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Facebook Will Harass You Mercilessly If You Try To Break Up (slate.com)

schwit1 shares a summary from PJ Media: Breaking up with Facebook is apparently as difficult as breaking up with a bad boyfriend or girlfriend who won't accept your decision. That's the experience Henry Grabar of Slate had when he stopped signing on. He stopped logging in on June 6 and stayed off Facebook for ten days. He had been a member for over ten years and this was the longest period he had remained off the social network. But Facebook didn't leave him alone. He received 17 email messages in a span of nine days urging him to return.

Grabar is not alone in trying to wean himself off Facebook for various reasons. Some do it because they realize it can be a waste of time, while others do it because of the company's inability to protect (or lack of interest in protecting) its members' personal data. The company has mistakenly released data of millions of its members and friends of members to third parties, and many of them have used the data for illicit purposes. While Facebook says they are not losing members, some recent statistics paint a different story. According to a Pew study, only 51 percent of U.S. teenagers use the service now, down from 71 percent in 2015. This was the first time the numbers have fallen.
The frequent messages reinforced Grabar's decision to stay off the platform. Some of the messages included photo updates from his friends; liked posts from groups he belonged to; and comments about a news article that was posted to a group he belonged to.

32 of 236 comments (clear)

  1. Just create a spam email address by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    How hard is it? Change to a spam email address before breaking up with a service

    1. Re:Just create a spam email address by Mr0bvious · · Score: 2

      So some third party can take over your account and continue to live your online Facebook life for you?

      Solid plan there.

      --
      Never happened. True story.
    2. Re:Just create a spam email address by scsirob · · Score: 4, Insightful

      That's what I do all the time. Got my own domain, with a few email accounts but unlimited alias ability.

      Whenever I must register for something with company-x, I create an email alias 'company-x@myowndomain.com'. If company-x gets breached, sells my data or simply starts spamming me, I can now stop emails coming in whenever I want by removing the alias.

      --
      To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
    3. Re:Just create a spam email address by default+luser · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Or you could just simplify your life and create auto-sort filters. I created a Facebook folder in my Hotmail account years ago, and I've just forgotten that it's there.

      No control freak domain ownership required :)

      --

      Man is the animal that laughs.
      And occasionally whores for Karma.

    4. Re:Just create a spam email address by johnsie · · Score: 4, Insightful

      His method makes more sense than just filters. With a catch-all address you can still have the filters, but more importantly you can see which company a third party company got your email address from.

    5. Re:Just create a spam email address by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      you can see which company a third party company got your email address from.

      And then, upon know who leaked your info you do what? Call them and complain? Take them to court? Yeah, right.

      The additional work doesn't amount to any tangible benefit. Just filtering works the same but with less hassle.

    6. Re:Just create a spam email address by GNious · · Score: 2

      GMail supposedly can do the same : add +@gmail.com should work

      eg scsirop+facebook@ ....

  2. Mistakenly? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    No. Facebook is in the business of selling my/your information. No mistake at all.

  3. Um by meglon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Isn't there a setting where you can get update emails to those things? Cause, turning it off might be a way to stop those emails. Just saying.

    I had a facebook account for like 2 weeks to keep up with a specific event. Deleted the account afterwards, and i haven't had an email from them since.

    --
    Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
    1. Re:Um by Richard_at_work · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Yup, this is a non-story, intended to allow people to manufacture outrage rather than reasoned discussion.

      If you diligently use Facebook for a length of time, and then stop using it without changing your notification preferences or deleting your account, of course they are going to send you notifications with updates - you *explicitly* allow that through the notification preferences.

      I have a Facebook account, I visit it perhaps once a month - I haven't had an email notification from them in years. That's mainly because I manage my notification preferences.

      What the OP is trying to do is get Facebook to read their mind and stop sending notifications - and then bitching when instead they follow the accounts notification preferences.

    2. Re:Um by allo · · Score: 2

      But you may think of the default - sending "digests" - as a dark pattern. The default should be "do not bother me" and everything else opt-in.

    3. Re:Um by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      It's not just normal notifications. If you stop visiting they send you special "please come back, look at what you are missing!" messages that are quite different to the normal notification ones. I turned all the notification emails off and still got these "please come back" ones.

