Why I left Facebook for good
As a longtime Internet industry, digital culture and privacy researcher, my concerns about Facebook’s data practices go back nearly as long as my Facebook profile.
In 2014, after producing some commercial research about a rapidly growing targeted marketing infrastructure, I began to question my own social media practices. I also began to raise concerns publicly about the ethics and consequences of massive commercial data surveillance.
I didn’t intentionally plan to leave Facebook entirely. As a book author and musician, I found the platform useful for promotional purposes, and though I found the environment increasingly toxic in the runup to the 2016 elections, I still appreciated the ability to connect with my far-flung friends and to have substantive conversations with them.
My initial plan was to “kill” my FB profile and then create a new one, thereby shedding myself of the decade-plus worth of data associated with my ac- count. I announced this to my friends on FB, and kept a list of the hundreds of FB contacts who said they’d like to be reconnected to my new profile once it launched. Then I killed my profile.
The problem is, I couldn’t start a new profile. I tried three times. In each case, I provided a legitimate email and, because FB requires a phone number now, I used online services to get an onlineonly number to receive texts. Each of the three times, I successfully launched the profile, only to have FB flag my new profile and suspend it within about 24 hours. They were never clear about why they suspended the profiles, although I suspect that the reason was I hadn’t given them enough data to make it worth their while to support the profile.
I gave up after those three tries and have been off of FB entirely for about a year. What’s incredible to me is that, after spending over a decade on the platform, interacting with it daily all that time, I didn’t miss it at all. Not even a little bit. I still don’t.
Aram Sinnreich, associate professor American University
Washington, D.C.
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