Steve Wozniak Says People Should Get Off Facebook Permanently
To me, Facebook provides enough value that I don&#x27;t feel the benefits of deleting it outweigh the benefits of keeping it.<p>Without it, I have no connection at all to some of my old friends. While I don&#x27;t necessarily need to be connected to them, it&#x27;s nice to see how people are doing every once in a while.<p>LinkedIn fulfills this desire in some ways, but I don&#x27;t typically connect with my &quot;outside-of-work&quot; friends on LinkedIn. Plus, LinkedIn has its own host of privacy issues, so it&#x27;s not really a great replacement in the sense of improving privacy.<p>There are also the useful community aspects. I often find out about local events through Facebook. I suppose Meetup or similar sites could replace that function. But my friends also use Facebook&#x27;s events to organize parties and stuff - I don&#x27;t know any good alternative that&#x27;s nearly as convenient.<p>I&#x27;m not convinced that deleting your account helps all that much anyways. You do make it harder for Facebook to listen in from your phone and things like that, but I&#x27;m sure they still keep a detailed profile on you. And you can get those benefits just by deleting the mobile app, without deleting your account.<p>I think the better reason to delete Facebook is the mental health issues with the whole spotlight effect or whatever that&#x27;s called (where you only see the highlights of other people&#x27;s lives which makes you feel like your life is boring). As long as you regulate your usage in a healthy way, I think whether you delete your account or not doesn&#x27;t make much of a difference.<p>For now I just throw on a handful of privacy extensions (uBlock Origin, PrivacyBadger, Decentraleyes, Facebook Container, etc.) and accept that Facebook is going to know many things about me.<p>As a point of reference - my age group started using Facebook around middle school. So I have a lot of &quot;friends&quot; that I would have no way of keeping up with otherwise, and I&#x27;m not used to not having that ability. I suspect the sentiment is different for older generations who are used to losing touch with people. My parents, for example, have a couple old friends from whom they haven&#x27;t heard anything in many many years. That concept doesn&#x27;t mesh with the lifestyle I grew up with. It&#x27;s not that there are many specific people I want to keep up with all the time - it&#x27;s just nice to get random updates on random people you used to know well.