Slashdot Mirror
Is It Time To Stop Using Social Media? (counterpunch.org)
Slashdot reader Nicola Hahn writes: Bulk data collection isn't the work of a couple of bad apples. Corporate social media is largely predicated on stockpiling and mining user information. As Zuckerberg explained to lawmakers, it's their business model...
While Zuckerberg has offered public apologias, spurring genuine regulation will probably be left to the public. Having said that, confronting an economic sector which makes up one of the country's largest political lobbying blocks might not be a tenable path in the short term.
The best immediate option for netizens may be to opt out of social media entirely.
The original submission links to this call-to-action from Counterpunch: Take personal responsibility for your own social life. Go back to engaging flesh and blood people without tech companies serving as an intermediary. Eschew the narcissistic impulse to broadcast the excruciating minutiae of your life to the world. Refuse to accept the mandate that you must participate in social media in order to participate in society. Reclaim your autonomy.
While Zuckerberg has offered public apologias, spurring genuine regulation will probably be left to the public. Having said that, confronting an economic sector which makes up one of the country's largest political lobbying blocks might not be a tenable path in the short term.
The best immediate option for netizens may be to opt out of social media entirely.
The original submission links to this call-to-action from Counterpunch: Take personal responsibility for your own social life. Go back to engaging flesh and blood people without tech companies serving as an intermediary. Eschew the narcissistic impulse to broadcast the excruciating minutiae of your life to the world. Refuse to accept the mandate that you must participate in social media in order to participate in society. Reclaim your autonomy.
We should not have more than 10% of the population on any given social media platform.
I haven't used facebook for almost a decade. I saw it was a bad actor from the beginning.
But Google is just as bad but not as obvious as is any other social media.
You are the product.
But part of their power depends on having most people on their platform. If they can't get more than a fraction of people on their platform, then they cannot build comprehensive profiles.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
One does not have to stop using social media, but one can use own owned platforms like Matrix (http://matrix.org).
Also one can stop sharing everything about your life.
For example I have Twitter which I mostly use only to read posts as new. I seldom post something myself.
Of course, it is never too late to realize your mistake in believing it was ever OK to give a soulless corporation access to your personal information, and thus also allow HR to look at all your party pics where you got drunk, and other things you really dont want your professional career life to know about-- but really, what ever made you guys think it was even a good idea to start with?
I remember when the very idea of using your real name online was a point and shame offense.
We need to get back to that kind of thing,
The best immediate option for netizens may be to opt out of social media entirely.
Posting that on /. Are you going to hit up Facebook and Twitter too, or should one of us do it?
[ RT to take back control. #OptOut ]
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The future of social networking is in a distributed system designed for (and owned by) the users, not a centralized one with the users as a product. With storage and CPU as commodities and available in the cloud, there is no reason for entities like Facebook to exist.
Is it time to stop posting dick pics to social media? /s
Social media can be valuable for people. It is not however an excuse to allow the harvesting of your personal data.
https://www.vanityfair.com/new...
I tried to post this nearly 6 months ago, but y'all weren't having any. Then.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Yes! Use a chat-app that uses end-to-end encryption instead. You can share the same information, but with more privacy. For information you really want the share with the rest of the world, use something like a blog.
It doesn't have to be like this. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.
Um... No, it isn't.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Asocial media then.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
The Oxford dictionary says: "Websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking." -- Well, even comments here on Slashdot count as "content" and therefore Slashdot also fits the definition presented here. Basically, any online-system that allows people to write a comment or comments counts; should we recklessly abandon every such system, or should the author formulate his arguments better? I vote for the latter, especially considering his argument is basically the extremely vague "reclaim your autonomy."
But it’s definitely time people started using it more wisely.
And I’d argue it may very well be time to stop using the truly evil entities like Facebook... of course having left it around 2014, I realize that’s easy for me to say but harder for existing users to do.
#DeleteChrome
As far as I'm aware, anything I put on social media is public information. I am surprised other people trusted facebook as much as they did.
