Why I deleted my Facebook account

Facebook – My Journey to Digital Detox

I had joined Facebook in mid-2008 during my first year abroad as a teacher. It was the first time I had left the UK to live abroad. I was leaving behind my family, childhood friends, my previous work and everything what I had known to be as my life. What lay ahead was a new job, new country, new city, new friends and much more. Facebook became the place to connect with old friends and memories and share with new friends and make new memories. It was easy to create an account and simply share thoughts, locations, pictures and videos all at a click of a button. No web authoring skills required.
I was a late member of the Facebook family. By the time I joined in 2008, Facebook had over a 100 million active members. It was not long until I was sharing how I felt each day and if I was happy, sad, or just under the weather. I began to share pictures and videos of my travels and adding third party Apps so I could play games, carry out personality tests and pin point every single location I had visited so I could keep a journal for my future self and friends. After all, it did not cost me anything but kept me in contact with everyone that I knew at once with a click of a button. It was all private as you could not access it without a username and password and unless I accepted friendships. At least that is what I thought and that is how it was sold to me. The reality could not be further from it.
Facebook knows every intimate detail about you not because it is eavesdropping on you but because you/we are the product. Every time we visit Facebook.com cookies, (small pieces of text that stores information specific to you on the web browser that you use) are left on your computer. The cookies show how often you spend on the site, identifies all your devices linked to your account, software that you use and it keeps sending back information even when you are not accessing Facebook.com. The cookies also talk to other cookies and they start sharing information with each other. Before you know it, your personal data is no longer personal. All of that becomes your value on the Internet, which is then sold off to third party Apps and sold off for advertising purposes so we can get targeted advertising. Cambridge Analytica is a prime example of this where personalised and targeted adverts were appearing on accounts specific to the history of the user, which in turn fed the pre-existing believes of the user. Bigots and racists kept on receiving other bigotry and racist content suggested by Facebook Algorithms. Algorithms do not see humans they see data and how data connects with other data. Coupled with no information and fact checking taking place on the data, false perceptions about issues such Brexit, migrants, foreigners and the like went onto form opinions of millions. By 2019, the Facebook family had grown to 2.4 Billion users and the products had moved into instant chat Apps such as WhatsApp, Instagram and most Facebook accounts being accessed by mobile devices. Because Facebook primarily became an advertising company it did not care about if, the information by third party vendors was false or not. What mattered most was the revenue these adverts were generating.
Although I had been thinking about deleting Facebook for years, for me it was an issue of trust. Can I trust a company that has built its empire based on knowing every step of its users? Can it, will it or even want to move away from the business model that give life to it? For me the answer was a clear NO. Although Facebook in the recent years has tried to fix its image of a Data Pimp but in my opinion the damage had been done and all Facebook was doing now was/is damage control by giving users some control of who sees what and how. Facebook began to give lip service to the idea of protecting data but the core business model of Facebook has not changed. We are the product and always will be unless we take a moral stance. I took that moral stance and even fought against my Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) and finally deleted my Facebook account on Thursday 26th September 2019 at 10:32AM and officially became deleted by Facebook on Saturday 26th October 2019 after not logging into my account within the months cooling off period. I wanted my data to be my data and refused to prostitute it. I am not sure what happens with my data. I can only hope that by me not populating more data that my old data will become obsolete and I would become useless in the data machine and I would have been forgotten forever in the world of Facebook.
#DeleteFacebook #TakeControlOfMyData