Life without Facebook on my phone
Why I deleted my Facebook phone app, and life ever since.
I loved Facebook!
I was an avid user of Facebook. I used to rant a lot on the social media platform. This comprised of long posts on my “wall”, long commentaries and endless debates on “comment threads”. I “liked”, and “shared”, a lot.
When they introduced the ability to “reply” to comments, it was like a whole new corner of the world opened up for me. Facebook was also my news aggregator — where I would get posts from the likes of WSJ, WP, NYT, Vox, Medium, NDTV, TOI, Economist, The Verge, Wired, and so many more.
Facebook gave me a sense that I was keeping in touch my friends, and the world that I lived in.
Facebook had me hooked. It was unhealthy and addictive — and I knew this about my usage of Facebook at the time. I loved it! While, I recognized the flaws in Facebook at an intellectual level, I loved Facebook at a visceral level. I really did.
And, then it happened.
My account information was used without my consent.
I got a notice from Facebook about how my account information might have been used without my consent.
It was late 2017, early 2018 — I can not place a finger on the exact time, because it was so long ago. News about Cambridge Analytica was blowing up. A lot of finger-pointing was, well, pointing at yet-another-wave of lax policies around data privacy when it comes to social media at-large, not just Facebook. I figured that this too shall pass.
I do not even know if this was necessarily because of Cambridge Analytica. All I know is that Facebook notified me that some 3rd party application(s) had access to my data on Facebook, even though I never gave permissions to those application(s) to access my account information. It would seem that the application(s) had access to some of my account information because they had access to the account information of someone on my “friend list”.
My guess is that someone on my “friend list” likely played a game or a took a quiz on Facebook (which are 3rd party applications). In doing so, they likely gave this game/quiz/application access to their own information. As part of their account information, they also likely gave access to their entire “friend list” — which I was a part of. And that allowed the application(s) to collect information about everyone on such “friend lists” — including me.
I was irritated.
I deleted my Facebook phone app
When I get irritated, I either get mad and yell a lot, or I get the spontaneous ability to cut through the bullshit around me, and arrive at meaningful solutions. This time, I cut through the bullshit.
First, I disabled access to my account information to all 3rd Party Applications that I was using on Facebook, which I had willingly given. Second, I uninstalled the Facebook phone app from my phone. I was also going to permanently block anyone sharing anything to my wall, but my wife would not have it, so I let that be. I did not delete my account though. More on that some other time.
In many ways, it was liberating.
Something shifted, half-unexpectedly.
When I removed all applications that had access to my account information on Facebook, and removed Facebook from my phone entirely, my goal was to simply limit how my Facebook account was getting used — both by me and 3rd party applications. I was always going to check my statuses and like posts on the website. I always intended for my usage to reduce. But not as dramatically as it did.
I have not meaningfully updated my status on Facebook for at least two years now. Also, I have not cared about liking anything on Facebook for a long time. I still visit the site to check up on the posts that my wife keeps sharing on my “wall” or “feed” or whatever it is called in 2020. I check my notifications to see if there in anything interesting — not once have I found anything. I also visit the site to ensure that account has not been hacked, or misused.
Once Facebook notifications stopped popping up in my phone, I just stopped caring about Facebook entirely. I genuinely did not expect that to happen. Note that I have not deleted my account. And I can always access it on a web browser on my laptop. But I just did not care enough anymore. I cannot explain why that happened to me. However, without all those Facebook notifications on my phone, I found myself with more time and focus.
Facebook left a void. And I was not craving it, anymore.
Curiosity and Inspiration came calling.
I found myself reading a lot more on my phone — without venting and ranting. I read everything that I could get my hands on — The Economist, The New York Times, Medium, The New Yorker. I started solving the NYT Crossword way more intently — which became a common pass time for my wife and I. I also finally began picking up books that I always found interesting, and started to get back to an old habit of mine — reading books.
I realized this a long time after deleting the Facebook app — I was actually expanding my attention span, and consequently my ability to focus for longer durations of time. Facebook on my phone — as it turned out — was making me dumber. Go figure.
More importantly, the ranting, venting and raving died down. Instead of being the “producer of content and opinion” that users of social media platforms are made out to be, I simply became an avid consumer of information.
I stopped relying on an aggregated, machine generated news feeds. Instead I went to the sources of information directly — websites for individual news outlets. It allowed me to curate the articles that not just interested me, but challenged me in both fact and opinion. I would start with one news article. I would simply not stop with one article, but instead roam around Wikipedia to check up on basic facts that the article was relying on. I would also read multiple news reports from different outlets reporting on the larger, common subjects that were touched upon in the original article.
I also found myself following works of creativity and color. I love data visualizations. I love building them, and being inspired by them — part of the reason why I have a NYT digital subscription. And so, r/dataisbeautiful became a fascinating corner of Reddit I stumbled into. Instagram became another favorite app, where I started following everything from posts about coffee, to posts about BMWs, pens and quills, polar bears and my sister’s awesome creations in paint and pencil. All that creativity inspired me to go back to writing — and not just on Medium or some blog, but actually spilling ink on paper, and scribbling ideas, thoughts, and periodic brain farts.
Such creative works challenged me to build and make something more meaningful and substantial than a bite-sized, sarcastic catchphrase about someone else’s bite-sized catchphrase.
By freeing up time that Facebook was otherwise occupying, I read a lot more, educated and challenged myself, and chose to be inspired by the creativity that folks express on the internet everyday.
Without Facebook, I chose the version of the internet that it was always idealized to be.
Thank you, Facebook.
Facebook did the right thing when it notified me of my data breach. (Yes, it was a data breach. This is how hacking in 2020 looks like.)
I thank Facebook for that notification. I imagine that this was not the first time that something like that happened with my account information. I can also imagine that some of the applications that I used on Facebook were nefarious in their own right — god knows what harm they did to folks on my “friend” list.
But this was the first time that Facebook actually told me that my account data was accessed without my knowledge or understanding. When that happened, something snapped in me. Something that was on the verge of snapping anyway.
The time that I spend on the internet is still not great. I can spend a little less time on Amazon and Etsy, for instance. I still use many of other products that Facebook has been acquiring left and right. But the past two years since I got Facebook off my phone, I have found myself more curious about, and open to the world around me.
I lost my trust in Facebook when I got that data notification about two years ago. But after staying off all this time, I realized something simple and uplifting…
I do not need Facebook to explore the internet on my own terms.
