Graph search and its creepy implications were then nothing I needed to find personally objectionable anymore.
I no longer have to complain about the other sleazy, move-the-goalposts, amoral aspects of Facebook Instagram.
This latest one, I have to say, should not be surprising to anybody.
DELETE YOUR ACCOUNT if you don't like it. You will still have friends, I promise :-)
Before you file for account deletion, you might want to do two things:
1) use http://www.picknzip.com/ to download the pictures of you from other people (I have a couple that I liked that I can use for other profile pics, etc.). (The other photos in my facebook albums that I uploaded myself, I already have elsewhere.)
2) associate your facebook account with a yahoo email address. You can download all the contact information of your facebook friends that way (I don't know if this still works, but it did last year)
This is, AFAIK, the only way to export your facebook friends' data
3) go to your full friends list, scroll down until the infinite scrolling loads the whole list. copy and paste this in an email to yourself.
These three steps should ensure that you don't "lose" any data about your friends on facebook, and will allow you to email them later.
Yes, you still will have friends, but you will lose friends, connections with businesses, and other abilities. I swore off facebook for one year after having been on it since...I don't know...maybe 2004 or 2005ish?
The modern Facebook account has everything from a person's college girlfriend, to the pictures of their first born. Yes it has some mundane things like what you ate for lunch, it also has messages from you and your friends debating over the Affordable Health Care Act. For a lot of people, it isn't just flipping a switch. You will not speak as often to that person that now lives on a different coast even though you both have each other's email.
Then there are the things that impact you even though you're still friends with people. For example, invites to events like Halloween parties are often sent by things like Facebook, so even though you see those people once or twice a week, you still become the asshole that has to be filled in while everyone else is already up to speed already.
Then you have local businesses and chains that only have their hours and specials on Facebook (or at least their Facebook account is the only one they actively maintain) Old Chicago in my area is an example. They have a national website, but the specials that change every Tuesday night are only posted to their Facebook page.
Nothing convinced me to invest in Facebook more than quitting Facebook.
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/imacros-for-f...
Yet here you are...
Additionally, apart from writing in PHP, there must be tons of technical fun and deep problems to solve that makes FB fairly unique.
And also, I'm not really sure how unethical it'd be to work for them, even if you felt they were wrong. Unless you're bringing some rare 4-sigma value to FB, it's likely they'd just get someone else. Might as well be you, where you have a chance to influence things.
Must be nice to have it wrapped up all tidy like.
I'm sure your frinds rather be working for some project that would make the world better (hey Linux, I'm at you!:) But, still, they have to pay bills.
That's life. Don't like it? Change it.
Mike Krieger (Instagram co-founder) here. Just wanted to offer some clarification since there's some speculation about the reason & scope for the verification mentioned in the article.
When we receive evidence of a violation of our site policies, we respond. This isn't a recent change, but the way we've run our community from the beginning. In some specific cases, for verification purposes, we request that people upload a government issued ID in response. This is the case for a very small percentage of accounts, and doesn't affect most Instagram users. The ID is used only for account verification, and not retained permanently.
Hope that helps clarify things a bit.
Verification of what?
Do you ask to cover the license number/address as well, the way Facebook.com does? If yes, doesn't it make it trivially easy to send a fake picture of a license your way?
Mike, how can you be a "software engineer" and make a statement like that?
Yes, it helps. Now I'm even more convinced how corrupt your company is.
Until now-ish (or the near future), FB had no way of verifying that, or forcing me to!
Push for real identities is beneficial to both - government and social networks. First get more control over their citizens, second more ad revenue.
I tried to explain what I was using the account for to their account reps, but they wouldn't unlock it unless I sent them the ID scans. I can't believe that there is not a bigger uproar about a non-governmental, for-profit asking for government issued ID, in electronic format no less, that relies on the unwitting user to hide pertinent data prior to scanning it.
Fucking ridiculous if you ask me. Instagram should be equally ashamed of themselves.
With business customers, even if we ask for ID to confirm larger contracts, they'll send everything. Full IDs, credit card scans, etc. Technical customers regularly just email root passwords to financially-valuable systems when they have the slightest problem.
Also, try this: run an ad on Craigslist offering $500 a day for whatever. Ask for personal info and photos. You'll be deluged with people ready to hand every detail over without second thought.
Most Facebook users have already given their name, birthday and profile photo. For most users they wouldn't be giving anything else than those pieces of information on a ID card.
Now, that doesn't get into the secondary requests as the article states, but it certainly isn't "entrusting a copy of their ID to a third party."
Agree. Scanning a drivers license over the internet seems ...
At some point you have to start attributing actions to malice.
People, get off Facebook. I'm in college and haven't touched it in 11 months. I'm doing just fine. Nobody needs it.
Reference: http://torrentfreak.com/court-throws-out-109-of-110-alleged-...
Follow the money. Always.
I will say that social networks like Facebook have introduced some interesting dynamics and engagement that could have not existed otherwise such as Caine's Arcade.
I think we're all waiting for the social network we all want and pay the $10-$12/year for privacy, transparency and complete ownership over our data.
I'm currently working on distributed systems/networks which could form the basis of a 'social graph' but there are questions about how to make it profitable (hence self-sustaining). Getting people onto a network is only part of the problem.
I trust FB to spell correctly and use the right apostrophe. Very interesting set of responses here though.
It can never be a valid ID, because they are never involved in the certification and registration process of your "official" existence.
Don't worry, they'll get there.
On the other, at least it's still a reset option. That might sound silly at first, but I lost access to an old MS Live account that I had foolishly left on auto-login on my Xbox for years and eventually lost access to the old Hotmail account (yeah, I made this account a long time ago) it was tied to. No amount of offering to show that I was the credit card holder for the hundreds of dollars in games or anything would convince them it was my account.
For the people to whom their Instagram account is really important, this might be a nice option (even if it is rather invasive).
> They see it as an underage Facebook.
I meant the underage kids, not Facebook itself. I wouldn't say Instagram solicits kids, just that there are lot of them on there.
I am tempted to join instagram just so i can upload a picture of ian lavender - "Don't tel Him Pike"
For FB's, they have to excuse from making an open source client side pre-upload number-removing tool.
Same for anyone who uses it.
The most difficult elements would probably be faking the font, and post-processing it to ensure the text looked real (pixel-perfect accuracy and color for text would be a dead giveaway of computer generation).
http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-dramatic...
