Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
No. Facebook is in the business of selling my/your information. No mistake at all.
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
I did. The emails stopped shortly after.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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?