Be aware of this and use it in that context. I personally don't mind that the world knows I saw The Disaster Artist last night. There are things that I do care about. I''not share those on social media.
Take personal responsibility for your own social life.
Social media doesn't take away any personal responsibility any more than the telephone or a newspaper advertisement did. Your social life still needs to be built on information whether you see an advert for an event on TV or on a poster glued to the side of a building, or get invited to a party through an SMS.
A lot of people fundamentally don't realise that a large part of social media doesn't offset meeting people in fleshy person, and actually provides even more opportunities to do just that.
I remember when people freaked out when /. started having user IDs and logins.
More of a news aggregator with comments.
Before dedicated social networks we used mailing lists, Usenet and forums. They were great because you could meet interesting, like-minded people, and they didn't harvest your personal data.
These days it's harder to avoid social networks. They offer a lot of features that people want, like easy photo sharing and real-time chat built in. Sure, you can replicate it all, but try getting random non-techies to install an IRC client, or spell Diaspora.
Modern life has become reliant on those services. People are too busy, they aren't going to post everything to five different networks and your personal email address.
The only solution is an open protocol. Make Facebook a protocol, let people choose the platform and client that suits them the best.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
This is the problem. People think they need it now. The abuses possible are inherent in all present implementations. A federal injunction should be issued. If they want to save face. Perhaps they read slashdot? The sharing of all (or part) personal information online is a national security risk. period. fucking period.
But I beg to digress (facebook needs to die. shutdown.) We need to focus on the solution. Open source (free as in beer) software and hardware to the rescue.
Let's get to this, gentlemen. IRC or whatever. but connect and solve this problem. We need transparency. We need the people to be able to set up their own networks. Think mesh community nodes with a DMZ to talk to the other networks. We can do this better. I know we can.
For f**ks sake, *Facebook* sold access to your messenger private MESSAGES to a company that markets that data worldwide. Using some hidden psuedo opted in by default consent.
It isn't some sort of endemic that spans every social media company. It's just Facebook that's constantly pushing the boundaries of what it can get away with.
"A Facebook spokesperson confirmed that the app, which was designed by Cambridge University researcher Aleksandr Kogan to collect data on Americans on behalf of Cambridge Analytica’s British counterpart SCL, requested access to user inboxes through the read_mailbox permission."
So your private messages were sold to Putin. It wasn't by accident, they weren't hacked, Cambridge Analytics requested access to the messages in your mailbox and Facebook sold them that access via an implemented API. And CA were not at all secret about their intentions, they toured the world offering up your Facebook data for sale.
Here's Aleksandr Kogan of Cambridge Analytics touting the data grab and the ability to use it to influence foreign elections to Putin's St Petersberg group:
http://money.cnn.com/2018/03/20/technology/aleksandr-kogan-video-facebook-cambridge-analytica/index.html
Ditch Facebook, delete your account, never ever log in again. If you use a site and it has a Facebook button on it, its a tracking system, ask them to remove it.
But everyone around me seems to and for many their lives revolve around it.
;)
As to the question, my initial take is yea! But maybe things are not that simple for others in their world.
Just my 2 cents
Go back to engaging flesh and blood contacts? Do you know your audience Slashdot? Who the hell has time or proximity to see real people?
So the time has come to pull back our social circles to the stone age? What about involving "big tech companies" like the phone company? Big government, like The POST OFFICE? It's all a matter of trust, and if necessary regulation. What this guy is advocating is Neo-Luddism.
Steve -- If you have to call it a system, you don't know what it is.
Get back to? Some of us grey beards never stopped.
If you search my full name (which is unique due to mix of nationalities) you will only find my LinkedIn profile, ie my carefully curated professional profile and CV.
Everything else I do online is either anonymous or under a pseudonym I keep for that specific purpose. People only know me by the handles I choose, and only people I've met get to know my real name.
I saw this bulk data processing coming right from day one on the internet. Many of the specifics have surprised me though, I thought it would be government abuse mostly.
