Deleting Facebook has become another “Monday diet.” Logically, everyone knows they should leave terrifyingly invasive service , which collects incredible amounts of data, but no one does it.
Despite scandals, for example the Cambridge Analytica scandal with its geopolitical significance and the breaches that affected 29 million accounts, no one thinks of leaving the service. Although many look at it, no one can press that blue button that says “Delete Account”.
The reason or excuse is a bit cliché: no one wants to erase their memories.
Facebook has personally collected memories for everyone (even from a very young age). The period in school, university, the army, viral posts, bad and good moments, weddings, love affairs, baptisms, graduations, the first car, the first child, the whole life, minor and adult, organized digitally.
Years later, and even though Facebook has shown itself to be unworthy of our trust, this core is still its strongest element.
Many of you have considered quitting. Facebook seems to be making it easier by allowing you to download your data. But it won't download thousands of weird photos that you didn't upload but were tagged in.
The process of downloading your account will give you a ZIP file containing HTML files of all your data and a folder containing thousands of untagged images. Yes, tags have a special feature. They connect everything you have stored to each other with an endless information network and other people. That is probably the real value, which makes the data you have stored on your hard drive so meaningless.
The web of information that Facebook constructs with your memories and your photos offers an amazing framework that can be taken for granted, but it is not. You can personify it as a useless service, but the digital book is surprisingly powerful. There are parents and grandparents of mine who have countless photo albums full of pictures of friends whose names they no longer remember. The system of tags in Facebook photos means that each photo contains a link to the person's profile and in most cases they can see more details.
But this web of information that gives meaning to data is exactly what fuels Facebook's powerful advertising network. It connects advertisers to each person's personal history, to our locations, events, and every bit of personal information we've shared with our friends. None of us chose to share it with advertisers, even though the service's terms of service state so.
There is no doubt that a great many people still use Facebook as a healthy social network on a daily basis.
The power of Facebook is its ability to turn life events into memories.
If you download your photos from the Facebook network, can you get away with it? Unknown and no one can guarantee it. The data has been transferred from one network to another, and what might change is the updating of it through Facebook, because we are not only exposed to Facebook.
However, for those worried about losing their memories, memories survive and have survived even without cameras. The power of Facebook as a service is that as you use it, it organizes and categorizes your life, turning life events into memories. Leaving Facebook means you have to give up that convenience.
I think none of us have forgotten how to preserve our memories.
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- Facebook hacked: users' messages sold
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