Facebook – A Scott Odyssey

My Great Social Media Purge of 2019 (Part 1)

2020-01-09 by scott

In recent months i have been thinking (again) about my digital data in relation to my privacy. I have been thinking about what my objective is regarding keeping my digital data safe. From who, and why? This is topical because more and more details have been coming out about Facebook and other social media’s use and collection of data.

I have been pondering what my own personal next actions on my social media exposure was. Then I watched the Netflix Documentary The Great Hack. That movie reinforced to me that I am not able to justify keeping my some social media accounts. And the way I use others needs to change. First thing in my mind was do I keep or cancel Facebook. Even after scrubbing data off the account regularly there are just some things you cannot get rid of. I have been diligent not to post almost anything that is not already public. I just haven’t been 100% great at it all the time. The question that kept bothering me is what will I / can I do about it. That brought me to question what I was worried about? From there I started asking myself what my threat model.

I had to think for a while to figure out what is my threat model for data collected by social media companies. At first I just feel it is a bit creepy that any one company can have that much information on me. That is not a threat model. It just got me to further realise in this day and age there will be data about my life leaked to companies. What I do not want is one or a few companies having a huge collection of my life. That morphed my objective to see how can i minimise my data leakage so to speak. At the same time still getting value out of some of the services i use. That for me is the key. What am I really getting value out of? That is subjective to everyone. For me it came down to what is my social media use case? If I am going to keep hugging Twitter, Facebook, and even LinkedIn I should be clear to myself what my use case is of each of those services. Only then can I weigh the risks of what each platform collects on me. After that I can decide what I want to do about it. I use each platform and others for different reasons so each one has its own use case.

I got analyitcial and wrote up my own assesment of my use for each. As I wrote them out I realized this is more than one post. I will publish each as a post with their own summary of what i am going to do with the service. At present there are about 6 parts (this is part 1). First up on my list is Twitter.

This post is titled My Great Social Media Purge of 2019 (Part 1). I wrote it in the Fall of 2019. It is still very relevant however I only now am getting around to posting it.

Going Sort of Cold Turkey on Social Media

2018-07-10 by scott

For a while now I’ve been focused on personal productivity. I consider myself pretty organized already. I use personal kanban, organizing my thoughts in a database to track information. I have been trying to journal. Even with all that I have also been serious about how to continue to improve on my productivity. My dad always said work smarter not harder.

More recently over the past few months I have been reading a lot about mindfulness and ways to improve day-to-day happiness. It’s a fascinating topic. It is surprising that I have noticed several general themes overlapping between what I’ve read about improving personal productivity and mindfulness.

The first thing universally accepted as a big time suck is reading and participating in social media. It also shockingly turns out to be something that generally doesn’t make people happy. Yet many of us still do it. In early 2017 I cut out my social media consumption almost completely. That of course coincided with my not logging into Facebook for months. When I started posting pictures on Facebook again I inevitably logged in to see if there were comments. That coincided with my return to blogging so I would login to also check on comments to those posts as well. I am at a point now where I know I shouldn’t be logging in and I feel like I’m about ready to just stop cold. I’ll keep writing and posting on my blog but reading Facebook feeds needs to go.

I use Twitter as well. Presently I’ve been using it keep tabs on some financial technology companies I am interested in. As much is that is using social media I find that I’m giving myself an exception by continuing to read that. It helps me stay on top of technical trends and that in turn helps me stay ahead in my career.

When I think about it I really do not get much out of looking at social media. There is a conversation here there with friends near and far that I cherish. Those are few and far between compared to all of the nonsense and polarizing news articles littering the cesspool of my newsfeed. The idea of Facebook and Twitter is great. The in practice isn’t so much. Besides not being productive I really am not much happier by engaging in it all. It is hard to understand why I keep doing it then.

