Yes, You
Should Delete Facebook
I deleted my
Facebook a few weeks ago, but it started scaring me last March.
A friend and I ran into one of his
investors in a café in San Francisco, and the investor asked if we’d heard of a Soylent
competitor, Ample. He
was curious what we thought of it, and of meal replacement companies in
general.
I hadn’t heard of Ample, but I shared my concerns with Soylent, and why I personally
would never put my money into one of those companies. My friend, for the most
part, agreed.
The conversation ended and we left. I didn’t think
about Ample again, look it up, or talk about it online with anyone. But less than 24 hours
later, there were ads for it in my Instagram feed.
It was spooky, to say the least. I was
used to getting ads for products whose sites I’d visited, and for products I’d
mentioned on Facebook, but products that I’d only talked about? That was weird.
After a bit of digging, I discovered I
wasn’t alone. There were dozens of stories online about people getting freaked
out by ads that seem like they
only could have come from Facebook eavesdropping on their conversations.
Now to be clear, this probably isn’t happening.
It would be a massive amount of work and data processing for marginally better
ad targeting. Like the Wiredarticle says, Facebook doesn’t need to
listen to your
conversations.
They can target you well enough
without it.
Cause for Concern
That’s meant to be reassuring: they’re
not listening to you because they don’t have to. But if anything, that should
be even scarier. Facebook knows so much about you they can make you believe they’re
listening to your personal conversations. They have so much data about you
they can send you ads that have an uncanny relevance to what is going on in the
real world.
Imagine, for a moment, that you had a
friend with this level of knowledge about you. Someone who knows everywhere you
go, what you like, what you fear, what you want, who you hang out with, how
happy you are at any given moment.
They could be an amazing boon to your
life. Or they could be a nightmare. It all depends on what they do with the
information, and how well you can trust them with it.
Now imagine the friend can use their
information about you to make money, say by manipulating your decisions to
benefit them. And imagine they’re the kind of morally bankrupt person who would
take advantage of their friend this way.
What would their incentives look like?
Since they can make money by
manipulating your decisions, they’ll try to manipulate your decisions. And
since they can better manipulate your decisions by learning more about you, the
more they’ll want to learn. If they want the greatest success for themselves, they will
necessarily have to manipulate you as much as possible and collect as much data
on you as possible.
Source: https://medium.com/s/story/yes-you-should-delete-facebook-heres-why-bc623a3b4625