@matpacker I had this thought a while ago, and signed back up after having deleted (not disabled) my account two years previous. I was pretty horrified that all of my friend relationships and most of my data was still there 😳. I then deleted (again) and started a brand new account, different email etc but it still managed to suggest most of my old friend connections.
@milkthealmond @matpacker They fully expect you to be sucked back in. I’m currently on a Facebook vacation, using Lent as an excuse, only leaving the Local app installed for event invites. On top of this, I’m currently reading Digital Minimalism, which just makes me want to leave it behind all together. There’s this part of me that believes personal blogging will catch on, it’s just people need to get past the convenience factor of having hundreds of people in one place over all the negative factors of a service like Facebook.
@matpacker Spying on people is FB's entire business model, so it will not require you to leave many breadcrumbs for FB to correlate your new account to your old account.
@davidm this is one of my concerns, out of morbid curiousity I went ahead and started a new account last night, I gave them the least amount of information I possible, and within seconds there was a suggested friends list that had quite a lot of the people in it that I was coming back to Facebook to interact with. It’s quite disturbing, specially since it’s been months and months since I deleted my old account entirely. I did have to have a laugh though, my wife is blaming my return to FB on the current outage they’re experiencing...haha
@sku\_b I want to believe that personal blogging will make a comeback, however, I think there’s certain perceived barriers that put people off as many still believe it’s complicated to start your own blog/website. The other issue I see is how people can interact with each other this way, comment boxes generally attract toxic comments so people remove the ability to comment, and unless you go for a blogging platform like micro.blog, you’re effectively in your own house wondering if people are actually reading your writing. The other pushback I’ve heard from some of my IRL friends is that they don’t want to manage their own servers, databases, and all the other bits that go along with running your own blog. Obviously I suggest micro.blog to these people so they can see they don’t have to do it all themselves.
@milkthealmond that completely matches what I experienced last night when I created a new account, almost immediately I had suggested friends that matched who I had on my old account. I don’t believe for one second that Facebook actually deletes your data one month after you close your account, they just slow down how quickly it comes back to you...
@matpacker Right. I don’t have comments enabled on my page because of toxic or pointless comments I’ve received in the past. Instead, I resort to cross posting to Micro.blog and Twitter as I’ve found those to be the best for conversation in the instances where it occurs.
@matpacker FWIW, I only* ever used Facebook on the desktop, and my location and your_places folders contain only a text file stating I have no data in that section, so it appears they can’t snoop on your every daily move via the web. That said, they do have the IP of every login/out/account update since January 2017 (in the security_and_login_information folder), so they can correlate that to a vague location, but at least only when using the site.
As I recall, you can set a preference so that people cannot tag you in photos without your approval; I don’t know if there is an equivalent setting for posts or groups (you can, however, prevent posts you are tagged in from automatically showing up on your wall/profile—or whatever the term is today for the view showing all the posts you’ve made).
* I logged in to the site via the web on my phone once 4-5 years ago to get my password stored on the phone in case I ever needed to log in from there in an emergency.