The only thing I have used FaceBook for in quite a long while is to log into Slashdot.
Those of us who cared for their privacy and are horrified at facebook or other social media practice, ALREADY limited their use strictly. Those of us who "vomit" their private live on social media, did not care to begin with and will probably not move. The only real solution is to lobby for stronger privacy rule and data protection, which we get in Europe. Good luck with that in the US.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
While there is a place for electronic communication: emails, 'phone calls, on-line group messaging, what is far more satisfying is meeting people in the flesh to: chat, eat together, dance, go for walks, ... that is how true friendships are nurtured and grow. When you are with people you more easily learn their true nature. We are a social species -- this need has been exploited by social media, with the unfilled promise that using it will make us more socially successful: whereas the result is often the opposite.
We need to upgrade/replace email and Usenet.
I've said this time and time again: Facebook only exists because we're still using protocols and services from the steam age of computing. Usenet is super-dead and email is some awkward crutch.
Replace it with something from this day and age and Facebook will disappear all by itself because people will stop using it because it won't be the best solution around anymore.
It's that easy.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
So far evolution has not eliminated gross stupidity, so the prospect for future reductions in stupid do not look good.
Why is Snark Required?
I remember when Bruce Perens freaked out that others made accounts spelled similar to his name, and they changed the page so UIDs became vgisible, so it beme a 'thing' to have a low UID.
Thanks, Bruce.
The question we hear many times a day. Yet we expect that almost all websites will not charge us. Even though they have costs: depreciation, electricity, staff, buildings - that someone has to pay for.
So would the public be willing to hand over a credit card to use a website? Experience shows that almost nobody does, when compared with the billions of accesses per day that come from subscribers to "free" sites. And what happens to "privacy" then? We would just trade fears of all the lies we tell when we subscribe to a website being replaced with the far more serious fears of having our card details stolen, bought and sold.
Personally, I don't give a damn about who knows when my date of birth was, what I last bought from Amazon or whether I "liked" a particular posting or not. It seems to me that the only people who do worry, do so about how other people might be losing their privacy - not about their own. If it bothers you, then stop. If it doesn't then ignore all the media frenzy. Though since almost all the online sites that are carrying scare stories about mass data collection are doing exactly the same thing they criticise FB and social media in general, of doing.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
No need to throw the baby with the water, you can use a distributed social media system that respect your privacy and is not a milkcow for some rich dude.
We get at least a dozen attempts at a FOSS social-media platform every fucking year and many of them are distributed systems, too. How many of them are actually popular among the average consumer? None? Well, exactly.
look for Mastodon, PeerTube, Hubzilla, Pleroma
Never heard of a single one of those and I would hazard a guess that neither has almost anyone else,e ither. Just try and guess how well that bodes for this yet-another attempt at a FOSS social-media-thing.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
it got better when they made a law that the stickers needed to be inflammable.
rewriting history since 2109
And I did this long before all of this media storm. I am 5 months free of Facebook. Furthermore, the apology that the Zuck offered was, at best, hollow. And the denial of the shadow profiles just about undid all of that apology. I am sure I still have one somewhere on it.
When was the time to start using them?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Way ahead of you.
It also works. Potential employers are looking at Facebook profiles, so give them something to read. Rub shoulders with the best and greatest in your field (Photoshop is your friend), make sure you talk about all the great events and conferences you get invited to but have to decline going because you just can't find the time between all your charity work.
NO employer will ask you about it because they'd have to admit that they're spying on you. But ALL of them are looking.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Despite teh constant negative vgisible bemes, covfefe.
Snake handlers eventually get bit. Lion tamers get eaten, and outrage farmers get turned against.
It's the natural order of things.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
I 'm as anti-social as they come. Let me ask you again:
You talkin to me? There's no one else here; you tawkin to me?
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I am really tired of crap like this:
"Take personal responsibility for your own social life. Go back to engaging flesh and blood people without tech companies serving as an intermediary. Eschew the narcissistic impulse to broadcast the excruciating minutiae of your life to the world. Refuse to accept the mandate that you must participate in social media in order to participate in society. Reclaim your autonomy."
