How to leave Meta
With the three Musk-ateers in Trump’s pocket, ask yourself: “What’s the worst that can happen?”
Why now?
It kinda feels like it could be the start of something big. It absolutely doesn’t seem a stretch that Trump could demand access to all our messages to protect us from the bad men. (In fact he’s been threatening TikTok in the lead up to his inauguation.) But if you minimise your digital exposure and all this blows over, what will you have missed? A lot of cat videos? You will definitely have learnt a lot about how your data is used and abused.
The tech giants
- Apple
- Amazon
- Meta
- Microsoft
- Tesla
Common reasons for not worrying about privacy
I have nothing to hide
Edward Snowden explains why this is a bad argument: you have nothing to hide whilst you agree with the person with the stick.
I’m not doing anything wrong
Rules change and you have no input.
Addionally, you are assuming the data gatherers will maintain its integrity once it has been picked apart, repackaged and resold.
I’m not doing anything really wrong like dealing drugs or something
Whilst it is probably true you are not on the FBI’s most wanted list, you are still being tracked and profiled. Mortgage lenders and employers might be super interested to know you are hitting the casino every evening, or you’re flagged as having some health issue. The nothing-to-hide crew ought to consider that there is no discussion as to why you have been declined a loan.
Using Meta plaforms to promote your business
This is tricky as it’s difficult to justify reducing your reach, especially if you’re not currently overwhelmed with work.
Meta’s changing policies
We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words such as “weird”.
See Meta’s hateful conduct policy.
Meta products
Meta products and what you might use instead.
| Meta | Alternative |
|---|---|
| Mastodon (but no private groups), Bluesky | |
| Pixelfed | |
| Signal (no web client, but a decent desktop version) | |
| Messenger | Signal |
| TikTok | RedNote |
Signal won’t replace WhatsApp (just yet) so you must concede that you will be running two messenger apps: WhatsApp for the people who are complacent about privacy, Signal for the rest.
Disable/delete your accounts
It’s tempting to just delete your accounts in a fit of pique, but there is an argument to keeping your username to avoid impersonation. Download your data as a first step, and if you decide to delete your account at least you have all your photos. (They will be inaccessible after deletion but will they really be removed by Meta? Maybe not, we cannot know.)
The Facebook download took about 6 hours to prepare and the zip file was approximately 5GB for 10+ years of posts, so make sure you’re not leaving it to the last minute. Additionally, you might find you use your Facebook login for other services – like Spotify – so hopefully you will sort that before you disable. (But obviously it’s not the end of the world if you have to repeat the process.)
- Disable your account
- Download your data: make sure to select full date range and high quality media
- Logout of all devices so you don’t accidentally check it on your phone browser
Remove the phone apps
You can limit the use of non-essential services to your laptop: you are not completely free from any data gathering, of course, but you can at least reduce your exposure and therefore the quality of the data captured.
Are you reporting breaking news or current affairs; or can it wait until you get home to edit your photos properly before posting?
Search engines
Google was once the developers’ friend but now it is a vast, nebulous beast. And it purvades everything, tracking your every move and profiting from it; but its creep has been so methodically slow that we’ve barely even noticed.
You can at least make the DuckDuckGo search engine your browser default.
VPN
I use ExpressVPN on my phone and you don’t really notice any reduction in (network) performance if you pick a geographically close server. But you will find you suddenly start getting Norwegian ads, which is quite fun anyway. Of course you cannot implicitly trust the VPN provider either, but it is another layer to the obscurity onion. Which leads us nicely on to the Tor browser – a dedicated web browser focussed on privacy – which takes the idea of privacy layers to the extreme: maximum security at the expense of usabilty.
Privacy in literature
- “1984” George Orwell: a society in which people can be monitored at all times, is a society that breeds conformity and obedience and submission
- “He who does not move, does not notice his chains” – Rosa Luxemburg
- “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph in the world is that good men do nothing” – Edmund Burke
DNS servers
Note: this really is getting into the weeds, only worry about this if you’ve done everything else.
Behind the scenes when you type a URL, there is a lookup of that name to an IP address which is used to route your request to the server where your website really lives. If you haven’t fiddled with it this is probably Google: 8.8.8.8. Therefore, despite your data being encrypted, all top level websites that you visit are tracked by Google, even if you didn’t search for it.
An alternative is Cloudflare: 1.1.1.1.