When I first heard about it (only 15 years ago) I was already wary of internet pages packed with advertising, and there were already sites on the internet that were cloaking ads in pages that looked like news articles. That was bad enough to keep me away. I didn't even realize then what kind of platform it would become for lunatic ideas and propaganda.
I know full well that google knows exactly where I am and what I'm doing pretty much most of the time. It knows I'm using this site now. When I was testing Fieldlines' registration system yesterday, when I logged out of my account on my phone, the cookie on my desktop computer got logged out at the same time. I expected this. Google is watching me. When I watch Netflix, Google knows what I'm watching.
Google, Apple, Microsoft and facebook are systems designed to aggregate user data and sell it to advertisers, political parties, and in most countries, to governments. Somehow, selling the data to hackers was a bit too far for westerners, but they've passively accepted all the rest of it, and in other non-western countries, they weren't even given that choice. The only choice I really have is how many I'm tied up with. Since I'm a youtube user and regular data miner myself, google is unavoidable. It crawls my personal website more often than the russians do. So all I'm doing is keeping it down to 1 big-data aggregator.
But that's become impossible to maintain. When I went to China last year I brought an alternate smartphone. I used an iPhone to make it dissimilar from my regular Samsung. A few months ago I accessed the Apple data backup from that discarded iPhone to get a contact # of some people in China. Yeah, well the data backup was immense and somehow Apple's data restore to the new burner phone is BIGGER than the capacity of the former burner phone. WTF. It restored pictures I had deleted from the old phone. Browser history was back - it even had the same tabs open. WTF. Conversation history in WhatsApp and WeChat were restored. WTF-ing-F.
I'm pretty sick of being tracked all the time, and if there is at least one of these things I can stay away from, I'd prefer that.
So I'm really not in the mood to interact with Facebook.