> Nobody forces anyone to visit that ad invested shit hole.
That's a little simplistic. In the social media space there are no widely-used competitors to Facebook. Companies that could be called competitors in scale - Twitter, Tumblr, Youtube, Snapchat - target different demographics and use-cases[1]. You're not likely to find too many older family members on Snapchat for example. Even so, Facebook also owns several former such competitors like WhatsApp and Instagram.
I try to avoid Facebook like the plague, but it gets harder every year. Just about my entire extended family currently uses WhatsApp for messaging and phone calls to save money on overseas phone bills. I'm trying to push them towards Signal - but it's like pushing a boulder uphill because all of their friends use WhatsApp also.
[1] None of these vet their ads with any rigor either, by the way. If I'm looking for a company that uses personal information and displays ads carefully and ethically such a beast doesn't exist.
For me it is the exact different. More and more people are available outside of the Facebook eco system because at this point the media conception is bad enough that you don't need to argument anymore.
Due to hangouts we are all connected in a social media like but private environment anyway. This only works because nobody i know has a iPhone anymore tho.
Literally the only reason I used facebook were low effort marketing actions. However they widely lost their effect the last years.
Tldr: from my point of view it never was easier to not use Facebook.
And I highly believe everyone can just not use it if they actually wanted to.
Except for all of the non-user user tracking they do with shadow profiles and their omnipresence on the web. Like too many things nowadays with tech and finance you don't have to have done anything to be affected by what these companies do. "TOS" doesn't even apply in most cases since many people don't even use the darn service.
But the info you post on Facebook.com is not the only place FB is getting your data. They purchase Credit Card data, follow you around the web with pixels and Facebook login, allegedly track cell phone calls (I don't know enough about this), encourage people to install their VPN (thereby knowing everything you're doing on your device).
I do agree that the easiest thing is to delete your account there is a lot more to it than what you engage with on their products.
You can opt out on all of these. So I don't see the bigger issue actually. The Internet is no cuddle place. Protection always was in the hands of the user.
I guess we're slowing reaching a point where we're about to find out how much all that legalese is actually worth - every user agrees to share their data, but when companies use it in such horrendous ways, are we going to accept it as a society? Just like EULAs are worth pretty much nothing in EU, I wonder if these "I agree to Facebook scanning my texts/calls/pictures for all intentions and purposes" declarations can actually stand up to scrutiny.
I too used facebook until a year ago or so for ads/work. However i dont see why anyone would care about baking and holiday pictures of their extended family.
That's a little simplistic. In the social media space there are no widely-used competitors to Facebook. Companies that could be called competitors in scale - Twitter, Tumblr, Youtube, Snapchat - target different demographics and use-cases[1]. You're not likely to find too many older family members on Snapchat for example. Even so, Facebook also owns several former such competitors like WhatsApp and Instagram.
I try to avoid Facebook like the plague, but it gets harder every year. Just about my entire extended family currently uses WhatsApp for messaging and phone calls to save money on overseas phone bills. I'm trying to push them towards Signal - but it's like pushing a boulder uphill because all of their friends use WhatsApp also.
[1] None of these vet their ads with any rigor either, by the way. If I'm looking for a company that uses personal information and displays ads carefully and ethically such a beast doesn't exist.