That said, I was never a Facebook user. I do have an account and that is that, which I tend to not use in most browser session because of Facebook surveillance.
You should check out WebKit‘s tracking prevention policy:
https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention-policy/
Also the Privacy category on the WebKit blog:
https://webkit.org/blog/category/privacy/
Specific blog posts you might be interested in are:
https://webkit.org/blog/7675/intelligent-tracking-prevention...
https://webkit.org/blog/9521/intelligent-tracking-prevention...
https://webkit.org/blog/10218/full-third-party-cookie-blocki...
https://webkit.org/blog/11338/cname-cloaking-and-bounce-trac...
https://webkit.org/blog/11545/updates-to-the-storage-access-...
With such a cure, you don't need disease.
That is why I was using heavily modified Android.
As I could prevent Android tracking me and kick the Google spyware out of it completely.
I am now using Sailfish ( https://sailfishos.org ) and I don't need to care about Google or Apple any more. Need to patch banking app from time to time and use plastic cards, but this is acceptable (well, not from bank software but I couldn't care less, they are free to port it to linux and make it open source /s ).
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Anyway, the GDPR is requiring from applications to disclose tracking and allow you to chose what tracking if any, you will allow, before it occurs. Not only that, PIA cant be a payment for app usage.
So in theory, Apple is only enforcing what is already required from applications by EU directive.
Yes i do like Llama but lets be honest who paid for it and for what.
Just because suckerburg gives us nice toys...
He could actually start giving his money away to humanity in a relevant and meaningful way to start fixing what he did to our society.
Guess what? New iOS features and YouTube videos are paid-for and provided in the exact same way. Both Apple and Google are complicit in spreading misinformation, advertising to kids and profiting from lootbox/microtransaction revenue. But nobody consciously objects to Apple for partnering with Taboola, or Google for supporting extremism on YouTube. No sane critic lashes out at Tim Cook or Sundar Pichai demanding they donate their life savings to offset the obvious damages they've created.
I think Meta and moreover Facebook is a purely detestable platform. It's absolutely hilarious how unwilling this website is to apply the same criticism to their other favorite services. The cognitive dissonance is arresting.
Never ever mistake any company that has public stocks doing anything else but earning money for the stock owners. As they didnt buy the stocks to support charity but to earn money.
Which is imho the correct behavior.
And, if possible (do read further, to see what I consider possible), I don't use their products, not having any Apple product, phone is Lumia with Sailfish OS and carefully blocking all the shit 3rd party products bring in, potentially not even using them (smartwatches aka spyware on your wrist, due to cloud dependence), Windows (i have Linux and FreeBSD everywhere, even kids don't use Windows but they do use Graphene OS on phones, couldn't do anything else there due to peer pressure)
Where this is impossible due to the public drive (try to block Google/Microsoft/Amazon ASNs and you will be effectively alone on the internet, due to cloud - interesting detail, while even Duckduckgo doesn't work, the Yandex does), I do everything to avoid as much of crap as possible, like blocking the trackers, randomizing fingerprinting, youtube ads, not having a google account, using youtube for exactly what I am searching for (a lot of content on internet is no longer written, which I prefer, but rather recorded as a video, so you are literally forced to use youtube), being 100% self hosted (not on cloud, physical server that I have built, with ups in my house) from mail to caldav, using self hosted searx for searching, having redundant zfs storage, doing backups to the tape, have my own VPN randomly deployed to other VPS providers...
Bottom line, doing everything that nobody else "has time to do it" and it is surprisingly simple and non time consuming when you "find time to do it" aka "you know how to do it and you consider it easy".
Or when you are sick enough of companies trying to privatize internet. SAAS? Over my dead body.
Anyway vacuum cleaner is rooted and modified, "Smart TV" is not connected and blocked on router (with default blocking hardware that wasn't added to the pass trough rule manually), became smart under my conditions with raspberry pi. Avoiding buying anything with "smart" label unless i know I will be able to root it or circumvent call home, like air condition.
Interestingly, mail server where everyone is complaining about not self hosting it, is the simplest, nicest piece of software, that I don't even need to look at it for months. It just works and all mails get delivered.
+40 hours / week backend software development for some company and having a family with kids in primary school. Just so you know I am not in pension yet. ;)
Google, is a lot different than Apple or Facebook. Google did a lot for our society through Android, Google maps, https, Gmail, Kubernetes and Search.
YouTube had a problem with fake news and especially the algorithm (flat earth etc.) but they actually acted on it a lot faster than facebook ever tried.
But yes pls don't assume something without knowing were my viewpoints are. There is no cognitive dissonance but we talk here about facebook and not about every other companie on the planet.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
https://time.com/5880118/myanmar-rohingya-genocide-facebook-...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/07/facebooks...
The way you've phrased that makes it sound as though Facebook were trying to hide the actions they took to facilitate things, which I think is a miscommunication.
People on the Fediverse get high and mighty about the Myanmar incident but in a Fediverse world the Myanmar government would have run the big instance in their language and would have defederated anyone who tried to stop them, alternately outsiders could have defederated but then they wouldn't have any influence.
