My relationship with Facebook, like for many of us, has been challenging to say the least, especially in the past year. On the plus side, it has kept me in touch with friends and family overseas. It has helped me to feel less lonely. It has given me the chance to join groups and learn a lot from the exchanges that took place there, and promote my writing career.
In time, I’ve become more and more resistant to using it for reasons I’ll explain later. I’ve kept it till now because I hoped it would help me to reach more and more potential readers. However, organic growth is non-existent, paying for ads is not worth it as I’m traditionally published, and giving money to an organisation like Facebook makes me gag. Why? For starters, its co-founder Mark Zuckerberg described us users as “dumb fucks” in an instant messaging conversation in 2003; and in 2009 he lied in a BBC interview when asked whether he would sell our Facebook users’ info: MZ: "This is their information. They own it." BBC: "And you won’t sell it?" MZ: "No! Of course not." Truth be told, I used its ads 2 years ago for a few months to build a mailing list. At the time, though, I didn’t know what I know now. When I heard that even Elon Musk deleted his Tesla’s FB account, I thought that I had no more excuses to postpone the deletion of my own account. So, here are my reasons:
Onavo Protect (which Facebook owns), is a VPN which, instead of protecting data from prying eyes, you guessed it, spies on its owners. Another example: FB has a patent, approved a year ago, for “Techniques for emotion detection and content delivery.” The patent “proposes capturing images of the user through smartphone or laptop cameras, even when the user is not actively using the camera.By visually tracking a user’s facial expression, Facebook aims to monitor the user’s emotional reactions to different types of content.” Why does it do that? To analyse our facial expressions so it can deliver more engaging/pleasing content to us. Maybe that’s why Zuckerberg has a tape on the webcam and microphone of his laptop, as you can see in photos and many videos, like on this video.
Department of Defence-funded program to use the military to quell civil unrest also participated in the study [the psychological experiment I discussed above].” (Source: RT) I know what you’re thinking. All big corporations are just as bad and we can’t win. I beg to differ. I have cancelled my Google+ account, don’t use Chrome anymore and rarely use Gmail. Since I’ve discovered that Microsoft reads all my emails, I’m using the Swiss Protonmail instead for all important correspondence because it encrypts my emails. I use Firefox and Tor instead of Edge and Chrome. However, I’m becoming more and more concerned about Firefox so I may drop it and use DuckDuckGo. Moreover, I have a tape on my laptop and smartphone webcam, and plan to put it on the microphones too. I have disconnected my Smart TV from the net and put a tape on its camera for good measure. And smart meters will gain access to my home only over my dead body, like Alecsa and the other spying devices similar to it. The countdown has started: in 2 weeks I’ll delete my FB account. Just enough time to inform my connections. I’ll still be on Twitter, although I’m planning to leave it too, and on Gab.ai @AngelaGuidolin What about you, dear Seeker, when are you going to #deletefacebook?
0 Comments
|
Categories
All
Archives
December 2018
|