Submitted by Sebastian on Wed, 12/19/2018 - 12:58
Read on to learn why.
Naturally we've long since been concerned about what happens to your/our privacy and personal data and who exploits it.
With the recent data leak scandals, reports of stolen or sold user data, mass user deception, etc, we're definitely conscious of how, by using 'services' like Facebook, we effectively promote a company's business model where the user and his/her friends personal information (including name, address, personal interests, relationship and employment information, location data, contacts, calls, texts, visited websites and app usage, etc.) is the product being sold.
Did you know that it's not just Facebook, Whatsapp and instagram apps (all Facebook owned) that are tracking everything they have access to on your phone but that around 42% of all apps available through the Google Playstore have implemented Facebook's tracking routines? That is what this recent study from Oxford university showed.
Facebook is getting more and more aggressive where forcing page-owners to pay for advertisement is concerned. Every time we post something on our apertus° facebook page we receive an email afterwards encouraging us to "boost posts" - paying to get more users to see our content. This isn't how the internet was supposed to be and it would be remiss of us to encourage this kind of behaviour.
In the beginning it was rather simple: peoples' own Facebook walls showed all posts of their friends and the pages they liked in descending, chronological order. But in recent years we noticed how Facebook's algorithms stopped showing all posts of friends and liked pages and started showing only specific ones. Nobody but Facebook knows what this algorithm does exactly - we can only observe the outcome: it was apparent that less and less of the people who followed us were actually seeing our project updates and posts. Then the paid "boost" emails and notices on Facebook started appearing.
Facebook is taking ownership of our community, holding it to ransom and will only give it back if we pay.
We tried a small experiment by clicking through the "boost post" options that Facebook offers. Here we can precisely define the target audience for our "boost campaign" and are offered with a vast list of things Facebook knows about its users: long distance relationship with anniversary coming up soon? Are you a top earner and what are your political views? - Oh and an interest in Free Software! There are even options to target users of specific email provider, smartphone types, browser or operating system.
You might have noticed that we reduced our Facebook activity as a result. But just not maintaining our Facebook page any more and leaving our Facebook followers in the rain is of course not solving the situation and not helping anyone. So we decided to take a radical step - We want to stay in touch with our Facebook follower community and encourage each and everyone to follow us through the plethora of alternatives (see below) which we can more consciously recommend in terms of how they handle privacy and user data.
There are growing numbers of more privacy aware and decentralised platforms such as Mastodon ... which seems to be the best micro-blogging alternative to Twitter out there. And its open source! You can host it yourself but still be connected to the global network. There are not that many users yet, but its steadily growing and we are on there already and the number of followers is growing so that's a good reason to give it a try :).
PeerTube is an open source decentralized peer-to-peer YouTube alternative. It can be self-hosted and streams video from the original server as well as other peers currently watching the video (making the system scale well as the audience grows).
And where video quality is concerned (particularly important for us) it should be noted that the video encoding parameters are of entirely under your control in a self-hosted environment. This is especially good if you want to showcase your work in the best possible way - and lets be honest: UHD content on YouTube is popular just because it results in proper sharp Full HD playback - something a normal 1080p file on YouTube will not achieve.
We do not yet have our own Peertube instance but we would very much like to get one.
4 Comments
I applaud your decision. What
I applaud your decision. What's your take on Twitter? Will you close that one too?
We are still undecided about
We are still undecided about twitter - its a lot better but the business model is still of the same breed... and mastodon is "the better twitter" - if only diaspora would have become the better FB but unfortunately that didn't work out...
The project is obligated to
The project is obligated to promote platforms which don't trespass against the natural rights of their users and/or their data in general. Twitter is more politically and commercially motivated than it is morally motivated. So, yes, because of the way Twitter is controlled and its policy biases, it has certainly put itself in the firing line. The question of abandoning Twitter probably isn't about 'if' but more about 'when'.
I've exported this page to
I've exported this page to PDF and sent to some friends. Oddly enough, it's lengthy work to compile FaceBook violations. This page makes it easy to demonstrate the gross and steady encroachment of privacy. Thanks for your bravery and helping us make a stand. I'm surprised there aren't more comments about this. Open Source, Open Hardware, and privacy go hand and hand.
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