Getting rid of Facebook

Hi,

I’m in the process of getting rid of Facebook.

I’ve already sanitised my account earlier this year.

I’ve been able to migrate oauth services utilising Facebook (and Google) to log in to standalone accounts.

The only thing where I didn’t succeed, is Spotify, because I signed up with Facebook at some point on Spotify. Spotify helpdesk were able to unlink my Spotify account from Facebook to a new account but this account wouldn’t have Premium. I had Premium for free via my ISP, but they no longer give those vouchers so I was unable to link it to my new Spotify account.

Long story short, following this trick I was able to unlink my Facebook account from Spotify. It basically gives me a number as userID (or e-mail) to log in now.

Hopefully it helps someone else who has the same goal as I had, and we can also have a general discussion with tips on how to get rid of Facebook.

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Getting rid of Facebook is always a good idea I think.

I deleted my Facebook account several years ago, because I didn’t give me any benefits, but sticked to WhatsApp for a long time for obvious reasons.
WhatsApp is owned by Facebook since 2014. Since then I’ve been thinking about getting rid of WhatsApp as well. But it is kind of hard when you’ve been using it for so long and it’s the easiest way to contact many of your friends. It surely was the killer app for private messaging years ago but obviously developed into a wrong direction.

Finally, I’ve been deleting my WhatsApp profile and the app 2 days ago and now I’m happy seeing your post here in this forum. Until now it didn’t hurt. Many of my closest friends and family moved to Signal during the years, some of them because my conviction. Others moved to Telegram by themselves, which I’m using as well. The rest will have to live with being contacted by legacy SMS :smiley:

EDIT: One thing I would like to mention regarding deletion of WhatsApp. The system will kick you out of all groups you were member of, so the group members will know you won’t read any messages in that group anymore. But for private one-on-one chats the other person will not recognize that you left. Sending messages to a dead account is still possible, but the messages will never be received of course.
So, if you have many contacts that don’t know you’re leaving, I suggest setting an appropriate status message before deleting the account. E.g. “Please DO NOT write anymore, I deleted my WhatsApp account. Please use Signal or SMS instead”.

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Congratulations guys! It’s not so easy to get rid of Facebook products. I did it last year, and I’ve never regretted it since then.

Regarding Facebook, I switched to the decentralised and federated social network diaspora*.

Regarding WhatsApp, I switched to Signal and SMS. However, after some investigations on Signal centralisation policy and dependency on Google libraries, I’ve decided to use XMPP/Jabber instead (the Conversations app is quite good). And for SMS, I recommend the Silence application to encrypt them.

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Almost none of my friends use Signal, and they’re too stupid/stubborn to switch to it. I just assume that what I write over WhatsApp is profiled by Facebook and my government, and therefore not private (if one of the people uses iCloud or Google Drive backups the keys are also in the cloud). If they sell my data though, I might sue them in civil court here (and I hope people will do the same to Facebook given they gave Spotify and such illegal access). I never agreed to such.

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Facebook and Google are not our friends. Twitter too has been used against us all. Some great tech guys (unpaid) have been fighting these monopoly’s demanding they play fair. Just a few names of the good guys fighting our (the public’s) corner. Prof Jonathan Albright.- Prof David Carroll.- Paul-Olivier Dehaye. - Jason Kint.

Chris Vickery (Upguard) & Ashkan Soltani also. If you are involved in tech, you really need to read their work & findings. Most important.

Yes it’s very complicated to convince friends and family to change their digital habits! I found most people are generally lazy, or don’t see the point, to switch to another habit, especially if it’s related to privacy issues. They usually invoke the “nothing to hide” argument.

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How Apps on Android Share Data with Facebook (even if you don’t have a Facebook account)

https://privacyinternational.org/appdata

(Feel free to edit this post to make it more accurate.)

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Nice to hear your experiences quitting Facebook and Whatsapp @JeroenH, @anon89700630 and @Freubert! I am facilitator of the Humane Tech Community and we have a lot of discussion about this topic (like here).

Many topics on our forum deal with harms of digital technology, i.e. at the software level. I am a big fan of Fairphone (but do not own one yet :flushed:) and part of my interest stems from the fact that FP is a prime example of humane hardware ! I do not know about many other hardware examples that truly classify as ‘humane’.

I’d like to give more attention to Fairphone within our community, and maybe you - or other FP community members - would like to share your experience with the device (especially reasons for switching), on our forum. Maybe here:

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To everybody thinking about getting rid of Factbug, better do it fast:

I somehow can’t believe that Fairphone will be one of these “several Android smartphone makers” - but then again they share a bureau building with FB.

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Well, at least they’re one level above them, in many terms :wink:
But I agree that this is concerning, however I think FP can’t do anything about it, since this deal was probably made between Facebook and G00gle and therefore if FP doesn’t want to include it, they’ll maybe lose their G00gle-certification, which would be fatal for a phone company (not that I would bother me personally though…)

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If I look at the article it looks like it is the manufacturers (Samsung, Huawei) who are partnering up with FB, not Google. Let’s just hope that FP doesn’t go this route, I’m already in doubt about them advertising on FB (= supporting FB), which in my eyes is definitely not ethical.

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Well, I think you should “Friendface” to talk about Facebook without writing the name. Have you seen the show The IT Crowd?
Here is the fake ad for Friendface in the show:

And here is why it got so popular:

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You might be able to at least reduce this by installing an app like Blokada. I recently installed it on a few (partly new) smartphones. The dispkay of the number of blicked requests was a real eye-opener, too.

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You know when you open a new web page and you get the obligatory data policy window? How do I block just Facebook? Normally, if I’m allowed, I go straight to ‘third party partners’ or something like that, say no to Facebook, and then agree to absolutely everything else. Are there any other Facebook names that I have to block as well?

CookieAutodelete
uMatrix
Pi-Hole or uBlock Origin

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I have none, I dumped them, but it’s not so easy to dump my children, so I keep WhatsApp. Really who give a $£![. It just a joke.

You soul is free but your body/mind definitely isn’t so give it a break.

Love and best wishes to the young who see a future where they are free.

I am engaged in the Delta Chat project. Basically, it is an open-source messenger app based on email, including PGP encryption via Autocrypt. It worked fine during the recent blackout of Facebook and Whatsapp…

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