Breaking Facebook's hold on our data
Like many of you, I’m angry and disappointed by the latest revelations (there’s more) about Facebook's unethical dealings with your data and mine. Handing other businesses information about us without our active and granular permission is a terrible business practice and not something I’m prepared to implicitly support through this business.
Our friends (we like to think of DHH, Jason Fried, and the rest of the team there as friends, or at least fellow travellers, even though we’ve never met) at Basecamp have begun a campaign to help businesses sever the Facebook cord, and acidlabs is joining them. We are officially a Facebook-Free Business.
From today, we will no longer use Facebook or any associated company as a way of ensuring we play our very small part in keeping your data, and ours, private and as a way of keeping the money we control out of Facebook’s hands.
We’d encourage you to do the same.
On a personal note, while there’s inevitably some FOMO and pain associated with reducing or eliminating one’s use of Facebook and Instagram to keep in touch with friends, family, and such, I’ll be doing the same with my personal accounts over the next few weeks. Cutting off my use of Instagram is pretty easy. Facebook less so, as I have a rich and diverse community there; so I need to make some decisions about how best to reduce my use and control any potential data misuse.
At the very least, I encourage you to use a wide-spectrum blocker like uBlock Origin; it won’t stop unauthorised data sharing, but it will make it marginally less valuable to companies like Facebook (and, TBH, not seeing ads everywhere is a much nicer experience).
