[dessant]

Facebook's concept of informed consent is a cynical joke, and we can only laud companies and governments that rein in on their bordeline-illegal practices.

I've recently signed up for Facebook to use Wit.ai, and have gone through account settings to lock down the account as much as possible. It took me about an hour to set everything to private in this new account, and I'm still not sure what would happen if I start posting on their platform.

The settings page is not the only place that needs to be checked if you mind your privacy, there will be a myriad of configuration options and barely discoverable controls that appear in different places on your profile, and remain hidden until you submit further content.

[ldrndll]

Careful. I opened a Facebook account to help my wife with administering FB ads for her business. Everything was fine, until I went through and locked down my privacy settings, and within 24 hours my account got suspended.I had to provide a phone number to unlock my account. Within a day or two it got suspended again. This time I had to upload a photo to unlock it. The cynic in me believes that this was just so that they had enough information to identify me and match me to my shadow profile.

Needless to say after that they declined to reinstate my account - without any recourse or right of reply - due to community policy violations. Given that my only contribution was managing ads - and my wife’s account remains unsuspended despite managing the same ads - I’m left drawing conclusions from my own anecdata that they very much don’t like having overly privacy focused accounts.

[dessant]

That is exactly what happened to my Facebook account, and it only got reinstated after this issue: https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues/30395

Though mine was probably locked solely because of the way I've metodically checked out every configuration option, and used Firefox with fingerprint protection enabled.

This whole ordeal made me realize that Facebook is sitting on personal data from possibly millions of profiles that are banned. I've read several reports about people logging in years after the account got suspended, and their personal data is still downloadable, but they are not offered further control of the data, such as deletion, which is illegal in the EU.

[akarma]

The most ridiculous part of Facebook’s anti-privacy crusade is that FB allows its employees to “lock their account,” making absolutely all information private / only visible to friends, even cover photos.

FB’s website claims the feature is “only available in some countries and on some devices,” but it’s BS, it’s actually an easy opt-in for employees.

It shows that FB understands the need for privacy, but only if you’ll help them spy on others.

[est31]

To be fair, from what I heard you need to have a facebook account in order to work there.

[akarma]

You do, but as the above commenter mentioned, you also need to have a Facebook account in order to be a customer of Facebook Ads, and for many other uses.

Purposely keeping that feature exclusive to employees shows that Facebook understands the desire for privacy, but only for those working for them.

[Nextgrid]

Facebook's take on privacy is also a joke. "Privacy" according to them is privacy from other users, but the concept of privacy from Facebook itself doesn't exist.

[rendaw]

When I had a facebook account (years ago) I would go through that hassle, and then a month later the settings would get reset and I'd have to do it again. I think there might have been some explanation like they were adding new privacy options or similar.