Facebook is not going to break up and re-sell WhatsApp & Instagram anytime soon
It’s up to the user’s to defend for themselves, you are at their mercy when fighting for privacy on a platform that lives by selling your data. Breaking up? - a silo like Facebook unfortunately controls our social relations. Facebook hacks into our social life: emotions, the fun moments we share & with our friends and family is associated with Facebook. It gets harder to leave such a platform, where you’ll miss out [FOMO] unless you get others to join you to use alternate platforms.
That being said — you’ve got to step-foot and take charge of your own digital-life. If you don’t, it’ll only go downhill. The more you use Facebook, the harder it gets to quit.
Deep-rooted in our vocabulary
If you’re Indian: you’ve probably heard these things quite often and can relate to it
- At a party?—“Cool, what’s your Insta? I’ll tag you”
- “What’s your WhatsApp number?”—No one cares about phone numbers any more. Some people think: I possibly gave them the wrong number because they couldn’t find my number on WhatsApp.
- “I’ll add you to the school group”—by group they mean a WhatsApp group, where you need to signup for WhatsApp with a phone-number to read messages/updates, regular members are not allowed to post/reply to messages: only the admin can, because.. it’s.. uh.. WhatsApp.
- Some schools force children to use Facebook (WhatsApp) and everyone just assumes you’re in that school-group, where the teacher posts updates. Our generation has skipped email-chains and notice boards.
Facebook’s true customers
You’d be surprised to know that we aren’t Facebook’s true users. Facebook like Google, is an advertising company. Have you ever met a Facebook user who’s paid for their account? That’d be bizarre.
The advertiser is the true customer: whom they sell user-attention
How are they so good at it? It’s because they collect an exorbitant amount of user-data, including analytics, cursor movements, run social experiments to improve their algortihms. Their real goal is to make you spend more time watching ads on the platform, and improve ad-click through rates!
I’m Deleting my Facebook account today: including WhatsApp & Instagram – the 2 apps owned by Facebook
Why?—Privacy matters, Facebook will always be an advertising company who profits off our data. I want to use better platforms, not based off of mining user-data for ads.
To friends and family reading this article:
“I do not consent to anyone sharing my photos, texts & data with Facebook anymore. I am deleting my Facebook accounts including ‘WhatsApp and Instagram’ Please purge our chats if you can or assume Facebook will keep it forever. Treat all our previous-chats as ‘public domain’. Read more at: polarhive.ml/fb and where you can find me”
This was the message I sent out to friends and family a week before deleting my accounts.
Before I made the switch I’ll admit I was addicted, juggling between Instagram and WhatsApp.
One reason: DMs the reason I tried Instagram in the first place, I didn’t have a phone number and used it as a replacement for WhatsApp. I could text anyone just by logging in on my friend’s phone in school and go home and continue the chat. 2018-19 was pretty cool!
The cringy catchphrase the naive 13 year old me bought into — ‘Dude just download it, cuz everyone’s using it’
D-Day
5th of April. I type deletefacebook.com.
It leads me to the ‘Delete my Facebook account’, there was a lot of tiny-font-text and other legal jargon that you’d have to read which makes it hard to export your data. I also tried to cleanup some old posts that I made just in case Facebook doesn’t really purge my data.
Infact, you can not instantly delete your account. Pretty zucc wants to lock me in for 30 more days. I made use of those 30 days: I posted Instagram/WhatsApp Stories and setting up auto-reply in the WhatsApp Business app with a link to this blog post: polarhive.ml/fb and a goodbye message.
I uploaded a short-video on YouTube just for fun! to say that I’m no longer zucc’d 🦎
Find me on better, federated social-networks
UPD: Here’s a chronological timeline of recent Facebook mishaps that I started logging after I deleted my Facebook account.