Why I haven't deleted Facebook

I was very close to deleting facebook for the following reasons.

I value my privacy but facebook keeps a molecular level profile of me that with thousands of data points beyond what I even know about that is accessible to people I don't know. What besides advertising is it used for? Who has access to it today? Who will have access to it in the future? A government agency, a political party, a pedophile targeting my children, a Nazi or Terrorist who wants me dead, etc. I also don't like the idea of my content, my time, being used to enrich anyone other than me.

My friend posted a dash cam video on facebook of a car accident and didn't make a penny on facebook while it made thousands on youtube (which is still not giving him the true value of his content but far better than the zero facebook paid him). Content and data are digital gold mines, Mark Zuckerberg understood this back in 2004 when he started facebook but based on the unlimited amount of content users give away for free I'm quite positive the general public doesn't.

More importantly I don't want to be manipulated by the content that is shown to me and the content that is scrubbed from me ever seeing it (same reason why I do not like watching TV, least of all "News"). The only filters and choices about content I see should be my own but facebook AI reads every post on facebook, tags it, and chooses who in the network sees it in their feed, and how far down the feed, based on the tagged content it wants you to see and when.

Further facebook will censor content that doesn't meet its community standards which are solely for the benefit of facebook and not its users. Facebook can and does effectively control the thoughts and emotions of billions of people by censoring what it doesn't want you to see and occupying your brain space with what it does want you to see. While facebook is not feeding you content to keep you on the site as long as possible it is feeding you content to effect how you think and feel.

Facebook is an incredible tool for marketers disguised as an innocent tool to share photos with family and friends. The only honest way to have a platform that has access to so many data points on so many people is for the software to be completely open source so the public an see what is being done with the data, what is being collected, who has access to it, how data is feed to you, etc. There are a few projects out there that are doing this already, they are open source and leave the control up to the user. Hopefully over time an open source social network will gain enough traction that it will have similar network effects as facebook but despite all of these compelling reasons to delete facebook my account is still open for the following two reasons

1) The information I have posted in the past and others have posted on my behalf is already in facebook's database and on their servers, nothing I do will take that back.  Facebook even has shadow profiles of people who don't have accounts based on data obtained from other users and other applications such as messenger its very unlikely a past user's data will actually be removed but rather kept as a shadow account removing my access to the data while preserving theirs.

What I have done since I have become more aware of facebook's nefarious data collection, content manipulation, censorship and the value of my data is I simply limit my future facebook data inputs to almost never. I do not have facebook or messenger installed on my phone, I rarely post anymore photos, I never check in, my browser clears facebook cookies after I log off and I use a VPN when I login so facebook doesn't even have my IP address.

2) Facebook is still is the largest database of humans on the planet with the most data points which is as valuable to me as it is for anyone and though I have gotten by pretty well without it over the past year or so I will still probably check in from time to time in the future.

In the mean time all my personal content, photos, posts, rants, and all other relative data, will be on an open source platform, that allows me to choose what is seen in my feed, doesn't censor content on a platform level doesn't collect data on me, and most importantly pays me for my content.

If you want to keep up with me you can find me on minds at https://www.minds.com/minixinside