      You can turn them off, but it's a lot of clicks and that doesn't lessen the fact that they are using psychological tricks to try to get recovering addicts back on to their site.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  4. LOL. No. by aliquis · · Score: 3, Interesting

    https://www.facebook.com/varme...

    See it? I don't either.

    All you got to do is to try to speak somewhat open-minded about the invasion of your country and the traitors in your parliament on 4-5 accounts of which 2 have more or less the same name. Get 20 or so month long bans in total and off the new "I'll keep this one clean!" and the old 15+ year old account goes.

    Ridicule their laws and ideas and break it and you'll get out eventually :)

  5. I still get emails by jetkust · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I never actually used Facebook for anything. And apparently never using Facebook for anything and not logging in for seemingly a decade if not longer means I'm still an "active member" because "YAY YOU HAVE NOTIFICATIONS AND FRIENDS!!!" .. Even though I never gave Facebook any identity whatsoever (except my email address......................).

    1. Re: I still get emails by Zero__Kelvin · · Score: 2

      Spoken like someone who knows how it *should* work with no idea how it actually *does* work.

      --
      Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
  6. DELETE YOUR ACCOUNT! by TheMiddleRoad · · Score: 4, Informative

    I did. The emails stopped shortly after.

  7. This is highly misleading. by ScentCone · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Choosing not to sign in to a platform you've been steadily using, where you are a member of active groups and have friends (that you follow) who post content ... and then getting updates from that platform telling you the sorts of things that are going on with your contacts/interests - that's NOT "trying to break up." Closing your account is "breaking up." Do that, and you'll stop hearing from FB in short order. Playing coy by keeping your account active and your connections established while not visiting for a week and half - sounds like he experienced exactly what one would expect.

    --
    Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
  8. Think that's bad? by GerryGilmore · · Score: 3, Informative

    Try cancelling DirecTV. I did, but - dang! - what an experience!
    First, there is ZERO way to cancel online. You MUST call in to them.
    Next, prepare yourself for a lengthy "we can drop your price!" pitches (which, TBH, if that's your game, consider it a freebie from me to you) all the way through - and I am not making this up! - "you're making me very sad by cancelling."
    It ALMOST would have been easier just to cancel my credit card....

    1. Re:Think that's bad? by rworne · · Score: 3, Informative

      You went about it the wrong way with Vonage. I had them for more than a decade because calls overseas are pretty cheap. I never had a problem with them, but the service steady increased in price over the years and I was getting annoyed with it. We have been using FaceTime for international calls for a few years now and I moved over to another VoIP company and all I pay them is about $4.70 in taxes for their free service.

      What I did was port my number over. The second it completed, bye-bye Vonage. They didn't even send me an email about it, they just cancelled the auto-pay, my account vanished off their site, and we wound up essentially ghosting each other.

      --
      I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
  9. Even when THEY lock you out by BeCre8iv · · Score: 5, Interesting

    After abreviating my name and being reported (probably by a user of a full pseudonym) FB demanded a scan of my passport or ID.
    14 days afterwards, I waslocked out of my account.

    I still however get notifications, birthdays etc in my spambin and cant make it stop without handing my papers to the
    Internet gestapo.

    While in hindsight they did me a favour bycutting me off before they could build an identifiable profile, FB and their parners can still just zuck themselves.

    --
    This perpetual motion machine Lisa made is a joke, it just keeps getting faster and faster. - Homer
    1. Re:Even when THEY lock you out by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 2

      Send a letter to their legal department and give them e.g. 30 days to stop sending you email before filing a lawsuit.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
  10. Re:Cause costs by johnsie · · Score: 2

    And yet here you are, spending your own time trolling the Internets as an AC, looking for people to tell to kill themselves.

  11. Can't read TFA without agreeing to spying by Slate by recrudescence · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Alas, thanks to the GDPR, the fine article is hidden behind a website which demands I simply agree to "the use of technologies such as cookies by Slate and our partners to deliver relevant advertising on our site, in emails and across the Internet, to personalize content and perform site analytics" as a single, lumped action before I am allowed to read it. Therefore I was unable to read it.

    I very much hope most users prompted with that warning also simply felt unable to read the content rather than compelled to agree to whatever it is Slate is trying to wave off under the umbrella of a single 'Agree' button.

