On the contrary, I've completely disabled OS update checks via OS X's settings menu on both my personal (El Capitan) and work (Sierra) computers. I've managed to keep both up to date on security updates while avoiding obnoxious High Sierra update reminders quite easily.

iOS is terrible in this regard, however. I've only managed to keep my phone on iOS 9 through a bug/workaround involving a tvOS beta cert.

The iOS 9 upgrade dialog was terrible. It would appear seemingly at random, often (but not always!) first thing in the morning as I was just unlocking my phone. Sometimes it would appear while I was in the middle of swiping around.

I was one mistaken tap away from accidentally upgrading to iOS 10 and losing access to my phone for the next hour or however long it took.

They finally got me. I'm on iOS 10 now. It's ok. One great feature is that the insistent iOS 11 upgrade dialog requires a passcode to actually do the upgrade, so it's very easy to avoid triggering it accidentally. It still pops up randomly though.

I can't stand the fact that iOS will download updates without asking... even when not connected to a charger. I've been on terrible train station wifi in a foreign land and noticed that an update "is now available!" Absolutely horrific decision from Apple on that one. The only way to stop it? Filling your phone with enough music/video/pictures that iOS can't fit the update in there...

You can disable this. In iOS 11, go to Settings > iTunes & App Stores and disable Automatic Downloads > Updates.

I used a Firefox add-on for this a few months ago, but I don't think it was ever updated for compatibility with the webextensions API. If I'm remembering correctly, it was this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fb-purity-cle...

Worked very well for me. No reason you can't spin up an older version of FF (or 52 ESR) just to use this add-on.

I cleaned out all of my account's information first, and then slowly weaned myself off of use of the News Feed when I had free time. Eventually I wasn't even logging in once a week and just up and deleted my account.

The same extension, but for Chrome, is what I use to browse facebook.

We see most of these articles because we're in tech. The average user probably will see only a fraction of them, so it's not so much "piling on" as trying to reach as many people as possible.

It definitely seems like there's a media circus about Facebook right now, but that's mostly because for the first time, journalists are realizing there's a large audience for negative articles about Facebook. So this is probably months or years of articles that didn't get sign-off that are finally getting the green light by editors because there's actually a clear audience now (and maybe the media was afraid to step on Facebook's toes before?).

Hmmmm... maybe I'm underestimating the number of non- and semi-technical people following HN. I do see the current debate in the general public as (at least potentially) healthy and long overdue, I just felt that here on HN this wouldn't really pass as "news" in the literal sense, and that by now everyone here would have gotten the meta-story that "the normies" are waking up to the reality of surveillance capitalist business models...

Even as somebody who works in tech, this article revealed something shockingly scummy about Facebook. The general news of "Facebook harvests your data!" is definitely well-known in tech, but I'd say that this story qualifies as a genuine scoop.

Oh absolutely -- Facebook pissed off somebody with a lot of influence, and now they're paying the price.

That doesn't change the fact that Facebook is a cancer on society that sucks every piece of data it can get from its victims in exchange for an, at this point, poor end-user experience. I'd welcome a world where people have given up on Facebook, so I'm all for this push. Something something the enemy of my enemy is my friend, I guess.

> Sixty-seven percent of Americans say online communication strengthens their relationships — compared with just 18 percent who say it makes those relationships weaker. If you aren’t on Facebook, you’re missing out on important parts of your friends’ lives — maybe even missing your friends entirely, if they live far from you.

I really don't think what people think Facebook does to their relationships actually maps at all to the actual impact of Facebook on their relationships.

I'm 22 years old. I graduated from college last year. I think in 2008-2012, Facebook helped me keep in touch with friends because all of my friends posted to it regularly, sharing life events and photographs. My News Feed (back when it was chronological by default) helped me keep up to date with the biggest things in all of my friends' lives. It was nice. Notifications told me when somebody interacted my content, and I could take the time to read every comment someone made on one of my photos or posts. There were a few ads in a sidebar, which I could mostly ignore.

