You don’t want unaccountable monopolies mining every intimate detail of your personal relationships and deepest confidences?
Then don’t use social networks.
OK, in fact, not using them is harder than you’d like, because
- The No-network effect means that all your friends have forgotten how to manage their life without Facebook all up in their shit, and anyway
- if you log in to one of these damn things even once you are tracked in perpetuity by the browser cookies which hang around you like the stink of dogshit on your shoe, so you may as well work out how to wash that off.
- we are social primates doing bullshit jobs with smartphones in our pockets and we crave social distraction from the searing grind
How do you say? I’m quitting Facebook, except for all the parts I currently use:
after I post this status, I will be quitting Facebook, except for groups, events, messaging, sharing my take on controversial op-eds, promoting my podcast(s), and seething with jealousy about my friends’ positive life updates.
Pretend to be on social media but don’t actually bother
80% of my strategy is this. See faking being on social media.
But that means I can get off social media?
Maybe. Scott Locklin summarises the fakebook extraction: Download your data. Delete your account.
Oh wait, your friends keep on using Facebook messenger to organise their lives? FFS, friends.
Practice social surveillance hygiene to reduce harm
Don’t use the facebook/whatever app. Alex Yumashev’s (uncited) tip for mobile devices:
use Facebook in mobile Safari, with an adblocker, and delete the iOS native app — helps a lot AND saves you from tons of ads and 3rd party cookie tracking. Not to mention wonders for the battery.
Wonder if that’s correct?
Access your social network using a quarantined single site browser. (I’m a big fan of this)
Firefox has a new smoother alternative: Multi user container makes separate mini-browsers for each social app so they each live in their own little universe. There is a facebook-only one, plus a bunch of other extensions to reduce the addictiveness/advertising. See more under browser hacks.
Logins. Don’t login with Facebook, Google, Twitter, Wechat etc. There might be better alternatives in the future (e.g. persona?). But for now, don’t if you won’t want the vendor knowing about your connection to these sites. Make a new password for everything.
Disable tracking in your browser using one of the extensions for that.
Reconfigure Facebook settings to be less leaky: How to gain control over Facebook
Roll your own social network
90s style! V. Cypherpunk!
Probably the entry-level here is Gitter (gitter source) which in principle you can run yourself if you have a trusted OSX server lying about. Its sort of like Slack, apparently? Now you are responsible for your own security. Is that better?
Solution: one-up everyone and use decentralised networks.