On this blog and others I write, I have criticised Facebook on numerous occasions. The reason for this is simply that Facebook has become so huge and dominant that they are becoming bullies who suck vast amounts of information out of us without our consent and impose very draconian and tyrannical controls over the use of their platform. Facebook will now collect anything and everything they can get about you and I do not for one instant believe their claims that they do not sell any of the information they collect.
In the last few months numerous computer algorithms that they are using to detect abuse and hacking have tripped me up on numerous occasions and I simply do not believe any of the claims Facebook has made about these situations, like that there was suspicious activity on my account on multiple occasions recently, forcing me to change my password three times in as many weeks, or recently, it was claimed my computer was automatically scraping people’s profiles. This resulted in a block for one week that was just supposed to stop me viewing profile information, that in actuality that stopped me from being able to read a lot of messages off people’s timelines, pages or groups. This is because Facebook’s code is so full of bugs or limitations that one feature not working properly can have unexpected consequences in other features or functionality. I had this problem before which was the reason I deleted my first personal profile and created a new one a couple of years ago.
If I look on the internet to see what other people are saying, there seem to be a lot of automated profile disablings going on and the biggest issue for all of us is we have absolutely NO RIGHTS on the Facebook platform. Their approach is shoot first and ask questions later. You cannot get anything addressed properly, you cannot actually have a conversation with a support person at any time. So because of all these recent issues it is time like never before for me to look at really do I need Facebook at all. Since I have always had everything I could on other platforms like Blogger and WordPress and some websites, there isn’t really much of an issue….and now with Groups.io available for groups, essentially a new version of Yahoo Groups, there is even less need for FB. This at a time when Facebook is still creating and adding new features like Messenger Rooms. Whilst I also have considerable disdain for Google, they along with almost everyone else are far easier to work with and I would rather use their own bulk chat capability than MR.
This time around I have gone a lot further than at any other point I can name in unpublishing nearly every page that I have set up myself, unliking a number of interest pages that I follow, leaving some unimportant groups, etc. I expect to sign up to Neighbourly probably to follow neighbourhood concerns. I now only have a few groups I am looking at and only two pages active at the moment. My blogs will continue but without the automatic Facebook syndication. Whether the pages will be removed altogether I haven’t determined but it is possible that is going to happen. I already have plenty of other platforms other than Facebook and so I really don’t need FB for a lot of things overall. So we shall see how that goes.