How about YOU stop assuming others use social networks for the crap you probably used it for?
This. So much of this. Dilute the social media brand. :)
They want to do facial recognition? Get the profile one hop from every face of interest.
The more they spy, the more junk they file and sort
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
All you need exists. Just not as polished as FB. I guess that 90% of people will go for polish, though. People are largely dumb.
Why would they put stickers on that would catch fire? Inflammable and flammable mean the same thing. Maybe you meant nonflammable?
If you search my full name (which is unique due to mix of nationalities) you will only find my LinkedIn profile, ie my carefully curated professional profile and CV.
I do it the other way: my full name happens to match that of a well-known politician (Democrat), making any search on it lost among millions of irrelevant political references.
make your facebook page a fake news site about yourself. put so much fake stuff about yourself on your facebook page that they can't figure out anything about you. fake jobs, fake people, fake vacations, fake relatives. everything.
Doesn't work. Facebook builds profiles based on what your comments say and pages you join and things you like.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Anyone else find it ironic that the article that says to leave Facebook says "Join the debate on Facebook" at the bottom? https://www.counterpunch.org/2...
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Usenet was my favourite thing about the internet. I still use it but feel sad that hardly anyone else does.
500 million people all joining another social network sounds nice but won't happen. Regulation is required. Just like Verizon can't sell access to all your text and calls, neither should anyone else. "But Facebook is a private company!!" I hear. And Verizon isn't? There has to be a way to monetize Facebook without invading everyone's privacy.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Says who? I've never used those services in the first place.
The question is, why are you posting everything? Stop broadcasting your life online!
Go back to regular forums, there's still millions of them all over the place, targeting specific topics. If I visit a DIY arcade cabinets forum, the worst thing that can happen is that I see ads related to arcade hardware, which I might be interested in because I visit that kind of website.
#DeleteFacebook
...but commenting on /. is social media.
Yeah the whole "costs get passed on to you" idea falls apart when it's a free service. What are they going to do? Collect more data? They're going to do that either way. Only way to stop it is leave.
It's pretty much impossible NOT to reveal your social connections using social media, but it's the combination of insight into the nodes in that graph with the network that gives people with that data power over you.
So any kind of game, app or quiz where you reveal things about yourself or personal preferences is a bad thing. Forwarding and commenting on political news is probably a bad thing -- not in itself, but combined with the analytical power a social connection graph provides; it's one thing to exercise your free speech, it's another to contribute to a the greatest political surveillance network in history.
You might want to think twice about face tagging and geotagging your photographs too -- going by the Categorical Imperative. If enough people do that they've got a covert body tracking network.
People use social media because they serve a useful purpose, but they aren't aware of the unintended consequences; exploiting unintended consequences is those companies' entire business model.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Social media shouldn't be used to replace contact with the people you're close to, but it is useful for keeping in touch with people you aren't close to.
For me, social media is mainly useful for keeping tabs on musicians, authors and actors that I like. I like being able to find about their upcoming projects and appearances without spending hours of my time checking individual websites or hoping a news site will mention them. Even better, I can interact with
Right now, there isn't anything that comes close to replacing social media for that.
Exactly this. Use a pseudonym with associated email address for each website, isolate all your interests from each other.
Here, I am known as DontBeAMoran, an idiot that posts mostly stupid garbage and sometimes funny replies or comments. On another website I am known as DontBeARocketScientist since I work at NASA and on another website I am called DontBeACarpenter since I love woodworking.
So to recap, make sure you never give corporations and governments the ability to associate your persona on one website to another. Use different pseudonyms for each, be careful to avoid similar pseudonyms and never divulge information about your other pseudonyms on the other websites.
