The #DeleteFacebook Trend - Implications, Alternatives

Started by Kithop, March 26, 2018, 05:24:42 PM

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Kithop

March 26, 2018, 05:24:42 PM Last Edit: March 26, 2018, 05:46:28 PM by Kithop
Should I #DeleteFacebook?  What does it mean?
In tech news, and indeed now in the general news, there's a lot of talk of some very shady business practices that companies have been up to for quite some time.  Many of us understand that by signing up for various online services, particularly 'free' offerings from corporations with centralized, ad-supported models, that we're giving up some of our privacy in exchange.  Indeed, the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. have quite the ad tracking network, designed to create a profile or model around your account, so they can see what sites you're visiting, what things you're buying online, and then tailor the ads they show you around that profile.  In almost all cases, they grant access to this data or sell it to various interested 3rd parties who do the same sorts of things.

This is kind of an Internet-wide version of the various loyalty programs you get from grocery stores or whatnot, except instead of points to redeem, you get 'free' services like your Gmail, or Facebook profile, YouTube account, etc.

Of course, the reason this is all blowing up in the news at the moment is because instead of merely showing you ads for widgets you might like, or diet pills, it's apparent that this sort of data was actively used for political purposes, in many cases skirting legality in various jurisdictions (and that's being generous).  Profile data was and probably still is being used to create and display targeted political ads to try to swing elections.  This is the line we've had to cross for people to get up in arms about this sort of data collection.

Many people have been blissfully unaware just how much data has been collected - particularly if you installed the matching smartphone applications for each service (call and SMS logs, browser activity, etc.), but ironically enough - companies like Google and Facebook are pretty open with what they're taking from you.  You can actually download a copy of all of your Facebook data and skim through it... though you may not like what you find if you're a heavy user.  If you're signed in to Google's services, you can double check your own ad profile and settings, and opt out of a number of things (hint: probably all of them).

You can also do a lot to protect yourself by running a full-spectrum ad blocker in your browsers (like, say, uBlock Origin for Chrome or for Firefox), and if you have the patience, a script blocker & whitelist tool like uMatrix for Firefox, and indeed, I'd strongly recommend everyone be running an ad blocker these days, just because of the sheer number of times ad networks have been abused to distribute malware, but that's not the be all and end all - especially if you're still posting pictures and other information directly to these corporate sites and services.

It gets worse when you start looking at 'the cloud' - we've already known about various three-letter-agencies from multiple countries around the world doing their best to hoover up as much data as they can, to sift through later and try to make decisions on.  One of the better arguments for keeping data relatively secure is to ensure that it's not physically stored on US soil.  Unfortunately, recent legal actions give the US carte blanche to request data from any American company's datacentres, even if those datacentres are located elsewhere.  Timing is suspect with the recent enforcement start date yesterday of the new EU General Data Protection Regulations.  Now, even if you have your instances in, say, the Canadian zone of a big American cloud provider, the fact that the company providing the service is American is enough for them to warrantlessly attempt to acquire your data.

So, what can we do?
Those of us who have more than a bit of grey in our muzzles can probably remember a time before these centralized, corporate services.  Maybe we've dabbled in using some of them, particularly at work, where some companies still run their own e-mail servers, their own IRC or Jabber/XMPP servers.

"But IRC isn't like Facebook at all!  And then I'm just trusting someone's IRC server instead of some company, with all the same potential problems!"

The good news is that there's been a lot of active development in various decentralized, federated projects with the intent of taking back control of the internet - where services and their development can be crowdfunded (through the likes of Liberapay and others - check out Snowdrop's comparison of various crowdfunding services), and the resulting specifications and code are open and free for all to implement and use.  In a nutshell, this means you can run your own server and instance, just for you and maybe your friends, and still be able to see and interact with the greater community - just like how your e-mail address is two parts, a 'user' @ 'a server', and that doesn't prevent you from e-mailing anyone you like, even if their address is at some other server, most of these federated, decentralized services use a similar notation: you're a 'user' @ 'a specific server instance', and you can freely interact with everyone across the network, regardless of where their account physically lives.  That's it.

Of course, you can always choose to sign up on someone else's instance and server if they allow account creation - just like how you sign up for this forum, you're generally granting the administrators of that server implicit access to what you're uploading and posting.  However, there's no built-in tracking, ads, or anything of that sort - the only things people have access to are what you choose to post and upload.

That's all well and good - so what are my options?

  • If you're used to Facebook and Tumblr, you might want to take a look at diaspora*
  • If you're used to Twitter, you probably want to try tooting with Mastodon (and find your Twitter friends with their helpful bridge tool) - bonus: adorable introduction video
  • If you're used to Slack, Discord, and Telegram, Matrix and its reference client, Riot are in active development and definitely something to watch.  Group audio calls and videoconferencing via WebRTC are already implemented, there's a Community/group feature, but as of writing they have yet to implement Discord-style persistent voice channels (though it's on a wishlist) or Telegram-style stickers (though as of this issue, it sounds like it's Coming Soon(tm).)

If you guys have any other recommendations, or if you've decided to join one of these networks and want to share your new handles, feel free.  This has been bugging me for quite some time, and I just felt the need to try and articulate my own thoughts on the matter. :)

Edit: word limit

ChapterAquila92

#2
May 29, 2018, 02:16:09 AM
It still amazes me that such a threat to personal privacy and security could have been seen coming from a mile away, and yet many people were all too willing to give away their personal information like candy just to chum it up with people they might never meet in person and play cow-clickers.
Military fur, proudly serving Queen & Country since 2010.
--
Accounts on other sites:
DeviantART|FurAffinity|SpaceBattles
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Kithop

#3
September 06, 2018, 03:50:25 PM
It's been a few months now, but with some of the recent... issues with Twitter, we're seeing a lot of furs dabbling in Mastodon / the Fediverse in the past couple weeks.

It took a bit longer than I'd hoped, but we're well past the point of merely being a viable alternative, to a thriving community with administrators and moderators that actually care.

You can find an existing instance to join here, or if you're technically minded, investigate one of the ActivityPub-compatible servers to host your own: Mastodon and Pleroma are the most feature-complete, but there are others like PeerTube (YouTube replacement), NextCloud (DropBox + other 'cloud' apps), Plume (blogging), etc.

One of the common complaints people have - finding other people - is quickly being sorted.  One of the new Mastodon features is the ability to set up a relay that instance servers can subscribe to, and share copies of all of the public posts between themselves through it.  Someone I know set up a furry one at yiff.social, for example, and there's a ton of activity coming through it already.

Audio levels are a bit low here, but someone's put together a nice tutorial for new or prospective users on how it works, how it differs from Twitter, etc.:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W22msAw2zwI

I'd love to see more of you take a look, and hope to see you here one day! :)

Kithop

#4
September 14, 2018, 05:05:47 PM
Mostly informative article just dropped on Kotaku:

"Twitter's Emerging Competitor Doesn't Want to be Twitter"

Misses a little bit in terms of the fediverse in general, other software that runs off of the ActivityPub backend, but the talk of instances and community moderation (hey, like these forums!) is right. :)
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