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Yes, You Should Delete Facebook
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Yes, You Should Delete Facebook
How we respond to Facebook today will inform the startups of
tomorrow
by Nat Eliason
I deleted my Facebook a few weeks ago, but it started scaring me
last March.
A friend and I ran into one of his investors in a cafe in San
Francisco, and the investor asked if we'd heard of a Soylent
competitor, Ample. He was curious what we thought of it, and of
meal replacement companies in general.
I hadn't heard of Ample, but I shared my concerns with Soylent,
and why I personally would never put my money into one of those
companies. My friend, for the most part, agreed.
The conversation ended and we left. I didn't think about Ample
again, look it up, or talk about it online with anyone. But
less than 24 hours later, there were ads for it in my Instagram
feed.
It was spooky, to say the least. I was used to getting ads for
products whose sites I'd visited, and for products I'd mentioned
on Facebook, but products that I'd only talked about? That was
weird.
After a bit of digging, I discovered I wasn't alone. There were
dozens of stories online about people getting freaked out by ads
that seem like they only could have come from Facebook
eavesdropping on their conversations.
Now to be clear, this probably isn't happening. It would be a
massive amount of work and data processing for marginally better
ad targeting. Like the Wired article says, Facebook doesn't
need to listen to your conversations.
They can target you well enough without it.
Cause for Concern
That's meant to be reassuring: they're not listening to you
because they don't have to. But if anything, that should be
even scarier. Facebook knows so much about you they can make
you believe they're listening to your personal conversations.
They have so much data about you they can send you ads that have
an uncanny relevance to what is going on in the real world.
Imagine, for a moment, that you had a friend with this level of
knowledge about you. Someone who knows everywhere you go, what
you like, what you fear, what you want, who you hang out with,
how happy you are at any given moment.
They could be an amazing boon to your life. Or they could be a
nightmare. It all depends on what they do with the information,
and how well you can trust them with it.
Now imagine the friend can use their information about you to
make money, say by manipulating your decisions to benefit them.
And imagine they're the kind of morally bankrupt person who
would take advantage of their friend this way.
What would their incentives look like?
Since they can make money by manipulating your decisions,
they'll try to manipulate your decisions. And since they can
better manipulate your decisions by learning more about you, the
more they'll want to learn. If they want the greatest success
for themselves, they will necessarily have to manipulate you as
much as possible and collect as much data on you as possible.
This seems to be the situation Facebook has gotten itself into:
They make money on ads.
Which means they need you to click on ads.
Which means they need to know more about you to send you
better ads.
And they need you to spend more time on the site so you
click on more ads.
So they're motivated to get you addicted to spending time on
the platform while collecting as much information about
you as possible.
Facebook's product is not the platform, it's us. If the product
is what a business sells to make money, then Facebook's product
is our attention and data. We are the product. And Facebook's
customers are the companies buying ads based on that attention
and data.
If our time and our attention are Facebook's true product, then
their long-term goal becomes clear: to influence (and tax) how
we communicate in the 21st century. Every product they've
launched and company they've acquired is related to this goal in
some way:
Facebook (app) is the asynchronous, community-focused
communication platform
Messenger / Whatsapp are the more instant, smaller group
communication platforms
Instagram is the visual communication platform
Oculus can be the future immersive version of all of these
platforms
Facebook wants to own how we communicate because it means more
data and more attention, which means more ads revenue. Simple
enough.
But that idea should be a little frightening: a company wants to
control how you interact with other humans so that they can make
money off of you. This isn't some secret, evil motivation
driving the company behind closed doors. It's a necessary
consequence of the incentives that shape it.
Compare this model to Netflix. You pay Netflix a flat monthly
fee, and in return, you get unlimited streaming movies and TV
shows from their platform. Netflix doesn't make more money the
more time you spend on it (they make less, actually), so they
have no incentive to addict you to the platform (beyond keeping
you from switching to a competitor). With Netflix, we're the
customers.
This isn't to say that all free, ad-financed apps are bad and
all pay-to-play apps are good. I've used Foursquare and Swarm
consistently for 7+ years. These are apps where I volunteer my
location, travel, eating, and shopping habits, and I've never
had the slightest sense that Foursquare was using this data in a
way that made my life worse.
The ads in Foursquare tend to be useful. Their goal for the
product is to be the place consumers go to find the next
restaurant or caf+¬ to try. They don't need you to spend tons of
time in the app, and they don't need you to buy products from
vendors unrelated to your in-app goals. They just want you to
stay in the habit of checking in places and finding places
through them, so they serve you ads related to the kinds of
foods and stores you tend to like.
If Foursquare started using that data in a way that made me
uncomfortable, I'd stop using it. If every time I checked into
a restaurant I started getting emails from them afterwards, I'd
know Foursquare was selling my email address to places I checked
in and I wouldn't be cool with that. I'd delete it, and switch
to an app I had more trust in.
The problem with Facebook is that its managed to gain such a
monopoly on our digital presence that we worry about quitting
it. Switching from Foursquare to Yelp doesn't give anyone
anxiety, but deleting Facebook does. The Fear of Quitting
How did Facebook get so ingrained in our lives that people who
lived without it for thirty years are suddenly concerned about
losing it?
