It took me seven years to leave Facebook. I wanted to leave in 2018 but, as administrator of a work account, I had to remain. While greatly reducing my activity on the site in that time, I saw the steady decline of the platform (what Cory Doctorow calls ‘enshittification’). My timeline was filled with advertising, some of it creepy because it was for things I had searched for elsewhere online, most of it completely irrelevant.…
Can I just say … Mastodon is great! I follow several people there who are part of the free and open source (FOSS) tech movement and are working to free themselves from online surveillance. It was there that I learned of the Opt Out Project by Janet Vertesi, a sociology professor at Princeton University who works at the intersection of society and technology. She opted out of Google in 2012 (an eternity ago in tech)…
It’s the beginning of the year. Where most people set resolutions, I review my ongoing list of goals and decide whether to dump any or add to the list. One of my goals for 2018 is to leave Facebook. Sounds pretty drastic to abandon a social media network that has billions of users and an addictive interface, but this feeling has been building for some time now. As Facebook has grown, it has shifted from…