Today (well, two months ago, when I deleted my Facebook account), none of this is true, and Facebook is completely useless because of it. My News Feed regularly hides major posts from me, and throws "suggested content" and ads in my face before I can see anything I care about. My friends never post any more, and when they do, I don't see it because it's a) hidden in the News Feed of garbage and b) might not even be in the News Feed of garbage because Facebook's algorithm doesn't think it's "relevant". Notifications are complete spam, telling me that "X posted something!" and never letting me know when people post on my own photos and posts. Because it's hard to tell when people engage, there's no point in engaging -- nobody will read your comments! I studied abroad Fall semester of my senior year, and when I got home I posted a huge photo album of exciting places I visited. For 6 months, I assumed nobody commented or liked anything because I didn't get any notifications. I checked back on it when I first started thinking about deleting my Facebook, and realized there were dozens of likes and a handful of comments per picture. None of which I knew about. All of these people tried to reach out to me via a comment, asking about my trip, and it looked like I ignored all of them callously because Facebook never told me anything.

Facebook was once a useful tool for social interaction, but today I simply keep a list of the two-dozen or so friends I actually want to keep up with. Whenever I have a lazy afternoon or some free time, I consult the list, think about who I've lost touch with, and give them a call. I find that this is a much more rewarding way to interact with the people I love and care about. If you're feeling trapped by Facebook's social graph, just remember that humans interacted for tens of thousands of years without social media, and decades with only phones and letters. You can do the same.

Don't feed Facebook's ad engine at the expense of your own social circle. You can do a lot better.

> I really don't think what people think Facebook does to their relationships actually maps at all to the actual impact of Facebook on their relationships. ... I'm 22 years old ... today I simply keep a list of the two-dozen or so friends I actually want to keep up with. ...I consult the list ... and give them a call. ... just remember that humans interacted for tens of thousands of years without social media, and decades with only phones and letters. You can do the same.

I'm 40 and I think you're misrepresenting what things used to be like. It used to be very easy to lose touch with people.

People would move, change phone numbers (and not have mobile phones with phone numbers that might remain a constant) and you wouldn't know. Or there'd be acquaintances or even people you'd call friends that you never had their contact details in the first place (it's more of a deal to ask for someone's home number and/or address -- or provide your own -- than to become Facebook friends). You likely kept people's numbers on paper, and if that was misplaced at some point you could easily lose any way to contact people.

I've lost touch with so many people I've known over the years. A number of these being people that had been good friends, who I would have liked to keep in contact with, and others who were less close but who I'd still like to have some sort of contact with.

This is a really good point, thank you for articulating it so well.

Since you're from the generation before my own (close to two generations, I guess), I'm curious for your take on this: do you find Facebook interaction to truly feel authentic (not the right term, but I can' think of a better one)? I find that it is too often a passive exchange: you friend somebody you used to know, you might exchange a few messages if you were very close friends in the past, and then their posts are largely lost in the noise of the Feed. And if they don't post, they might as well not even be your friend.

If you really want to get in touch with those people, today you can always search for their LinkedIn or send them an email or just ask a friend who might still be in touch to share their contact information... right? At least then they'll know you truly care, instead of just clicking a button at the behest of a Facebook suggestion algorithm. Personally I feel like friendships ought to be active relationships, so Facebook "friends" usually aren't anything more than acquaintances. But then again, I'm young, unmarried, and living in a major US city, so my perspective might be a little different from somebody who has a spouse, children, and a mortgage in suburban America :) ... or anybody else in the US, for that matter.

> I'm curious for your take on this: do you find Facebook interaction to truly feel authentic (not the right term, but I can' think of a better one)?

I think a lot of the interactions are very shallow ones (not saying there's anything inherently wrong with all shallow interactions), and I think it lets people "manage their image" to a large extent. But I do think that even fairly shallow interactions can still be authentic (in the sense that people aren't trying to lie or mislead).

But at the same time, I think similar can be said of a lot of face-to-face interactions as well.

> And if they don't post, they might as well not even be your friend.

There's a spectrum. E.g. there can be people who don't post much, but occasionally post photo albums, which means you can look at their profile and see their photos and at least get a sense of some of the things they've been up.

> If you really want to get in touch with those people, today you can always search for their LinkedIn or send them an email or just ask a friend who might still be in touch to share their contact information... right?

