Facebook was the first thing that I got rid off. To be honest, I had begun my journey of getting out of Facebook much earlier. For different reasons though.
To me, Facebook became a source of negativity. Whenever I logged into Facebook, my news feed was filled only with positive sides of people – their vacation pics, their weekends, their selfies, checkins at restaurants and so on.
Soon, I started feeling as if everyone else apart from me were having a better life. And I started questioning myself with some of the choices that I made in my life. (The realization came after I quit facebook – that, in these social networks, people only want to display their positive sides. While in the real world, life happens!!)
Anyways, at some point, Facebook became a major source of stress in my life that I decided to something about it – cut down the time that I spend on Facebook. I was using Chrome as a browser (not anymore) back then and I installed an extension called StayFocusd (if you are using Firefox, you can try LeechBlock) through which you can limit the amount of time you spend on a website.
This was back in 2014 where Facebook mobile apps haven’t really taken off. So, if you are going to do this today, you may want to find similar tools for mobile apps.
So, I set some pretty aggressive targets like “10 minutes in a day” when I started. And the result?
I was over riding the settings very often to extend it by few more minutes 🙂 I guess that’s how it works with every addiction. But soon, I was well under that 10 minutes target. And eventually I stopped visiting Facebook. The constant interruption by the extension and the extra work that I had to do to extend the “timer” started having effects on my addiction. Eventually brain seems to have given up.
A few months later, I first de-activated my FB account and eventually deleted the account. I wasn’t able to hit the “Delete” button for few days – the fear of letting go kept me from doing that. But eventually I hit that button.
Its been close to 5 years now since I hit that “Delete” button and I would say that I am not missing anything.
Those blue Like and Share buttons that used to follow me everywhere – they have disappeared completely.
More importantly, in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal (if you haven’t seen, I highly recommend you to watch the documentary “The Great Hack“), I was relieved that I got rid of Facebook much earlier.
I could really see Facebook’s impact in dividing our society at large. We are more divided today as we create our own “networks” and those networks’ intelligence (gained through continous tracking of us) constantly feed stories that satisfies our “confirmation biases”. We no longer spend time to learn about other sides to a story to make our opinions.
Facebook tracks even without an Account
While getting rid of Facebook relieved me of the negativity, what I realized later was that Facebook continues to track even if I didn’t have an account with them. If any of the websites that I visit have integrated with Facebook (for advertising, Like/Share buttons, Pixel Tracking), then all those websites feed data back to Facebook irrespective of me having an FB account or not.
So what are your options?
- Tweak your Browser’s settings to block “Cross Site and Social Media Trackers”
- Configure your Browser to send a “Do Not Track” signal. Websites are “supposed” to honor this setting but its entirely upto them. Neverthless its good to have this turned on by default
- Install “Privacy Badger” which will learn if “Do Not Track” is not being honored by websties and starts automatically blocking those trackers
- Install “Facebook Container” if you want to continue to use Facebook but limit their tracking. This will isolate all your Facebook activity into a separate container so that Facebook doesn’t track you across other websites that you may visit
- You should really ask yourself if you need that Facebook app on your phone
While I took some of these steps, I am pretty confident that Facebook will continue to find ways to track me – after all they employ thousands of best technical minds in the world!! But, by large I am kind of at peace with respect to Facebook. I don’t miss it at all. I don’t feel that I am not connected to people. In fact I feel better connected with people that matter to me – in the real world.
May be there are still some invisible trackers that continue to send data to Facebook. However, I feel I am not being followed as it used to be earlier. May be its because of few other things that I have done as well – which I will share in the next set of posts.
If you do use Facebook extensively, you must evaluate some of your choices. At least understand what data might be gathered about you and if you are OK with it. For example, if you have Facebook installed in your mobile device, you should be aware that at a minimum the following is being collected by Facebook:
- A lot of wealthier data about your device – OS, times of the day you are active, deviceId, Contacts Identifiers, SMS, Call logs, Wi-Fi connections
- Location data including which stores you visit offline
- What all apps you have installed in your device
- What all apps your FB friends have installed on their devices
- Tying all those data points with other Facebook owned apps – Whatsapp (metadata as data is end-to-end encrypted in Whatsapp), Instagram
All these are data points on top of data that you voluntarily give to Facebook – your profile information, pictures, posts, status updates, etc, etc.
The next step was to look at a much larger beast in our lives!!!
CloudStaq 
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