Friday July 6th marks a full month without Facebook. As soon as the second week transpired, I got the notifications of all the other “attached” bits being severed. A good sign that I had held out the full two weeks. Apparently once they “delete” (cough cough) your account, it takes about 90 days to tag your data for removal, and for it being removed1 from their servers.
I have removed the hosts file redirection of facebook.com to localhost. The temptation to go back to it has waned. I have refocused some energy on this blog (and my other greytbros head over and see some fun about our new family addition).
Since I won the Yahtzee tournament and deleted my profile, more discouraging news has come out, reinforcing my decision to leave, for good this time. You can thank the GDPR for the lifting of the veil, and the confirming how poor of a steward of your private data Facebook is.
I am also about 90% Chrome browser free too. I will admit that it was more difficult to switch to Firefox than to leave facebook, as there are some things that just don’t work in it (mostly internal work sites), so I am likely to need to keep a Chrome instance installed.
It has been an interesting 4 weeks. I am reading more books (as I am reminded by my wife for having bought more than my usual consumption from Amazon). I am getting back to my hobbies, dinking with some simple electronics, and relaxing. I am doing the daily NY Times crossword (I will admit that is a challenge, and I need a few years of practice to get really good at tying their descriptions to vocabulary words).
I will admit that I miss many of my friends (or more active friends) from Facebook. My meme farm is going to seed.
And like clockwork, there are more revelations from the bowels of Facebook on how they violated their trust, and abused the hoard of personal information they have collected, reinforcing my decision, and ultimately – I hope – serious government regulation.
1 – no, I don’t for a nanosecond believe that Facebook will actually delete my data. All my images, posts, messages and interactions will remain in their clutches, used for building their network, for their ML and AI training sets. I have just stopped caring about that.