Partially for the same reason people joined in the first place:
information. We want to know what's going on in the lives of
our friends and acquaintances, and Facebook has become the go-to
source for doing that.
But in the process, Facebook has changed friendship from an
active to a passive process. You can sit back and wait for some
update to appear from a friend or acquaintance and then respond
to it. You don't have to put in any effort to reach out and ask
what's going on, you get it fed to your by the magical friend
algorithms.
How often do you reach out to your friends to ask them how it's
going? Or to see if there are any big updates in their lives?
There's hardly any need anymore, since Facebook has automated
the process. We don't have to put in the work, the information
comes to us, and so we've lost the muscles we used to use for
staying updated on our social circle.
It's similar to the problem I outlined in my article on the
switch from search to social. As we moved away from actively
looking for things on the Internet, having them fed to us
instead, we became more passive informational consumers. And as
we move more towards passive Facebook-style friendships, we lose
our old abilities to stay in touch with people.
This would be fine if Facebook relationships were as meaningful
as in-person ones, but they aren't. Conversations through chat
apps and getting up to date on your friends through the newsfeed
is the relationship equivalent of Soylent. A technological
pseudo-improvement over an ancient human process, and one that
falls dramatically short of the value it's trying to recreate.
And since we've been sipping the Facebook friend juice for so
long, it's legitimately scary to quit. How will you know what
events are going on? How will you know if something big happens
in your friend's life? How will you stay in touch with people?
The simple answer isCǪ all the ways we did for the last 100,000
years. Talking to people. Being an active consumer of
information and knowledge about your friends' lives instead of
letting it passively wash over you.
But it would still be fair to ask: why bother. Yes, quitting
Facebook does make it more likely that you'll miss events,
updates, and messages, since other people are on it. And yes,
it can be a little inconvenient to not have it at times,
depending on your friend group.
So why is it worth it to delete the social network instead of
begrudgingly continuing to use it? Why Bother Deleting Facebook
Someone observing the digital landscape a couple years from now
could see Facebook continuing its dominance and deduce that it's
fine to play fast and loose with customer data in the name of
growth, to optimize your product around addictiveness, and to
sell information on your users.
Or, in a couple years, they could see the massive consequences
Facebook faced for behaving that way. They could see people
chose to give their attention to products they trust, and left
Facebook in droves.
Which is why quitting Facebook matters: it sends the message
that companies can't, and shouldn't, try to have that much power
over our lives. That if other companies try in the future,
they'll get punished for it.
If someone in our social circle deceives us or lies to us, we
tell our friends. We use gossip to spread information about who
is and isn't trustworthy, partially so there are consequences
for not being trustworthy. If businesses aren't subject to the
same consequences for not being trustworthy, they'll have no
motivation to think before they do something that could break
their users' trust.
If Facebook thinks they can keep focusing on addiction, ad
revenue, and data collection with no consequences, they'll keep
doing it.
Reflecting on how Facebook has become such a dominant force in
our lives the last five to ten years, and the consequences of
that dominance, I think there are a few key lessons from it that
we can apply to other technologies: Don't rely on a product for
a natural human process
Facebook can't replace socialization and face-to-face
communication. Soylent can't replace food. Porn can't replace
sex. Tinder can't replace dating. It's tempting to try to
technologize everything in our lives, but it won't work for
these more old-school processes, and we should stop believing
that four guys in their Harvard dorm room can really make a
better social network than the one we have IRL. Be the
customer, not the product
Opt for services you pay for instead of services that sell your
information. Pay to remove ads whenever possible. When you're
using a product for free, you're still paying for it in some
way, typically through the data and attention you're giving it.
Watch out for the incentives of companies and products you use,
and don't expect that they'll all be benevolent masters of your
information. Most importantly: treat companies like people
If a company can't be trusted, ditch them, and let them feel the
consequences. If a product can get away with mistreating its
users to make money, it will keep doing it until they feel the
consequences.
Facebook has become the abusive partner in many people's lives.
They've carved out such a seemingly important role in your life
that even though you want to leave, you're scared of the
consequences.
But I can't stress enough how little impact quitting has on your
life. I was almost entirely off it for a year before deleting
it, and in that time I've never missed it. Have I missed an
event or two? Probably, but that's a small price to pay.
And as for staying up to date on my friends livesCǪ well I just
do it the old fashioned way. Talking to them. Which is
wonderful since we actually have something to talk about when we
meet in person, instead of sitting on our phones looking at
Facebook to get up to date on all our other friends' lives.
Imagine going back 10 years and being told that if you signed up
for Facebook, they were going to collect a disturbing amount of
information on you, manipulate your emotions, store your
conversations, and try to control how you communicate with
people online. Would you sign up? Would you let your kid sign
up?
I wouldn't, and I don't think you would either.
Here's how to quit when you're ready.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/how-to-delete-your-
facebook-account/ [wraps]
FIDOGAZETTE Vol 12 No 17 Page 4 April 25, 2018
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