“Walt Mossberg is far from alone in giving up on Facebook,” Daniel Victor reports for The New York Times. “But as a leading technology journalist who has spent decades chronicling the impact of Silicon Valley’s policies, his exit from the social network speaks louder than most.”
“Mr. Mossberg, a veteran of The Wall Street Journal, The Verge and Recode, said on Monday he would be deactivating his Facebook account, along with the Facebook-owned Messenger and Instagram apps,” Victor reports. “‘I am doing this — after being on Facebook for nearly 12 years — because my own values and the policies and actions of Facebook have diverged to the point where I’m no longer comfortable here,’ he wrote on Facebook.”
“While Mr. Mossberg didn’t list any specific complaints on Monday, his history of public writing left little doubt that his ire was aimed largely at the company’s policies and actions on user privacy,” Victor reports. “Facebook did not immediately return a message seeking comment.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Better late than never!
Unfortunately for Mossberg, FaceBook already has all of the personal data, and then some, that they’ll ever need on him in order to profit off of him.
We use FaceBook as an RSS feed. Our CMS automatically reposts our article headlines and links them back to our website. That is our only interaction with Facebook and has been our only interaction with Facebook for years. We deleted our personal accounts [which we opened only so we could understand the Facebook phenomenon] many years ago.
If you want to share photos and videos with friends, text them using Apple’s end-to-end encrypted iMessage service. You need to control your social networking, not cede it to a gatekeeper like Facebook. – MacDailyNews, March 19, 2018
As we’ve been advising for years now: Delete FaceBook!
As we’ve written previously, “If you trust Mark Zuckerberg to be the keeper of your photos, contacts, political views, religious beliefs, etc., you’re batshit insane.”
Instant messages sent by Mark Zuckerberg during Facebook’s early days, reported by Business Insider, May 13, 2010:
Zuckerberg: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuckerberg: Just ask
Zuckerberg: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend’s Name]: What? How’d you manage that one?
Zuckerberg: People just submitted it.
Zuckerberg: I don’t know why.
Zuckerberg: They “trust me”
Zuckerberg: Dumb fucksSEE ALSO:
UK lawmakers publish internal Facebook emails that reveal use of free iOS ‘spyware’ VPN and more – December 5, 2018
Somebody call 9-1-1!
I’m with Walt. Haven’t cancelled my account, but my activities on the site are down about 95%. Grew increasingly uncomfortable with the entire ecosystem, the partisan bickering and the fact I never understood the algorithms they used to produce my feed.
The realization that I spent hours interacting with bots, spammers, scammers and Russian hackers was the final straw for me.
Apple needs to create a social media site… that extols privacy.
Never joined. No regrets.
I wish we could get other organizations that are of value to us to toss FB.
Perhaps Apple should jump in to supplant FB with an ios only version?
I only go there to post my bowel movements results. Thats how valuable FB is. Agreed?
I would like to know how to do this. I decide over a year ago not to use it for anything meaningful. I thank people who send birthday wishes but that’s about it. Would like to know how to turn it off completely.
While I haven’t closed my account, I’ve stopped posting my exercise activity there – now only on Twitter. That was all I was ever posting in the first place. Facebook majorly helped the Russians skew the 2016 election results. I will never forgive them for that.
FutureMedia, you are so stuck in the past it isn’t funny.