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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.

5 of 236 comments (clear)

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

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

  2. 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.
  3. 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.

  4. 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
  5. 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