[richsherwood]

I’m just so done with Facebook. I know this is said time and time again here on HN but Facebook (and google) provide a lot of stress to me for little value in return. The majority of the stress comes from always having to be “on” and watching for some ambiguously worded pop up, or constantly changing privacy settings, or tracking pixels around the net. I spend more energy trying to run away from fb and google then I so using their service. It’s constant and fatiguing.

[sova]

Abstinence does little to help the masses who are still using it. We need good regulation and laws to make it decent, not just abandon our friends and family on it who may not be as aware of the perils

[richsherwood]

I agree with you on that. A service such as social media (the connecting part, not the advertising part) could easily be seen as a necessary service being that we are all social creatures by design. But at this point in time it’s a massive Wild West where the laws haven’t been able to keep up with the advances in tech. So now we are stuck in this situation where every step you take is one in which you have to be very careful if you don’t want to have your personal habits exploited against you. The truth is I have been doing my best to educate the people close to me but up until very recently, with the Facebook scandals, it all fell on deaf ears. And maybe that’s another reason why I do find it so unnerving, as people are aware of these things going on but either don’t care enough and in some cases fully support their extremely private data being used on them for advertising. It’s also very conflicting because in this day and age of big data, real change could be made but all we seem to hear and experience is the opposite of positive change in this era. (I’m not normally this much of a negative guy but this topic specifically makes me feel very powerless)

[sova]

The European laws are actually having an effect. Provided we can get the old hats in Congress to understand the right to privacy and the right to be forgotten, we may be able to curb the tide of mass surveillance that's currently being exploited to make more money and sell more goods

[KozmoNau7]

I've cut down, and only give Facebook a cursory check once a week. It's very nice to not constantly have it on my mind, and I don't seem to be missing much.

[richsherwood]

Did you find you had some hard habits to break? Or was it a smooth transition for you?

[KozmoNau7]

Yes, absolutely. The urge to juuuuust give Facebook a quick check is there, it's muscle memory almost, and it takes a conscious effort to break it.

I uninstalled the FB app ages ago, and I've removed all shortcuts to FB from the start pages in my browsers. That helps a bit. I've also set Cookie Autodelete to not allow any FB cookies, so I have to log in every time, presenting a further small hurdle I have to cross. It's a very small thing, but it makes me more aware of what I'm doing, so I can stop myself.