Fediverse folks could have refused to run a server to support genocide but there is no way they could stop their software from supporting genocide. A centralized system like Facebook does have more control and more responsibility but when they took that responsibility later on Myanmar kicked them out
https://apnews.com/article/myanmar-censorship-virtual-privat...
Or in words of Umberto Eco ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umberto_Eco ):
“Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
You are underestimating the horror that Facebook did to human society. I am accusing them of crime against humanity. And all that, just for selling ads - where you will be able to see the comparison with IG Farben, do whatever it takes, to earn money.
I accept the argument, that if they wouldn't, someone else would, but nevertheless THEY did it or we would be talking about someone else.
https://bigthink.com/the-past/nobel-disease-great-scientists...
Fun fact, they didn't have large budget for shooting so they were searching for footwear that would look futuristic. They found some unknown company producing cheap "shoes" so horrible that the director wasn't worried for it to succeed as "no one would wear that". The company was Crocks.
https://media.snopes.com/2023/09/idiocracy.png
Anyway, this whole thread is actually proving my point. It wouldn't happen before Facebook.
That alone should be a very strong signal that maybe your nostalgia is not based on a rational unbiased observation of the changes in society.
edit: and to be clear, obviously there have been times in history where things really did get worse for a period. But if you're proposing that that's happening now, you have a massive burden of proof to overcome, and you should be absolutely really totally sure that you're not being influenced by rose-tinted glasses. Which I'm not even sure is possible.
Correlation does not imply causation.
But Crocs had actually become somewhat popular already before Idiocracy.
The more realistic full picture explanation being that they chose something that they or someone on their staff, like many "look at those idiots" types (myself at the time included), already knew and considered a stupid trend is much more likely. It doesn't at all negate that they in fact thought nobody with taste would wear those shoes, but I don't think that choice was entirely made in isolation not aware of the trend.
The effect of watching the movie and seeing Crocs worn was yet another of those pieces of evidence that the stupid people of today connect to that fictional future world, like all the other stuff on the movie dialed all the way to the top (energy drinks, corporate sponsorships, etc.)
The mere fact that someone knew of Crocs, thought of them, and chose them because of their ugliness, means they were popular/successful enough to pop up on someone's radar, despite them ostensibly not being something that would be worn by anyone. Perhaps they didn't know how much more popular Crocs would become but they for sure must have picked them as an artifact of things already going in a weird direction (Why can you get this? Who would want this? Someone must, these will be the stupid people of tomorrow.)
But also, actually, so what?
Look at some of the fashion of past decades older movies. Some of it is cool but a lot of it is super ridiculous.
And if you look at Crocs, are they really objectively stupid? Treating them as a high fashion item probably is. But they are versatile and robust, good for many types of use cases were people used to wear other types of cheap plastic sandals. People wearing leather shoes surely thought sneaker were stupid until they became so mainstream that they were evaluated more objectively.
Citing idiocracy and Crocs seems like a very weak argument to your case and even Idiocracy's point (fashion choices don't indicate the world is getting stupid). Mind you I'm not disagreeing that things have gotten worse in many ways and social media is definitely not helping. OTOH, Facebook actually was somewhat reasonable for a long time, and useful to connect with people. Only once the Twitterification of it started did it get so bad. But somehow Twitter never gets the bad reputation.
What these normie-networks did do was make a UX for public posting so easy that scores of low-education users were able to be influenced and re-share low-infromation-quality stuff in huge magnitudes. FB is guilty of making a super accessible user experience, and then in not being aggressive early enough in having high standards for its userbase. But it didn't invent society's ills.
The influx of normies circa 2000 did not seem so bad to me but Facebook and Twitter were another thing.
Let me repeat him as you probably didnt catch it (I dont understand how, but this is one of the things, I dont understand, so I wont argue about it):
“Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
I can just confirm that what he has seen and described is correct. And the more that you are standing your ground, the more you are proving, he was correct.
That Facebook?
Also the Russians sitting around posting on social media meme is still actively in use. I’ve seen it at least a handful of times this month
It's only privileged, highly-paid coastal elites that hate FB.
Zuck, can literally say GFY as they don't matter in the broad scheme of things and innovations.
Negativity? Yes Facebook was negative for 20ish years and as a result of their behavior technical people don't like them.
This is not something, we are wrong about even if your "negativity here" silently suggests that.
You reminded me of something, please read this article: https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/leave_my_br...
It is helpful for becoming negative to negative companies where they deserve it.
IG Farben had great technology (for that time) but needed change of name and half of century of good service so they have been removed from our memory as producers of Cyclone B. Now they are known as Bayer. And my neighbor (concentration camp survivor), while he was alive, wasn't buying Bayer products and he was quite vocal about it. Any of them, regardless of technology, different people, different products,... Guess why. Will you say he was negative?
Thats why FB was renamed and I am eagerly waiting what they will be like after 50 years. Until then, they will not be anywhere near my devices and even less filtering my sight.