#DeleteFacebook
I actually managed to convince most of my friends to move to WhatsApp as an alternative to Facebook. WA at least does end-to-end encryption and isn't a social network, so while not perfect it's a lot better.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I prefer noninflammable because it confuses people who don't know that flammable and inflammable are the same thing, but do know that one should not use a double negative. They know it can't possibly mean not-not-flammable, but they can't reconcile that knowledge.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
The outrage appeared first strange to me. I always assumed that signing up for a free service means that all the data provide are essentially public and can be sold. It is the prize to pay for a free service. I also still assume that a free service can at any time change its rules and policies or disappear or even assume that some censorship might occurs. The network is not mine and I don't pay for it. Where free services cross a line is when they collect data of users which are not on the network or data which users have chosen not to place onto the network. If some personal data get onto a network because some app just pulled all private contact info of some friend or somer elative, then this is not ok. It is here, that regulations need to be put in place. Also, if I decide to say "yes, it is time to leave a network", I should have the possibility to delete an account without trace if needed. Also that needs to be regulated. The social networks do not do that on their own.
Dilute? No. Use it to your advantage. They want all the information about you. Give it to them. Tell them everything ... they should think about you.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Everything else I do online is either anonymous or under a pseudonym I keep for that specific purpose. People only know me by the handles I choose, and only people I've met get to know my real name.
Don't underestimate the ability to link tracking cookies, like if you order something from an e-tailer under your real name because they need your shipping address and post to /. under your alias at the same time the IP address will be the same. Even pseudonyms are dangerous if they can be linked to other pseudonyms that aren't anonymous because most of us are too lazy to fully compartmentalize. For example my best friend has a fairly unique online nick that is also publicly linked to his real world identity. If you can link my nick to his nick like say on a gaming clan or something, you can identify him. If you identify him, you can find me in his friends list and real world events we've been to. It's all a question of access, smartness of algorithms and effort that are all out of my hands.
Truth is most people can't manage to maintain completely separate identities, even when they're trying quite hard. We've had those stories on /. on prostitutes start seeing Facebook friend requests from customers, attorneys with clients, unfaithful with mistresses where they have made more than a casual effort to keep it a secret. And it's only going to get worse as more and more things get "smart" in various ways. On a random note, my dad needs hearing aids and last now he was on a check-up the doctor told him she could see from the statistics how many hours a day he's used them on average. I had no idea it did that, it's not exactly a huge infringement of privacy but it got me thinking how privacy is dying through a thousand needle pricks.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Well plaid, sur.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Very sly there.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
All those informations do not tell anyone who my friends are, what my hobbies and interests are, what my daily routine is, etc.
#DeleteFacebook
If more people realized this, it would be so much easier to get them on board with distributed social media networks.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
> Is It Time To Stop Using Social Media?
When was it ever time to *start*?
It's an anti-user business model by design.
End of discussion.
I think what's happened is some businesses feel they can promote their wares or marketing through a captive audience.
Why UNIX?
I could live without social media if I could keep in touch with family and friends and also find a place to talk about stuff with anyone who's interested.
If you can make IRC really user friendly so that the less technically inclined can use it and reincarnate usenet, it would be a very small start. In 20 years, we might have something.
I think AOL did this a while back but too many rowdy teenagers were cluttering the place.
Why UNIX?
Schools should teach how to find opposing views. It is a learnable skill.
Yeah! Gonna Like and tweet this, bro!
Why is everybody acting so surprised? The relentless collection and analysis, or pillage, of personal data has been obvious from day one. I never had a facebook account because I don't have to have one to participate in the world (Unlike young people) , But, gmail is just as bad, and I do have a google account because I need email to participate.
"Use our system -or- have no life" seems like a bogus choice.
Slashdot sure has gone downhill since the corporate overlords came on board. Where are Cowboy Neal and Cmdr Taco when we need them?
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
I stopped posting on Usenet when spammers began harvesting email addresses from posts, and I was too principled to fake my email address.
