One year without Facebook
Last year, I wrote a post about how I permanently deleted my Facebook account, and some of the effects that decision had in my life.
Well, 14 months later (exactly, to the date) since I wrote that article, I wanted to come back and reflect on how much has changed in that time.
Facebook’s long-standing mission has been to connect people, however, one of the many pitfalls that come with the network is the influx of friend requests. On this platform, in particular, there’s an emphasis, almost a social obligation, to be connected with everyone you’ve ever known and met in life. When I was using it, at one point, I had almost 400 “friends,” and I would routinely go through and try to cull and reduce that number to something more manageable.
Just before I permanently deleted my account, that number sat around the 150 marks, but in reality, I have about 15 people in my life that I genuinely care about and actively want to stay connected with. When I would try to remove someone from my friends list, I would always feel worried that they’d find out and that their feelings would be hurt due to that social obligation, and believe me, happened on many occasions. Remember follow-for-follow? Those were the dark days.
What about FOMO? Well, the thing is that after I deleted my account, I found that I was spending less time passively sharing my thoughts and content into the void, and instead, spending more time communicating directly with my circle of friends, whether it was one on one or in group chats. I’m not feeling any less connected than I was 14 months ago. If anything, I feel more connected. I continue to make plans with friends and family over messaging apps, calendar invites, and emails, so for me personally, nothing really has changed.
Two of the most common use cases I hear people give me when they defend their usage of the platform are event planning and birthday notifications.
I can honestly say that I cannot remember the last time anyone I know used Facebook to plan or schedule an event. In fact, looking through my calendar, almost every event, form a casual hangout session with friends, concert details, to parties, all of them were scheduled either through email or Google Calendar. And the same thing applies to birthday notifications. I just plugged the birthdays of people I care about into my phone, set a reminder for the night before, and that’s perfect for me.
So, it feels like nothing much has changed, right? Well, not really. I did notice a significant change in one area of my online life.
Even without a Facebook account active, the company can still build what’s called a shadow profile of you and sell that information off to advertisers. They do this by using the Facebook pixel, which is embedded on every website. When you load a website for a particular brand you like, the embedded pixel collects and sends information about the device and its browsing activities back to Facebook itself, and from there, they use that information to help brands continue to target you.
Even though I’ve been using adblocking software for as long as I can remember, I also began to use tracking blockers as well on both my laptop and phone to prevent these invisible trackers from gobbling up my data and selling it off. These extra steps did help, and I began to see fewer targeted ads everywhere online and in the other social platforms that I still use.
The other benefit that I didn’t think about either until recently was that my online shopping, and the feeling I had to spend my money, also dropped significantly. I like to think of myself as a person with great self-restraint, but when I’d visit a site two or three times to see if they had anything I liked and wanted, but didn’t need, and then I’d see an ad in my feeds, I’d feel tempted to part with my hard-earned dollars. Now that that has been almost entirely removed, I don’t feel the urge to spend money on shiny new things just because I can. I still see wildly off-target ads in my Instagram feed, but I think that’s because since I don’t have a Facebook account, they’re missing big chunks of relevant information to really build a shadow profile of who I am and what I like, so it doesn’t know what ads to serve me.
Looking back on these last 14 months, I think I’ve become more intentional with how I spend my time online. I’m no longer constantly reaching for my phone for that digital fix and scrolling endlessly through the feeds (mostly because I’ve turned off all notifications aside from favourite contacts to text, email, or call me), but rather, I’m spending more time just being present.
If you’re interested, here are some of the apps, extensions, and tools that I use to block ads and tracking.
Web Browser:
My browser of choice on my laptop is the new Microsoft Edge based on Chromium. It’s got some great built-in privacy features and is not nearly as much of a resource hog as Chrome is. On my phone, I use the Brave Browser. It’s also built on Chromium, but has some excellent privacy features baked in that make the overall web experience that much smoother.
Extensions:
uBlock Origin
Privacy Badger
Disconnect
HTTPS Everywhere
PixelBlock
Tools:
