why should I have to upload a photo of myself to facebook?
Is it possible to be a passive user of Facebook? I want to read announcements relating to friends and colleagues, and peradventure post comments, without building a profile with photos, a timeline and so on. I take managed perfectly well without joining, but occasionally miss useful information that is non available elsewhere. Eira
What's known as "lurking" – being a fellow member without actively participating – is very mutual. To quote Jakob Nielsen, "In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a picayune, and 1% of users business relationship for nearly all the action." This is known every bit the ane% dominion, and it's obviously a gross generalisation.
Facebook's participation levels appear to be much college than that. We don't know the number of lapsed or (literally) dead accounts, but in September 2018, Facebook reported 2.27 billion monthly agile users (upwardly 9.half dozen% over the previous year) and almost ane.5 billion daily active users (up 9.3%), despite losing nearly 1 million users in Europe.
While there's no obligation to participate, at that place are much trickier questions about privacy and tracking.
What distinguishes Facebook from Twitter, Reddit, Metafilter and so on is that information technology is based on real identities, which are fundamentally public. While you lot can choose how much information you mail on Facebook, and how widely you share it, your friends may already have given Facebook your electronic mail address as function of the "find friends" procedure. Some of them may also have posted images of you, mentioned you in comments, or linked to things y'all posted on other services. As a result, when you sign upwardly, Facebook may already know who most of your friends are.
This data may be nigh you, merely it isn't yours: it belongs to the people who shared it.
Either way, whatsoever organization that knows your real name can probably find out a lot about you. This was already obvious in 1999 when Sunday'due south Scott McNealy said: "You have zip privacy anyway. Get over information technology."
Minimal Facebooking
To sign up for a Facebook account, you need a name and a working email address or mobile telephone number. Yous tin can utilize whatever proper name you are known by. Even so, if you meet a trouble, yous may have to provide an acceptable course of ID to verify it later.
You will also be asked for your date of birth – considering y'all accept to be at to the lowest degree xiii years old to bring together – and your choice of gender. Both may be used for advertizing purposes. After that, everything is optional.
Facebook volition want yous to complete your new contour by uploading a mug shot and a cover photograph, inbound the names of schools or colleges you attended, where you alive and and so on. You are not obliged to do any of this. Your profile photograph could exist a cartoon character. However, there could be from dozens to thousands of people who have the same proper name equally you. The more details y'all enter, the easier it will be for friends to find y'all.
Adjacent, to make the system work for y'all, you lot have to "friend" people you know. Facebook encourages you to upload your contacts book (come across above). It's much ameliorate to track people down one by i, though it is more than work.
And that'south it. When your friends post things on Facebook, they will appear in the news feed. Yous will also have a timeline nether your name, which used to exist your wall. You can't get out of having these, just again, y'all don't have to mail service annihilation to them.
Privacy settings
When yous practice post something, you tin command who sees it by using each post's settings menu (3 dots), but it's better to choose settings for your whole account. To do this, click the down-pointer on the far right of the blue heading bar, select Settings from the carte du jour, then Privacy. The chief entry is "Who tin see your future posts?" You probably won't want to use Public, which means anyone on or off Facebook. Instead, limit visibility to friends, perhaps, or customise it. You tin can exclude by name anyone you don't want to meet something.
Yous tin can as well limit the range of people who tin can look y'all up using the e-mail address and/or phone number you gave Facebook, though that can brand information technology harder for friends to find you lot.
Where it asks "Do you desire search engines outside of Facebook to link to your profile?", reply no.
You should too visit the ad preferences page and click on "Advertisement settings". This lets you lot turn off adverts based on "data from partners" (external websites, not Facebook), and adverts on external websites based on your activities on Facebook. This removes the advantages of tracking you. Otherwise, Facebook could employ the data that you visit, for example, car websites to show you car ads.
You lot tin can also alter "Ads that include your social deportment" to "No 1". This stops Facebook from using your actions (signing upward for events, using apps, making recommendations and so on) to promote them to your friends.
Finally, Facebook publicises birthdays. The setting is on your About folio under "Contact and basic info". Note that you can set different privacy levels for your date of birth and your year of birth. You could set both to "Merely me" or just keep the year – and therefore your age – individual.
This description barely scratches the surface of the many means you can manage your data. Facebook provides detailed command over your privacy, and how it tin can target y'all with the adverts that pay for its costless service. The trouble is that it would have many hours to find, empathise and customise all the settings bachelor. Understandably, most people but don't care enough to make the effort when the merely visible benefit may exist seeing less appropriate advertisements.
Facebook disconnect
Facebook Connect or "Log in with Facebook" is an identity organization that, conveniently, lets yous log into other websites, play games and then on with your Facebook ID. While this saves creating a lot of different login names and passwords, information technology also lets Facebook know what you are doing away from Facebook.
This isn't a new idea, and Facebook's tracking network is much smaller than Google'southward, but it'south what drives the employ of things like Ghostery, Privacy Badger, Disconnect.Me and Redmorph.
Y'all can opt out of using the whole platform. This stops Facebook Connect from working, and disables all the apps and games that have been used by third parties to harvest user information.
To do this, get to the Settings folio and select "Apps and websites". Scroll down to the Apps, Websites and Games section, click Edit and and so select "Turn off". I got some dire warnings when I did this a few years ago, but every bit you're a new user, it shouldn't affect anything.
You lot can besides limit Facebook tracking by running Facebook in a container in the Firefox browser.
Information technology's non merely Facebook
Facebook explained in a blog post what sort of data it collects and how it does it. Obviously, it mentioned that other internet companies are doing exactly the same things.
In fact, the main difference between Facebook and LinkedIn and some rivals is that well-nigh (only non all) of the personal information on Facebook and LinkedIn has been willingly contributed by users for their own purposes, rather than gathered by spying. Facebook has become the universal boot boy partly because of its abandon, and because its massive scale means its blunders can touch far more people, or fifty-fifty whole nations.
Ultimately, nevertheless, the trouble is not Facebook merely "surveillance commercialism": the business model whereby users merchandise personal information for services instead of paying for them.
As security practiced Bruce Schneier wrote last twelvemonth in a blog mail on Facebook and Cambridge Analytica: "for every commodity about Facebook's creepy stalker behaviour, thousands of other companies are breathing a collective sigh of relief that information technology'south Facebook and not them in the spotlight. Considering while Facebook is one of the biggest players in this space, there are thousands of other companies that spy on and dispense usa for profit".
For those of us with distant friends and family, Facebook is just too valuable to surrender, and its replacement(south) might well be worse. Information technology'south the whole organization that needs fixing.
Have you got a question? E-mail it to Ask.Jack@theguardian.com
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/askjack/2019/mar/07/is-there-a-way-to-use-facebook-without-giving-up-my-privacy
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