The problem isn't social media. The problem is people, or rather a subset of the population. Any time you do anything non-anonymously in public, there are people out there who will try to twist and abuse it for their own benefit. Whether it be social media, or Usenet posts, or for sale ads in the newspaper (phone number added to robocall lists, creepy callers), or posting for sale ads on a public bulletin board at the supermarket (same problem with your phone number), or doing anything in public (people spreading gossip about who you were out with, what you were wearing, what you were doing). Social media allows you to leverage databases, networks, and automation to abuse it on a scale never seen before, but at its very root it's the same problem people have been grappling with for millenia.
Too much of basic human interaction is so reliant on this stuff that I don't think you can outright ban it. If you tried, you'd basically make it impossible for strangers to meet, and we'd die off when our birth rate dropped to zero. You have to identify the most egregious abuses and prohibit it. Unfortunately, those engaged in those abuses have the benefit of their part mostly happening in private so it can be hard to figure out exactly who is behind it (e.g. copying Usenet post email addresses to sell to spammers, or making crank calls to phone numbers on for sale ads, or spreading juicy gossip).
Now is the time for nerds to promote and create open standard alternatives to monolithic exploitative corps like Facebook which only offer specific but popular desires of billions.
Twit feeds:
Clueless method to post anything for your followers. Facebook posts included EMAIL is not broadcast and blogs are too hard. We need something like a personal RSS feed that is easy to create. It's really a simple specialized blog system with no features. Define the protocols, APIs let others implement. like http, email etc.
People Finder: a way to find people you know and link to what they are publishing. like DNS but for humans. Facebook did this aggressively-- many approaches can be used by many places but we need a standard uniting the task. like DNS... and free... details such as harassing people by email or requiring signup to view things emailed to you by others.. can be left out for others.
Example: I've thought that some sort of RFC for EMAIL which creates an alternative mbox to INBOX ... a FRIEND directory with a limited MIME format email that goes into it would be a good idea. This would leverage existing tech, integrate easily with email since friend requests are similar but also would allow specialty use without even touching email use cases. Filtering can be specialized on the FRIEND box as well. NO, we don't just use email we optimize the use case to a special separate use of email technology that doesn't require any of the complexities of email. This is why I suggest another mbox to keep it away from INBOX. Apple does this very well with their notes and todo lists running on top of IMAP without users even realizing it is actually a kind of email client.
Public Identity service:
Email is unique and maybe those should be your ID... but we and the governments of the world really could use a unique public identifier standard; an open one as well as an authoritative one with some solid backing. No proof of identity or authentication but merely an ID. I've thought over this problem before as well. I'm thinking a base 52 encoded number comprising a serial number, a year, and a 1 character checksum (depends upon the numeric base.) This should be somewhat easy to memorize and share (due to encoding, which is where I spent most my thought... picking encoding character rules to avoid human errors. Such as not using O because it looks like 0. As well as an escape for indicating other formats like social security numbers (part of the checksum bit indicates alternative format) )
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
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Is It Time To Stop Using Social Media? YES.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Well said, I feel the same way. My feelings toward 99.99999% of all social media can be summed up as, "No thank you."
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
no.
YES!
The Internet has become the new public commons and as such no corporation or gov agency should act as gatekeepers dictating who can and cannot speak on an Internet forum, especially if they solicited enrollment from the general public with promises of being fair.
I never signed up for Twitter and dropped Facebook months after I signed on when my list of friends got hacked and even worse, an unknown friend of a friend of a friend ... sent a snapshot of herself in bra and panties and asking to be "friends". She appeared to be a minor. Even then, FB told me that if I clicked any button on any site that was related to FB for the next six weeks it would immediately reactivate my account.
I signed up for Gmail soon after it started and was supportive of their "First, Do No Evil" slogan. As they morphed into a company that made evil its primary plan I decided to drop gmail and my G+ account. First, I visited passwords.google.com and was stunned to learn that they had my login names and passwords for every web account I created in the previous ten years, and some I had forgotten about. They even had my wifi admin login name and password. After dumping my info I went to every website and either canceled it or changed my name and password.
