Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/04/02/zucktopus.html
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Just announced last week that I’ll be quitting Facebook this week.
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Y’all realize, you don’t need to delete Facebook. Just walk away.
There has been too much oversharing. Too many vague post. But I have an honorable solution. Just walk away. Give them your likes, the emojis, the memes, and mobile online games, and you will get back your lives. Just walk away and you’ll get a safe passageway to Twitter, or PornHub, or PornHub’s Twitter. Just walk away and there will be an end to the horror.
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Agreed. It’s not as if they can bill you for another month.
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Post of the day! WINNER WINNER CHICKEN DINNER!
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You sure about that? Section 13 at the below link is NOT bi-lateral, and I’m pretty sure FB has the credit card info of many a user. Summary: just walking away probably isn’t gonna cut it.
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Do what? First off, no, FB doesn’t have my CC. If they did and tried to charge something, I would cancel it. If you used FB to send money, they aren’t going to charge it when they aren’t supposed to any more than PayPal does. And again, you just dispute it if they did.
Turn off notifications and walkway if you are done with it. It isn’t that hard.
Or change your name into one of a variety of things and they will shut down your account for you.
I was merely suggesting that they have the CC info of many users (not you in particular, of course). And, if you read the Ts and Cs, you will see that they reserve the right to do what they want, when then want. It says what it says, I’m just passing along the info. Of course it’s not hard to turn off notifications, but does that nullify the agreement a user entered into with them?
Or change your name into one of a variety of things and they will shut down your account for you
You could make it a game. Post increasingly offensive posts to see at what point they ban you.
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Deleting your account is very satisfying though. And it means that all the FB links on all the sites you visit won’t still be connected to your account.
When we are on topic where is the option to delete an account on BoingBoing BBS? As far as I can see there is none.
Yeah and now try quitting Amazon.
I quit Facebook many years ago and actually, it was pretty straightforward but in Amazon’s case, it’s the most confusing process I ever encountered.
Oh and btw., I predict that Facebook is here to stay, no matter what scandals occur. Just as it was with MySpace, people will only leave in swarms once a real alternative turns up. I don’t see any at this point.
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You can ask the mods here to have your account “anonymised,” which changes your BBS handle to something like “anon53666” on all existing comments. They also announce that they’ve done this in the General Moderation Topic so that others are aware the person has left.
BoingBoing apparently does this so that existing Discourse BBS comment threads don’t get eaten by the deletion of a user. The mods and admins can probably give you a more detailed explanation for why they handle deletion this way.
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It’s not the same thing, isn’t it?
It definitely isn’t the same thing as total deletion, but anonymisation strikes me as a fair balance in the context of this particular site and its policies, preserving past discussions while also letting someone walk away easily. If I have any criticism of BB in this regard it’s that they don’t discuss this option in the FAQ or detailed community guidelines.
In any case, comparing BoingBoing BBS to Facebook would be comparing apples to oranges. BoingBoing obviously doesn’t abuse its users’ privacy the way Facebook does, for example, and its admins and mods are a lot more responsive to user requests to disassociate themselves from BB than FB’s are.
[I’m sending up the @orenwolf signal here in case he wants to correct me or clarify further for you]
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Scorched Earth.
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This should be spelled out in TOS clearly. Actually it should be spelled out in a warning that is a part of account creation process.
They use a 3rd party service to handle this. I may trust people running BoingBoing on this but why should I trust people running Discuss. On top of that Discuss used FB or Google login as part of their service. Which brings us back to FB.
Discourse seems to be more of a close partner to BB than it is a third-party service. @codinghorror , one of Discourse’s developers, can clarify the relationship a bit more.
I agree that offering Facebook as a login option is a very bad idea, but in the end it’s a BB user’s choice to use it (or Google or Twitter or Yahoo) as his login. I’d be curious to find out what percentage of BB’s active user base makes the foolish decision to log in with FB.
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Double-negative aside, this is a public forum, unlike facebook where many of your details are private. All your posts are crawled and indexed by robots all over the web. Don’t post anything here you don’t want to hang around, possibly indefinitely, in web indexes.
Your personal details (which is really just ip address, email, password) are nuked if we anonymize your account. Just your public posts remain, without identifying information.
Discourse only uses Google or Facebook auth if you use it as part of your login process. If you login with Discourse directly then your login details go nowhere but here.
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If preventing holes in conversation is a concern process can still be made automatic. If user deletes his account his comments can be instantly anonymized.
The right to close my account should remain at my discretion. I should not be required to explain my reasons to another human being.
