« Walking away from Facebook

This is the second post, of 3 on walking away from social media, inspired by this article.

I’ve been on Facebook since 2007, I am not sure when it launched in Europe, but that felt like early days, just as for Twitter I remember the first days wondering what to do with it, as there were not so many people on it.

In the years I’ve used it less or more, but here’s the thing: apart from keeping in touch with a friend or two I actually don’t see any value of the platform.

I also recently found that you cannot remove the Facebook app from your android phone, I find this utterly appalling: all you can do is disable it.

I could have got in touch by email or reaching out people by phone.

I have (had) about 350 ‘friends’ on Facebook, would I call all of them friends in real life? Of course not, I’ve already removed a few of them, people I’ve met once or twice, ‘friends’ from elementary school. Why are we even friends? Just to see the counter getting higher? To steal a ‘like’ on some silly share?

Sean Parker recently admitted that Facebook exploits human psychology, I don’t think it was on Zuckerberg initial idea but it’s clear that in the years they manage to optimise for addiction rather than user experience.

How easy is to remove everything from your profile?

Very hard. The best extension that I’ve found is Social Book Post Manager but deleting stuff is not easy. 
Part of my problem was an issue that I had with Spotify, between 2011 and 2012 it was posting (but I couldn’t see) on my timeline what I was listening, so the number of posts to delete is too big for the extension to handle. 
A lot of retries, left the laptop on to delete all weekend, and my timeline is now empty. Relief. 
The extension seems to handle about 5000 deletes, it’s either a memory leak in Chrome or the extension itself. 
But then there’s tags and likes: deleting everything from Facebook is basically mission impossible.

You might wonder why deleting and not simply de-activate the account, well, even if I am sure that Facebook holds multiple copies of my data on different data stores, at least I gave it a shot, plus, I am not deleting my account, it will stay there, empty as if I joined yesterday.

Other bits that are concerning on Facebook are the apps: I used to clean up the authorised apps (or logins) from time to time, I’ve found so many apps that I never use, those 3rd parties through use your data, as much as you let them.

I’ve also changed my privacy settings to ‘paranoid’ levels, nobody can add me, nobody can find me, tag me, write on my timeline.

Backing up before deletion was easy, to be fair with Facebook, and it comes as a nice HTML browsable archive of all your pics and posts, way more easy to browse than the actual site, no advertising, no privacy issues, it’s on your laptop.

Looking back at my Facebook history was also a very interesting experience, it kind of witnesses a shift from text (my early posts were just text, facebook went just live in 2007 with their mobile site) to images and then more and more shares.