The command netstat shows that while running a naked browser on any particular website at least two dozen or more 3rd party or tracker websites are connected to my computer and leaching info and watching everything I do online, even if I leave that website. Running with NoScript active causes many website to not display properly or at all. Many websites want you to allow cookies so they can spy and also hijack the HTML code arriving at your browser from other sites by planting ads that the website didn't code in and wasn't asked to include.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
"I'm a narcissist that isn't getting rewarded on social media by people telling me how great I am, so now I'm telling people that I stopped using it. Aren't I unique, quirky, and a total edge Lord?
I'm so young and counter culture it hurts"
Yeah, great, you play in the sand box kid
Your comment reflects the total hostility that is exhibited on all sides of any topic on most forums these days.
Not knowing a single fact about the poster you fling poo like a caged monkey, while insinuating the worst motives about your target anonymously. YOU are what is wrong with trying to hold intelligent discussions on most comment forums today.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It will be like East Germany. A file on all connections between all people.
What the USA wanted with DARPA LifeLog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The problem was sorting the informants and undercover police from the protesters.
Now that would be some photoshop fun. A protesters face getting some facial recognition next to "trusted" police and military faces in the same image.
One hop of connection.
Are the police protesters too?
Is the protester police?
Whats an AI to do? Slow down for every image to test for advanced photoshop and reject the faces and hop?
Social media becomes difficult for the security services to trust.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
and I'm not going to take it anymore......
[($)]
Some of the proposals/ideas being put forward here already exist ... It's called XMPP.
But they (google, facebook, microsoft, apple, et al.) don't want you to talk to other people outside their walled gardens. Which is why they killed off XMPP.
And people inside these walled gardens didn't even notice, that people they used to be able to talk to, just suddenly disappeared.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Decentralization and addressing
The XMPP network uses a clientâ"server architecture; clients do not talk directly to one another. The model is decentralized - anyone can run a server. By design, there is no central authoritative server as there is with services such as AOL Instant Messenger or Windows Live Messenger. Some confusion often arises on this point as there is a public XMPP server being run at jabber.org, to which a large number of users subscribe. However, anyone may run their own XMPP server on their own domain.
And I am on the Outside looking at you people inside these walled gardens with Schadenfreude.
We need social media that doesn't rely on ads or selling your data as part of it's business model. We also need social media to make it policy to not share your data. That's needs to be central to its product offering and part of its main value proposition. When the business model doesn't rely on third parties paying the bills (like advertisers or research companies) then there's always a mismatch between what the user wants and what the advertisers want. But with paid social networks with no ads the incentive is to just provide a service that people want. That's what RealPeople.io does (https://realpeople.io). No ads, no bots, users pay. Not sharing your data with anyone unless required by law. No AI filtering, no bulk data selling.
What if somebody else thinks it is a good idea to post the photo of me drunk online?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
What a waste of your ability to push a change on your firends. WhatsApp is a Facebook company. All the metadata is still mined by Facebook (friends lists, communications timing, all the data WhatsApp gathers from your phone, etc.) And there are unconfirmed reports that WhatsApp, while encrypting your information, somehow mines the data and uses it to serve personalized ads. Maybe in app, before it was encrypted? Maybe tokenized?
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Citation very much needed.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
And you won't solve the social media problem by opting out.
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
We need: Opt-IN options, NOT opt-out, and remove tracking and info FULLY and WHEN REQUESTED.
Our privacy is paramount.
It'll keep things like Russian election hacking from have any significant effects.
I see freakin' social media links EVERYWHERE!
Who knows what (tentacles) those companies have injected into places.
For example: cookies.
I go online shopping for an item. Let's call it a power adapter for my cellphone.
I find what I need at a reasonable price, and order it. It arrives and works fine.
For the next MONTH, I am targeted ads for cellphone adapters!
Do ya think there something is missing here?!
This happens with every online purchase I make, even with cookies and tracking turned OFF!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
Why is it the social media that's the problem? How about just the social aspect? I'm boycotting people.