Last week Facebook pissed me off one too many times. After turning off their social plugin a second time and deleting all of the cookies, I was once more greeted by a selection of friends and their articles when I visited the website of a major national paper. The utility I receive from FB (largely nil these days— items in the news feed ranges from banal to depraved) does not justify the compromise of my privacy when I read items on the internet. Taking this pre-IPO behavior as a baseline, I expect even more aggressive behavior as the company struggles to increase revenue to support their massive overvaluation. As a consumer, I will have none of it.
I fully understand that companies like FB need to track users and maintain data about them in order to provide services. But I think that such user data collection must be limited to explicit, known engagement with the site. Facebook goes far beyond this. Beyond explicit integration with other sites through the platform, FB uses the Like button to accumulate a vast wealth of knowledge while users are from the site. The Like button isn't really about quantifying popular interest (the number of upvotes) for content but for gauging exposure to that content over all FB users. This gives FB unprecedented information both on the a) behavioral patterns of consumers b) wellbeing of other companies (i.e. they know how many people visited the WSJ and the NYT). It's like Alexa on crack. Imagine if you could see from Google Analytics the Facebook pages of everyone who visited your site—that's what FB has, for every site with a like page.
If you derive sufficient benefit from the use of FB that you what to stay on there, at least prevent it from collecting your behavior across the internet. This is easy to do in Chrome and Firefox by installing the AdBlock Plus extension and then adding the 'Antisocial' filter. This prevents your browser from loading social plugin content or sending information to FB's servers (G+ and Twitter too).
If you want to leave FB, it's not too challenging (of course they keep all your data anyway):
https://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account
Interestingly, the Like button still works for collecting data about users who don't even have Facebook accounts; so even if you leave FB you should still block the ads.
I fully understand that companies like FB need to track users and maintain data about them in order to provide services. But I think that such user data collection must be limited to explicit, known engagement with the site. Facebook goes far beyond this. Beyond explicit integration with other sites through the platform, FB uses the Like button to accumulate a vast wealth of knowledge while users are from the site. The Like button isn't really about quantifying popular interest (the number of upvotes) for content but for gauging exposure to that content over all FB users. This gives FB unprecedented information both on the a) behavioral patterns of consumers b) wellbeing of other companies (i.e. they know how many people visited the WSJ and the NYT). It's like Alexa on crack. Imagine if you could see from Google Analytics the Facebook pages of everyone who visited your site—that's what FB has, for every site with a like page.
If you derive sufficient benefit from the use of FB that you what to stay on there, at least prevent it from collecting your behavior across the internet. This is easy to do in Chrome and Firefox by installing the AdBlock Plus extension and then adding the 'Antisocial' filter. This prevents your browser from loading social plugin content or sending information to FB's servers (G+ and Twitter too).
If you want to leave FB, it's not too challenging (of course they keep all your data anyway):
https://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account
Interestingly, the Like button still works for collecting data about users who don't even have Facebook accounts; so even if you leave FB you should still block the ads.