I have been thinking about this all for a while now. I am finally ready to action for myself. What I’m going to is simply stop. I am going to remove Facebook from my phone. I am not going to check my newsfeed. What I will keep doing is periodically checking some specific groups that are useful and that I contribute to. If I want to do that though I will need to do it from a computer. I will also continue to review a few specific Twitter lists I’ve curated for keeping up on technology. I plan on keeping Twitter on my phone for now. That’s it though. No trolling to see what others are doing. No commenting or replying to comments. And definitely no glancing at news articles or news headlines others garbage posts that litter my newsfeed.

What I hope to do instead is message friends more. I want to have direct conversations virtual or otherwise. At the time of this writing I hope to start this immediately.. By the time this gets published on my blog however it should be several weeks. Hopefully by then I will have been successful. I sure hope so.

In addition or along with this I have to address my news consumption. That’s the next habit I will write about Stay tuned, or not.

The Great Facebook Purge of 2018

2023-09-302018-06-14 by scott

With the news in April about a 3rd party company stealing tons of Facebook user data is in the headlines it envouge to delete Facebook accounts. For me I have limited my Facebook exposure for years. I deleted my account once a in 2013 and started over with no content. I have also limited what goes onto the platform. Prior to deleting my account i looked for a way to purge en mass content. Facebook suprise doesn’t make it easy for you to do that. That was why i deleted my account in the first place.

Early last year I stopped looking at and updating Facebook. Late last year I came back for specific reasons I wrote about here. Those reasons still are valid so I do not want to go as far as deleting my Facebook account however I have little trust in their motives to collect so much data about me or their ability to safeguard that data.

Instead of deleting my account I found a script that sort of worked to remove content or hide content from the past 6 months. It scrubbed posts, likes, etc. It is perfect for my use. It should have worked for my entire timeline however i had issues with it. Thankfully I have been very sparce on my usage of Facebook over the years so cleaning up manually was not too bad. For anyone who used it every day for years may not be able to do the same thing.

What I am now left with is simply posts from my blog that are public on the internet. A few group discussions i took part in and mainly birthday posts from people. What I am not able to get rid of easily is tags of me in posts. I had to settle for manually hiding them from my timeline.

For many what i did in an hour or two would not be possible without significant effort due to the volume o content people post and the fact that Facebook does not let you easily get rid of stuff.

Facebook Fail

2018-06-06 by scott

Apparently I have been posting new blog entries for a few weeks now and no one can see them. Oddly I see them and they say viewable by friends however they do not show up. There goes the fancy way of posting from WordPress to FB. I am back to the old school way.

My Return to Facebook

2017-09-21 by scott

It was a nice long run. Since the beginning of 2017 through the middle of September I might have logged onto Facebook all of a handful of times. During that time I might not have posted anything. I don’t count blog posting since I write them and it auto magically gets posted to my twitter and Facebook feeds without me logging in.

This week all that changed. I started wading back into what sometimes feels like the cesspool of Facebook. Why after calling it “sometimes cesspool” like would I return? I did not really want to. My not using Facebook has taught me a few things. For one sharing photos to a limited number of people is challenging. I have an iPhone. My wife has an iPhone. My parents have an iPhone. My in-laws do not. If I want to share photo and use iCloud, I have to call them and let them know they should turn on their iPad to look for an update. That is a technology fail. Finding a tool or service that a large number of people use is hard. Getting people to start using the tool because you want to share information is challenging. Especially if that’s the only reason they’re going to use it is for you. Using Facebook I lower the barrier to use significantly since many people are using it already.

Facebook’s not quite secure however. Photos on Facebook aren’t out on the Internet for everyone to see however they are also not securely locked away that virtually no one sees. That basically became my trade-off. For the past nine months or so I haven’t really shared what’s going on and I was ok with that. I am not self-centered enough to assume that everyone that is a friend of mine on Facebook is missing photographs and updates about what’s going on in my life. There are some family and friends that are interested and are not set up technologically to connect in other ways. Those people I do miss the connection.

That brings us to why I’m back. During roughly the same time I was radio silent on Facebook a lot is been going on in the “real world”. When not posting on social media I could relatively easily meet up with someone for dinner or an afternoon to hang out to catch up. I could talk to someone in the family who talks to someone to pass on details of whats going on, etc. In the near future that will change a lot. Starting on or around new year we will be moving. There will be significantly more distance between close friends and family and where were going.