These days you can, but the reality is that the more friction involved the less people are going to do it. Ideally they would do it, but that's not reality. You can argue that if you're not going to make the effort then those people weren't really close enough friends. I don't agree with that -- one, there's differing degrees of friendship and 'lesser' friendships can still have value, and second, people are imperfect just don't always do what's in their best interest (like going to the effort of keeping in contact with good friends).

> Personally I feel like friendships ought to be active relationships, so Facebook "friends" usually aren't anything more than acquaintances.

I've already touched on my view on this, but I don't hold the 'close friendship or nothing' view. I think there can still be value in 'weaker' forms of friendship, right down to being acquaintances. (Obviously though, this is a topic you could get quite deep into... like in how much time is it really worth devoting to different kinds of relationships... and I'm only dealing with the matter in a fairly superficial way, and I know I could be wrong about it).

I agree with everything except that I don't see those broken connections as a loss. Instead I see them as a signal of a relationship that ran its course.

There are plenty of people I have fond memories of and wouldn't mind staying in touch, where that didn't happen even though it wouldn't require more than occasionally sending a message: "Hi! Just thought of you. How are you doing?"

I assume I could track down most of them, but doing so has this strange feeling of a misplaced nostalgia turning into benign voyeurism.

But that's just me. Clearly others feel differently and I see no reason why they shouldn't.

For tens of thousands years, you never moved from small village or tribe you got born at. And you lived with your parents untill you married.

And in recent decades, people were loosing touch very easily.

More like we should care about privacy but don't. This is the place that considers Snowden a traitor and Obama (the dragnet drone king) a God.

We can pretend that "omg we always cared about data", but that's not the truth. We just hate Trump so much that we're willing to see Zuck for the snake he is. I guess that's not the worse outcome.

> This reeks of whataboutism to me. Why are you trying to imply that we shouldn't be concerned about privacy?

I don't think I've seen a single person use the term "whataboutism" correctly since November 2016.

People in this chain are simply pointing out that if somebody is angry at Cambridge Analytica, but not Obama's 2008/2012 campaigns, they do not actually care about data privacy. They just don't like Donald Trump. You can bet that the next time a data privacy issue comes up, these people will be indifferent so long as the abusing party is aligned with their politics. They also will likely be supportive of people they agree with circumventing any privacy regulations that may arise from this particular scandal.

Asking these questions is a useful filter to help determine how many people actually care about the core privacy issue, and how many are just worried about "their team" having an advantage.

Then we agree. I think that both CA and the Obama campaign's use of personal information on Facebook was a violation of data privacy expectations, and anybody who criticizes one but not the other is a hypocrite and not at all concerned about data privacy.

I was complaining that people are using Obama's data use to justify CA's data use. Obama did it and it was wrong. CA did it and it was still wrong.

I would disagree with the claim that Facebook is "pretty good at its job" -- the News Feed is completely full of ads and "suggested content", notifications have become complete noise at this point, and even Messenger has ads in it now, and makes it difficult to get to your actual list of online friends.

In 2011, Facebook was good at its job, with a chronological news feed, meaningful notifications, and a messenger paradigm that worked much like AIM in the early 2000s -- you could see who was online, away, go invisible, etc. In 2018, Facebook has lost all of those positives, and with it a lot of user engagement, all for the sake of cramming the maximum number of ads down the users throats. And I'm not even getting into the nasty dark UX patterns, like hiding the ability to delete your profile (seriously, there isn't a link to do this anywhere on the site -- you need to search Google for it and they change the link all the time to break external guides) and showing random pictures of "friends who will miss you if you leave!" when you try to delete your account. I don't think your average user would mind leaving Facebook much if there was any actual alternative.

I think you're under the impression that facebook's job is to be good at showing you what you want and being useful. I'm pretty sure they think their job is to balance being just useful enough that you don't quit while maximizing revenue from you, which might entail being pretty crappy to use overall.

> I think you're under the impression that facebook's job is to be good at showing you what you want and being useful. I'm pretty sure they think their job is to balance being just useful enough that you don't quit while maximizing revenue from you, which might entail being pretty crappy to use overall.

This is just a minor quibble to lambda_lover's point, which still stands. Facebook may understand it's job is to shove as many ads in its users' faces as they will tolerate, but that's not why users use its app. It's users view its job as being useful to them, and being bad at that makes makes FB vulnerable to competitors or even just general dissatisfaction.

