Social Media

Bye Bye Facebook Sort of

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Hi there, Facebook friends! I hope you’re all doing well. At the beginning of this year, I stopped posting to my “wall” (or whatever they’re calling it these days). But I’m still blogging—I have been for almost 22 years, and I don’t plan on stopping. All new blog entries will go to my Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/scott.weinstein.me/

Why, you ask? Well, Facebook and I (and all social media, for that matter) have a complex relationship. I only post on Facebook so family and friends who care to know what’s going on can see my blog updates. Otherwise, I’ve found social media to be far less enjoyable than I once thought it could be. Plus, Facebook prevents automatic posting of external links to personal accounts. That’s why, years ago, I set up my Personal Page.

If you’re already following my page, thanks! If not—and if you still want to keep up with what’s going on with me and the fam or you moderately enjoy my writing—you should follow the page.

I won’t be posting here anymore, with the exception of occasional reminders over the next few months to follow the page.

To Keep or Cancel Whatsapp

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In my part 1 of My Great Social Media Purge of 2019 i outlined my objectives with assessing my use case of each social media platform I use. Part 2 covered Twitter. Part 3 covered Reddit. Part 4 covers Linkedin. Now part 5 is Whatsapp, or as I call it “the chat app i am forced to use since everyone left AOL IM”.

I thought about WhatsApp when I first started this excersise. It still only comes in fourth on my list. Partly because I was procrastinating. My assesment with WhatsApp is simple. I dont want anyone to know who i talk to. I am not doing anything wrong or illegal. Neither to my knowledge is anyone i am talking to. That is imiterial though. I have a right to privacy and I am excersising that right. Plain and simple.

Not wanting people to know who I talk to and using WhatsApp is challenging. Whatsapp does collect tons of meta data about your messages and calls. They allegidly are not able to read the body of the messages. Just the metadata. The question then becomes do care that WhatsApp has any metadata on me? More specifically the question could be how bad is it that they have metadata that i called my mom? Or my wife? Since lets face it they are the main people i use it for. I also chat or call people internationally with it for work. I can say I dont care about work linkage on WhatsApp however I probably should. I do care about everyone else I chat with on whatsapp. It’s mainly innocuous yet the linkage is still there in collected meta data. Will it likely impact me in my every day life that Facebook has that linkage? Probibly not. The fact they can learn a whole bunch about me because of it is creepy.

Practically speaking I know I will not get my local parents Organization for my kids school to stop using whatsapp. That means I have to live with the metadata collection.with. Or choose not to be in the conversation. I want to be in the conversation and there are too many ad hoc chats with friends and coworkers using Whatsapp that there would be a noticible loss of comunication and colaberation with several circles of people if I delete the app. Likely moreso than any other tool I am using and rewviewing.

To minimize my exposure to Whatsapp I aim to move as much of that conversation over to Signal or Telegram. Preferably Signal. I haven’t been very successful so far. Some work friends use Telegram. I got some family on Signal. The vast majority of people still use Whatsapp. I am going to make much more of an effort on this going forward.

The verdict on Whatsapp (For now) is sadly I will keep it. I will say its keep for as long as I have to, however lets face it that will likely be a while. I blame everyone else I chat with.

To Keep or Cancel Linkedin

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In my part 1 of My Great Social Media Purge of 2019 i outlined my objectives with assessing my use case of each social media platform I use. Part 2 covered Twitter. Part 3 covered Reddit. In Part 4 I will cover Linkedin. its a short one since the decision was pretty straight forward.

Linkedin is a tough one. I feel for professional reasons it is necessary. The data mining that is creepy in other platforms may land me a job opportunity on Linkedin. Funny irony right? I would like to remain blissfully unaware of anything creepy that happens on this platform or what they do with my data. That way I will not dig further into it and get spooked by whatever I find.

I even need to use this platform more to promote myself professionally. Its a keeper. So if you have creepy stories about LinkedIn, I do not want to know.

To Keep or Cancel Reddit

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In my part 1 of My Great Social Media Purge of 2019 i outlined my objectives with assessing my use case of each social media platform I use. Part 2 covered Twitter. Part 3 covers Reddit. Yup i started reading some stuff on Reddit.

I started using Reddit in 2019. I broke down and signed up. I haven’t posted anything. I joined a few sub-Reddit’s. That in and of itself helps build a profile on me and what I like and read. I am not a fan of that. I do find following along in each community I find informative. It is targeted discussions and some of them have been useful. That value however comes at the price of Reddit knows I am interested in specific things. For now I am not really sure if my lurking there for some information is worth that model on what i am interested in. For now I am paying that price.

I may just cancel my account and have direct links to some sub-Reddit’s i want to read. Then i could try to use a TOR Browser on VPN to just read without having the linkage to me. That work around does require much more effort to do so not sure if the cost benifit is worth it.

In the end I think I “should” delete Redit. That being said the cost “i think” for keeping it is low compared to other providers so I am neutral on it, for now.

To Keep or Cancel Twitter?

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In my part 1 of My Great Social Media Purge of 2019 i outlined my objectives with assessing my use case of each social media platform I use. I am starting off with Twitter.

I surprisingly find value in using Twitter. I only ever post to twitter to share links to my blog. My reasoning is my blog is public anyway. At this moment I do not believe there is a downside to the linkage of my blog to my twitter account. I may come to regret that however for now I am ok with that linkage. I do have lists of peoples twitter accounts that i follow. Mainly i look at FinTech companies twitter accounts. Some security journalists and a few tech industry people. I also will look at a few comedian’s or The Onion. Even that information starts to build a profile on me. The limited amount of value there I am ok with.

Other uses for Twitter have been in the past I found huge value in having a list to track emergency management accounts. When i was in a pure operations role that came in very handy when Hurricane Sandy hit. Or when a few other big snow storms hit NY. Some of that linkage i am not happy with however that linkage would exist if i followed some of these companies or twitter accounts via Twitter or if i used an RSS feed.

As I wrote this post I unfollowed a bunch of people and friends who never post. What is left i am happy enough with. I think i will have to revisit Twitter again in the future however for now i am ok to keep using it the way i do. I may limit my usage (again) to a secured VM).

Verdict, for now a Keep.

My Great Social Media Purge of 2019 (Part 1)

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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

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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.