In this episode, I’m talking about my experience of leaving Facebook. That is not an easy thing to do but the process is fully engaged.
Enjoy and thanks for listening. Please feel free to visit my blog @ http://numericcitizen.me for all the news and personal comments on my experience quitting Facebook or comments about privacy and a lot more.
To all my Facebook friends, I have some news for you but before, I want to give you some context. It’s been a long time since I made my entry on Facebook. I did not count the years. Over time, I have been more or less active. I poured in a part of my life, my experiences, my travels, my photos, my pictures of good and not so good meals. But for several months I have considerably reduced my publications. Maybe you noticed. Maybe not. I do not care. What matters to me is the quality of my life. And I think that with Facebook, once the wonder passed, the reunion ended, part of my quality of life is questioned without having expressly consented. And I’m not comfortable with that. Explanations.
Facebook’s mission is to collect as much information as possible about me and sell my data for use by advertising networks to target them according to my profile, according to my data. In other words, I became a product to sell other products. What bothers me a lot is that this data go much further than what consciously knew. Over time, I began to think that not only should Facebook remain free, but that I should be rewarded for all the data I provided. What other domain allows companies to extract raw materials without any form of compensation? I do not know any. But that’s not all.
Facebook as an entity has a duty to protect the data of its users. Facebook has been at the center of several controversies for some time precisely at this level. Facebook’s endless appetite for swallowing all sorts of data makes the company’s management blind and malicious. At the time of writing, Mark Zuckerberg is the Chief Executive Officer. I do not like this character or his dummy values of connecting people. He is not really interested in connecting with our friends or distant relatives. What interests him are the interactions and the data you pour here. Your personal data, your public discussions as “private” or “intimate” is what motivates him. It’s the semantics that comes from everything you say here or post here that interests Facebook. There is no protection for your data. Any. Facebook’s business model is based on the use and sale of your data. What Facebook puts at your disposal is only a decoy to reassure you and give the impression that you data is safe. As a result, Facebook is now a monitoring agency that is probably more useful and relevant than any police or government database and all without any form of regulation and external control. But, you know what, I’m in control of my presence here and I’m going to stop it. But there is still something that puzzles me.
For many, the face of the Internet, is Facebook.Facebook is not internet. Except that with all that we put in it, the mass of Facebook has become too important in our individual lives and in the community, in society and because of all of us. Even the democratic debate is shaken. Companies do not open more websites to their own image, no, they open Facebook pages. It’s depressing and unhealthy to delegate so much control to Facebook.
The counterweight of all this is to pick up and leave. This is what I’m gonna do. It is not easy. Think again, I am not the first. We are millions to quit this platform. The same goes for Instagram (also the property of Facebook). Moreover, I also closed my Instagram account, Lightwiz, several months ago, this platform having moved too far from its founding mission in addition to becoming another Facebook.
All the more or less significant people I met in my life are now in my “Facebook Friends”. Well, to you, I just tell you the following: if you want to give me news, share photos that you think are important or even take my news, I’ll take you back to the simplest thing that existed before Facebook, email and phone. I will give you my number if you ask me. Oh yes, not only I close Facebook but by ricochet Messenger too, I do not like my conversations to be constantly indexed, searched and stored.
Those who have not bothered to read so far, well, it wasn’t worth it after all and our paths end here. For others, I say congratulations. You know how to give me news and ask for mine. As I will no longer see your daily life in front of my eyes every day, it is with great pleasure that I will find the haste to see you again in person and you will tell me what you like to share me.
I conclude by reminding you that I do not disappear completely from the digital world, quite the contrary. I concentrate my energies to use my creativity to maintain my presence on http://numericcitizen.me as well as on Flickr, Vimeo and Twitter. For those who only go through Facebook to give or take your news, I will miss you.
To Facebook I say: good bye toxic friend.
…eventually they left like everybody else and nobody would go there and then the bar would close. This is a story of many popular bars. They come, they go. Social places have their own life and their own death for one reason or another. Facebook, is social place that eventually will become a thing of the past. Last year (2018) was the year Facebook fucked up big time. They won’t recover easily if at all from this. So people re leaving… like me… but this won’t cause Facebook to disappear. Reading this piece from M.G. Siegler “F*ckedbook” on Medium:
(…) it wouldn’t be a mass exodus that would kill Facebook, it would be the younger generations who don’t use it in the first place.
Ask any teenager or young adult where they spend time online? Snapchat and… Instagram. The latter is owned by Facebook yet, I suspect it isn’t as data hungry as Facebook, the social network is. Many people who stay on Facebook are passive, they don’t contribute much. If they want to get in touch with their friends, they use something else than Facebook. Recently, Zuckerberg said one of their biggest competitor is iMessage on iOS by far. This is one of the ways people are escaping Facebook and this is how Facebook will slowly and painfully die.
Excellent story here by By Jason Koebler : We Should Replace Facebook With Personal Websites. Facebook is not the Internet. I want to puke each time I stumble on a company “website” which is in fact a Facebook page. I hate Facebook pages. I hate Facebook period.. I’m going to quit in the next few weeks. My friends don’t know it yet. I’m writing my last post for Facebook these days. I don’t know yet when I’m going to pull the plug but I’m going to do it.
This blog is in part all about leaving Facebook and regaining control of my numeric social life. And I could’t be happier. People who want to give me some news they can reach me by email, by phone or even my blog. If I want to get some news from old friends I know how to reach for them because I have their email or their phone numbers. Those are my closest friends. I care about them and I hope they care about me. For the others? It is noise on the line. Simple as that. As I get older, I make more choices et select what is more valuable to me. Quitting Facebook is part of all this. Being here also.
As a numeric citizen (this blog name), I aim to stay independent and free. I don’t want to be a product of some big entity like what is Facebook now. So I stay away from it. Yes I still have a Facebook account but I’m not active on it. I’m silent after being somewhat active back in the years when it all started. And reading this Wired article, “The Truth About Facebook’s Fake Quest To Connect the World“, I’m even more happy and confortable with my decision.