We are moving to London. Yes I said it correctly, London England. If you have read five paragraphs in to this blog post you earn the right to be one of the first (ok maybe twelveth) to know that were moving overseas.

I plan to write a lot more about our planning, reasons why were going, and the experience in the future. This post really is about my return to Facebook. Why I returned is directly related to our move overseas. The way I’ve been updating friends and family limited who got photos of my kids and what was going on in the world with us. Becoming more “normal and oversharing on Facebook will be away for those close to us to know what’s going on since will be thousands of miles further away.

I still have issues with Facebook’s facial recognition of photographs. Especially of my kids. On the other hand my wife does post photos so the exposure is already there. Commenting about what we are doing goes to my blog that is completely open on the Internet. I do that deliberately however I know I need to be mindful of what goes up there since there is no restrictions.

The other aspect reading about what other people are up to and having quick discussions with soon to be faraway people. The challenge is doing that while weeding through all the other stuff on Facebook. The other stuff being political commentary, news articles, etc. That’s what drove me away in the first place.

In the end that’s the price I I am willing to pay to have some more level of connection with those friends and family. Because of that Facebook wins. I am back. I might not be happy about it however I’m glad to have a medium where I can share what’s going on in our lives while we are 5000 or so miles away.

The Story of Why I Make Short Blog Posts and Link Them to My Social Media Accounts

2016-09-26 by scott

In the summer of 2013 I made the decision to delete my Facebook profile. I wrote about it at the time here: I wanted to delete a large amount of content I had created and there was no way to do it without individually deleting things. I did not want to take the time or effort to do that so the only alternative I had was the so-called nuclear option of completely deleting my account. At the time I even thought I might not come back. I still think about getting rid of my account again however it is a good place to share photos and what’s going on with friends and family I don’t get to normally see. Communicating in other ways might be problematic so for now I keep my Facebook account.

The reason I wanted to delete all the content from the account in the first place was because when I initially signed up for my account somewhere in 2007 or 2008 my expectations of privacy were vastly different than what you are today. There wasn’t anything incriminating, illegal, or anything like that posted however with Facebook continuing to inch people to share more I was uneasy with a large amount of information that I hadn’t vetted since I published it was solely in their system. I didn’t like that so I removed it all. In the fall of 2014 I did the same thing with Google.

Those actions do not mean that I don’t publish personal things on the Internet. On the contrary anything I post nowadays I do so knowing full well that is public on the Internet. The only exception would be photos on Facebook that I post however I do it in such a way that I delete them after three months.

Some people including my wife have pointed out in may have made fun of the fact that I link very short status posts from my blog to Facebook. I do that for a specific reason. Normally I do not make status posts at all however there are times when the situation warrants it. My opinion might not have any bearing on anything however I would rather have something posted on my blog and crossposted to Facebook and/or Twitter then have it exclusively within the control of Facebook and their systems.

Now that I’ve started blogging more I post my writings to twitter and Facebook because that’s where the people I know go to browse. By sending the link instead of writing directly within Facebook their system only has the URL and may be a snippet from my blog. They don’t have all of the content. Like I said I don’t know if doing this has any bearing on anything however it’s my little way of controlling information I generate. I can control who spiders my blog and I can get analytics on who’s going to my blog whereas I have no idea what Facebook is doing with my data. Worse yet I have a bad idea about what they’re doing with it and it doesn’t have my best interests at heart. They’re not evil however there trying to make money for my information or information about me. That compels me to limit what information I provide to them. If you’ve actually read this far into the post and you feel that I might be getting my tinfoil hat out again I recommend you watch the 2013 documentary terms and conditions may apply. If you do you understand how disturbing and prevalent mining data about you really is.

So there you have it. You might think it’s silly however I feel I have very good reasons why most comments, status, updates I make on Twitter and Facebook are generated from my blog no matter how short it may be.