After due consideration, I deleted my FB account. Appropriately, as good salespeople who are always trying to take you in one more time, when you hit the final delete button, they bring you to the login page.
Just in case you changed your mind, y'know?
7 comments:
I'm sticking with it, for now. I doubt much that they gather from me can't be observed other ways, and any opinions I post are gathered under another banner. I have observed at least one site chosing to drop Facebook comment logging, however.
Groups are why I'm not leaving FB, yet. And it's mostly in groups that I'm getting what I originally joined for -- photos and news about grandchildren.
As for getting news, I don't think there are any reliable sources now. Perhaps there haven't been in a long long time. But who in their right mind would have EVER considered Facebook a news source? Please don't tell me that I'm the only one who considered it gossip venue when viewed "publicly".
I just looked up my friends list on Facebook. There are only 10 that I haven't met IRL. 90% of my Facebook friends are relatives.
Often, I've wondered if some of my relatives had their first internet experience on Facebook. So many of them are so internet naive. I remind myself that I was "online" for at least 5 years before the World Wide Web was available and at least 10 years before Facebook.
Also, in high school, I was staff on the student newspaper. I'll never forget covering a school board meeting and noticing the complete difference in my report and that of the daily newspaper. Apparently we "heard" different things and I've never trusted a news source since then. Even when I worked for that newspaper, I didn't believe anything that I didn't report myself. But that was 35 years ago... surely news is reliable now... right?
Donna - good comments. I also have a very high IRL to online only ratio, and I pretty aggressively unfollow (not unfriend) and block most political content on FB. I use it to keep up with relatives and my train hobby. I follow a couple of the local tv stations for news and weather but vety little of what I see in my feed is what I consider 'news' so I have the same puzzlement over people considering it a news source rather than a link to news gatherers. I've been an online since the late 1980s, reading blogs since 20001, long before FB. My scepticism regarding news reports has been growing markedly lately but it certainly began in the Reagan years when you could see the disjoint between observable events and the press reactions, and the growth of the press (remember Sam Donaldson) as the official voice of the opposition to Republicans. That became glaringly evident after Bill Clinton's election.
I've been relying heavily on my FB page in my campaign for a seat on the county's Commissioners Court. I have about 400 "friends," mostly just county residents interested in the periodic reports I post of things like Commissioners Court meetings. I also belong to several local groups containing 5K to 8K members, which is a large fraction of the population of this small rural county. My page is completely public. Anyone who likes can find out all kinds of things about me, which doesn't bother me in the least. It's a small county, where people were bound to know a lot of your business anyway, even if you weren't running for office. Also, I've just never been able to work up any passion about privacy. I've never felt that people were likely to learn much of importance about me even if I tried as hard as I could to communicate with them. What do I care if they know my phone number or email address? I've been making those as public as possible for decades, anyway, in case a relative, acquaintance, or potential client was trying to reach me. I wonder if I've been extraordinarily lucky? No harm has ever come to me as a result of any of this. I try not to say things in public I'd mind having repeated.
Texan99 -- I mostly agree about the privacy. I have an IRL friend who shreds junk mail because it has his address on it. I don't think he realizes that the postal service sells his address to these mailers and that since he owns his house, it's a matter of public record. However, I'd love to cut back on the number of spam emails and phone calls I get. Not because of privacy, just the irritation factor.
I'd really miss my FB groups. It would be clunky to go back to group emails to plan meetings and share information. Three are family only and even there, planning vacations and travel gets complicated. The others are volunteer groups.
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