And while Google is much more omnipresent (no argument there!), at least their tactics involve letting the users do what they would normally do, even if they're spying in on it. Google might be watching, but at least they aren't controlling.
Yeah, I guess you're right - Facebook is insistent on suggesting their way of doing things, constantly trying to tell me what to read and what to do.
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In my personal experiences they have failed, though.
All their suggestions were way off and totally useless. So I just auto-ignore their mails, dismiss the notifications just by type without checking and whatever and use only what I want to use (they have some good uses).
Heck, even their Android apps are so awful, so even though I wanted some of features they sort of forced me to not install any apps and just use a browser. ;)
How is this even remotely possible given the advertising duopoly?
I really always thought it's monopoly - just Google. With some small or local vendors (e.g. Yandex ads are huge on Russian-language resources) here and there, but mostly just Google.
It's rare if some random webpage doesn't talk to Google servers, be it analytics, fonts, CAPTCHAs, "sign in with Google" buttons or whatever. And they're in every other smartphone. And they handle lots of payments. And so on.
Facebook, on the contrary, rarely shows up. Sometimes there are like buttons, but I'd say they're rare. Or maybe I'm visiting the kind of sites where they're rare.
They may try to spam me (usually with some "you have new friend suggestion" with another person I've never ever met) but not like my mail filters care about that. And I occasionally log in there to check if someone had posted something (usually nope). I fed it some public information, never ever fed it anything non-public (not just private but non-public - even though I tag some public stuff as "private" there is no harm if that becomes public), and don't post anything there myself.
I'm going to say a heresy but... that's feels basically harmless (and absolutely useless) to me.