Why are you on social media? because all your friends and family are there, simple. If you left you would feel as if you would lose connection to them, however this isn’t true. Social media is only there for the purpose of making money out of you through advertising and selling your data.
But how else do I contact them? There are many messengers that aren’t social media as well as just calling them on the phone or meeting up in person. This is basically just common sense and you shouldn’t feel like you would lose them because as Henry from techlore put it, you shouldn’t lose a friend just because you don’t use a website, the real friends will still find a way to contact you.
But why would I want to leave? If you haven’t heard recently half a billion peoples Facebook data got leaked, that’s roughly one in five people that use Facebook, well there you are one big reason not to use Facebook. Also the fact that Facebook collects and sells up to 57% of the data you put into it with third parties (other companies that you aren’t told about) and Instagram (owned by Facebook) 79% including location, pictures, contacts anything you upload. And more which includes anything that they work out about you, using algorithms and AI, that you haven’t even shared with them such as political preference, sexuality and of course they know who all your friends are and how much you speak to them and for how long and who you speak to the most. They could know you better than you, this should scare you; that’s not my aim I just want to spread awareness of this.
What about Facebook messenger? Well it is not end to end encrypted by default meaning that the text that you send is sent through the Facebook servers in plaintext they can read store and do whatever they want with it, same with Instagram. End to end encryption (E2EE) in simple terms means putting a lock on your message before it is sent over facebooks servers so they can’t read what is inside.
So what to do about it?
- Spread awareness of the issue
- Move over to an E2EE messenger such as signal, XMPP, Threema, matrix, element, Jami or briar
- Delete Facebook!
Further reading/sources:
I haven’t logged in to my Facebook account that I still have for at least 1.5 weeks and it has been very good for my wellbeing.
When you do delete your account you have 30 days to restore it. I think that their reasoning behind this is that it gives you time to regret your decision and come back.
But you can use the psychology of this feature in a different way: Delete your account while giving yourself explicit permission to restore it if you need it within the next 30 days. I did this and, well, it’s truly deleted now :-)
You can also export all of your photos to another cloud storage service automatically.
I’m leaving my account as a “wasteland”. In case anyone tries to contact me, they get an automated watomatic message about where I am on other platforms.
No regrets (Lemmy, Mastodon, Matrix simply amazing)
A bonus if it is self hosted or free and open source cloud storage, which adds to the privacy