  12. Re: Bamboozlement by Zero__Kelvin · · Score: 5, Interesting

    He isn't making it up. I tried to delete my account last year and had the same experience but worse. After not logging in for over a month one day I clicked on a link from a Google Search that was someone's FB account and I got automatically logged into my account that they were supposed to have deleted weeks earlier. There is basically no way to ever delete your account with the GUI following their instructions. I'm guessing if you contact customer support you *might* have better luck.

    --
    Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
  13. Re: Bamboozlement by postbigbang · · Score: 2

    You expected their instructions to be useful?

    I left Jan 1. Like you, I received lots of cloying come-back messages.

    Fuck these dirtbags. I went so far as to delete the password from my browser's cache. I'm not going back. This frat-boy-ish network's management is worse than United or American Airlines.... perhaps even worse than Comcast.

    You're the product, until you aren't.

    --
    ---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
  14. Re:Can't read TFA without agreeing to spying by Sl by 4im · · Score: 3, Informative

    Then Slate does not conform to the GDPR, and are exposing themselves to being sued by european users. Acceptance for different kinds of use of data *must* be separate, and service *may not be denied* when only the minimum required for delivery of service is accepted (e.g. the online shop 3suisses using your address for delivering goods to you and invoicing you, but denied from selling your data to 3rd parties, where they used to make most of their money).

    Oh well, Slate has a lot of company that way, few have bothered to implement GDPR properly so far. Of course, they'll cry a river when the fines start coming...

    On the + side: the data they are not allowed to collect can't be leaked. Or it'll seriously bite them if they collect them anyway, and they get loose.

  15. This is why you use a spam email account by gatkinso · · Score: 2

    Then you simply delete your account, done.

    --
    I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
  16. breakup analogy solves the data retention problem by goombah99 · · Score: 2

    We should seize on this analogy. The problem isnt that facebook has your data, it is that you don't have anything that belongs to facebook to trade back for it. When you breakup IRL you also have to return each other's shit stored at your respective apartments. Meet in the ihop parking lot and move her hairbrush, potpouri, photos of her, and Duran Duran CDs to her trunk, and take back your shirts, varsity jacket, and your dog's extra bowl/mat/food. But she conveniently forgets to return your Starbucks coffee mugs. That's like Facebook hanging onto some of your data but at least you get most of it away from her.

    --
    Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
  17. Re:Bamboozlement by fuzznutz · · Score: 2

    I'm pretty sure the primary purpose of Facebook is to share pro-Trump posts. That's one of the many reasons I left.

    I guess it depends on your "friends." I only have an account to keep in touch with my high school classmates and I have two that relentlessly post pro-Trump stuff. I have about 20 or so that post anti-Trump stuff relentlessly. I have considered blocking them both, but I only log on about once a month. It never fails though, you would think I log on every day because the crap is always exactly the same from the same suspects every single time.

    I don't care about your damn dog.
    I don't care where you went out to dinner last night.
    I get it, you hate Trump.
    I get it, you love Trump.
    I don't find your humorous meme shitpost funny.
    Sorry your husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend left you.
    Go see doctor and quit complaining.

    And I can absolutely concur. When you don't log in for a few days, they send emails at least one or twice a day reminding you of "all you missed."

  18. Re: Bamboozlement by terrycarlino · · Score: 4, Informative

    They keep shadow accounts on people who never join Facebook. Do you really think they're ever going to throw away data that they've collected on people they actually already have the name of?

    The most they're likely to do is make an account inactive so that you can't log into it anymore. They'll continue to collect data on you and if by some chance you ever log in again it will all be waiting for you. So it's a service. Right?

  19. Re: Bamboozlement by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 2

    It depends on what you set your email preferences to. I never did use facebook much, but I always kept getting emails about how so-and-so posted a photo I was tagged in, or liked what the fuck ever, or commented on a post from somebody I don't even know. It never stopped until I was sick of them flooding my inbox and changed the preferences to block all forms of emails.

    People know that if they need to get ahold of me, then don't try to message my facebook account.

  20. Re:breakup analogy solves the data retention probl by datavirtue · · Score: 2

    Wow. You really triggered on that one.

    --
    I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock