Why Facebook Is Never Safe

Jakob Appelbaum:

How to use Facebook safely
Here’s the easy solution: don’t fucking surveil yourself! If you want to stay safe on Facebook, the answer is, you should not use it, and don’t tag people! There are benefits of using it, there are tradeoffs, but in the long run I think it’s going to be pretty bad that you gave a bunch of capitalists all your private information where the US government asserts and has the right to read it without a warrant and with the ability to gag the corporate.



What’s the greatest database of Jews on the planet? Facebook. What will happen when you want the biggest database of leftists on the planet? Or right wing people? That’s really, really scary, so one way to not be part of that dataset is to not put yourself in it voluntarily, and to chastise people who only hang out with you to tag you in facebook as a sort of conspicuous consumption of the 21st Century say: “Hey, if that’s all you get out of our friendship then go fuck yourself!”



There’s an important distinction, this idea of privacy by policy and privacy by design. Privacy by policy is the idea that there is a policy that is like the law. But policy doesn’t really matter because someone can say they’re not going to log, but then they do log. They say they’re not going to give the log data out but someone will copy it, or maybe they’ll sell it.