing them to both request account deletion and confirm it's been deleted in one step (I'm not in EU so not sure how that works).
This isn't the death knell for FB.com (the company is large and somewhat diversified so will survive), but I predict it's heyday has passed.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
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.
Whether the UI is merged or not is completely superfluous, you can be guaranteed that your data from Instagram is used to profile you in much the same way as it is on Facebook and that whilst the data is presented as being separate, if it has not already done so, Facebook will be will be working to amalgamate these systems on the back end which creates a common pool of data on everyone.
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
I liked the idea of Google Plus, I liked how circles work, I liked how you did not give a perpetual license to anobody for anything you upload. However, nobody else does. And Facebook will be popular as long as companies use it as a channel with their users: comic shops having updates on Facebook only (treat Facebook as blog), Tinder using your Facebook profile, games publishing on your wall, contests run on Facebook only, Slashdot allowing to login with your Facebook account, etc
What are you illuding to?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's not the number I'm interested in. I want to know what advertisers are pulling Facebook ads. If you want to hurt Facebook, don't try to make people leave, organise a boycott of any company that uses Facebook for communicating with its customers and of any company that advertises on Facebook.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Network effects. As Google learned, the service provided by Facebook has almost no value. The fact that other people are using the same service is the sole reason that Facebook seems useful. Imagine trying to start a new phone network now, if you weren't allowed to connect to the existing one. Think you'd get many users?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
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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...
I did delete mine. It wasn't due to privacy concerns, but the privacy concerns did cause me to review my social media use. I discovered social media in my life was mostly one way (I posted and never read anyones comments). This was because reading the comments caused me to dislike most every human on social media. So I decided to simplify my life and remove facebook from it (and a few other social media profiles).