I was not sure.
I watched and read as people I know, IRL, left Facebook. I watched and read as people I know, again, IRL, deleted tweets. I knew there was something there, but, damn, it is so easy to use Twitter. To use Facebook.
I also knew, that since those services were free, I was the product that was being tracked, sold, and fed a lot of lies. And it was easy.
No more.
Thanks to vowe, I’ve deleted over 30,000 tweets using Cardigan (it was a recommendation by one of his readers). Because Twitter limits their API to 2500 or 3000 tweets, I paid Cardigan $3.00US (if I remember correctly), to delete 29,900 tweets. Small price to pay to remove my activity from that site. Now, I hover around 100 tweets during any given month.
Facebook.
I’d read all of vowe’s posts about Facebook. It wasn’t until he posted this, about Facebook factcheckers, and reading about their backdoor deals with large companies to grant greater access to its customers data, that I finally decided to do something.
It’s taken some time, I will not lie, to delete things off of Facebook. They do not make it easy, which is probably by design. Almost everything I had on Facebook, from 2009 until 2018, has been deleted. All pictures, posts, tags, birthday greetings, and more. Most of it is now gone. I am still struggling with some items, but in the end, those, too, will be deleted.
It was a sad process. There were posts I wanted to keep, memories that I wanted to relive, photos I wanted to keep sharing. Oh, the photos were easy to keep. Those were downloaded and then uploaded to a cloud service. The memories? Well, I will rely on others to keep sharing those as they pop up in their own Facebook feeds. I have a physical book that will continue to remind of Dash4Dosh. It was bittersweet to delete some cherished posts. But I did it.
I also took vowe’s simple advice and changed my birth year. You know how many of Facebook’s partners want to advertise to a person born in 1918? None.
I will continue to move what remains of my Facebook presence to some other appropriate media, be it cloud, a document, or whatever, until I no longer have any content on that platform. And then my Facebook account will be deleted.
I value my privacy, and yours, too much to continue using a platform that will stop at nothing to know everything about you and then to sell it to the highest bidder, largest corporation, or nation.
Gregg Eldred 