Unravelling

Why can't I quit creepy services?

A long time ago, I deleted my Facebook account. Then, because of FOMO, I came crawling back.

Lately my Facebook use has been in steep decline. It's not just me. Nearly half of all young people have uninstalled Facebook from their phones.

Students don't want to work there anymore, and those who already work there, are much less happy to do so (non paywall link).

Media blame privacy issues.

Privacy was the reason why I quit the first time, but not this time. This time, I ... just don't use it. Facebook doesn't feel relevant any more. In an attempt to fix this, Facebook changed their algorithm this year. All that Buzzfeed brain teasing had pushed away human interactions that felt meaningful.

It was too little, too late. Those personal relationships had already moved to Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. The three latter are owned by Facebook, and the founders of Instagram and WhatsApp have since quit (perhaps even taking massive stock losses in doing so) due to privacy disagreements.

Koum, who will leave before his stock award fully vests, could be losing out on as much as $1 billion

So if privacy really was the reason why people quit Facebook, people should - like the founder of WhatsApp - be just as eager to quit Instragram and WhatsApp. And of course Messenger, which is Facebook both in name and service.

Surveillance isn't causing the mass exodus from Facebook. It might be a factor, but I don't think people care that much.

They don't even think about it that much. I sometimes tell people that Google Maps know where there is a traffic jam because Google sees that all those Android phones are moving slower than normal. When people hear this, you can see that they are starting to get a sense of how much Google is tapped in.

I sometimes tell people that by solving those Google tasks that prove you are not a machine, you're also training the Google machine:

reCAPTCHA makes positive use of this human effort by channeling the time spent solving CAPTCHAs into annotating images and building machine learning data sets. This in turn helps improve maps and solve hard AI problems.

When they hear this, they start to realize that Google always has two agendas: the service to you, and the service to them. This is OK, the problem is that you always know what you get in the deal, but you very rarely know what you give.

Yes, I've also tried to quit Google.

I got a new e-mail address. I switched to Duck Duck Go and Startpage.com for search. But I just can't escape Google.

While Facebook used to be the web of people, Google is the web of services. I can't quit Google without quitting the internet - and my job.

By having a lot of service, it becomes really hard to quit Google. All you need to do is to use one service, and then Google can build a profile of you.

You don't even need to have an account. By reading news or visiting sites with Google AdWords, Google is probably building a profile on you. That's why, if you live in the EU, you have to answer all those annoying privacy pop ups. It's so that Google - and other ad services - can track your moves.

Facebook (the service) is dying because the social web is being rewoven on new services. It was born in the pre smart phone era. Back then you were social by typing a few choice words on you laptop when you were online.

The biggest problem with chat was that you had to be online at the same time. With the smart phones, you're always online.

The big problem with sharing photos was that you had to do a lot of work uploading those photos to Flickr or something similar. With smart phones, your phone became a camera. That made it really easy to share photos.

Facebook (the company) will survive because it owns the new social web services.

The more services Facebook (the company) can hook you with, the harder it will be for you to quit them.

So no one is leaving Facebook. Not really. We're just changing from one Facebook service to another because the new one is a better smart phone fit.

17.11.2018