Wow, I didn't know this about Spotify! Too bad there's no opt-out. I actually like the social aspect of Spotify (seeing what my friends listen to often introduces me to new bands) but it's a shame I can't limit the selling of that data. Hell, I'd even pay for the right to keep my data to myself!

Yes I do too,

some quick searching says that spotify pays the record companies monthly, around 50-70% of revenue for the music licensing.

however there seems to be a serious distinction between free subscriptions and paid.

Because free users are getting music for free, this seems to be where the Spotify Group may be packaging up and selling data to music companies or elsewhere to pay for hosting, salaries etc.

I guess the opt out is to disconnect your facebook from spotify;

Or, create a new separate spoitify account. But, because your billing/email settings would be the same.. it's would be easy to join/coalesce the account data in the backend.

or just buy cd's

> What happens if they find that 50 different organizations had access to and may have saved as much data as CA?

Isn't this more than guaranteed? Literally any crappy quiz app or game had access to all of this data when they launch Facebook Platform. And I'm betting Kogan's app was far from the most popular on Facebook at the time -- the potential for hundreds of thousands of data harvesters to have exploited this is way too high. I disagree that it's "the end of Facebook", though... in general, users just don't seem to care that much about this sort of thing. I can say for certain that my parents don't understand what this means or why this is bad (they had trouble understanding what was so bad about the Equifax leak as well), so your lowest common denominator user is never going to budge, even after something like this. I'm just hoping that my more technically-inclined friends start to lean away from Facebook's collection of data aggregators.

I just cleaned out my "connected" apps, and found like 4 quiz apps that I don't remember at all with full access to my personal info and friends. Back when they launched login with facebook I used it like a fool (also Spotify at launch ONLY launched with it). I knew this had happened, but its more like now the consequences are coming much more into clarity.

> I disagree that it's "the end of Facebook", though

If they do what they say and publically shame the apps in a way that people would see, it might. It would be hilarious for them to put up 100 logos of apps on the top and say oh yeah by the way all these apps have been taking your personal information, with lovely trustable names like "e-quiz" and "sofunni"

In my experience the problem is that these clauses are traditionally presented to you by a non-technical employee typically from HR, and (in my anecdotal experience) these employees usually try to dismiss your concerns with a "oh it's just a formality" or "all companies make you sign this sort of thing!"... so if you're not important enough to talk to someone higher up, you might just get your offer revoked if you try to fight it because your HR contact isn't important enough/doesn't care enough to fight against it for you, and the legal department only has so much time for custom agreements.

-Agreed that the clauses are most often presented by someone not authorized to waive them.

However, I've found on the couple of occasions where (non-reasonable) NCAs were presented to me that simply claiming that the terms as stated are not acceptable and that a revised NCA must be prepared if I am to sign it results in a shrug and a 'Whatever. We'll just skip it, then.'

Now, if they'd stood their ground, I'd have had to look elsewhere. (I am not a big fish - just a lowly engineer who do some management on the side - so they didn't waive the NCA for REALLY wanting me to come aboard; more from reluctance to go through all the hassles of either doing another hiring process OR amending the NCA.)

(At a former employer, the NCA basically stated that anything I ever thought of, be it at work or after work, in my field of expertise or in whatever unrelated field, belonged to them. Oh, and this obligation extended past the termination of employment for a period of time decided at their discretion. Not enforceable in the least, but still...)

Those are all tricks. They put pressure on the candidate to sign ASAP.

If the candidate accepts the contract as it is the company wins.

If the bargains around clauses it's still OK and having many clauses to drop makes it look like the company is being flexible.

Always push back!

Oh I do. I'm just saying that most folks aren't as stubborn as me, and it's unfortunate that you have to play games over something like that. All it does is screw over people who don't have many options, and widen the delta between the haves and have-nots in our field (the haves have the luxury of rejecting these clauses, while the have-nots might not be willing to "roll a hard 6" on their only job offer).

You have just been hired as their new rockstar developer. If HR lose you over this HR will be taking some flak.

Just speak to your future line manager and explain that you have returned a modified version of the contract and that you hope that they will agree to it soon because you are really excited to start working.

If someone doesn't have the power to change the contract, then they don't have the power to negotiate with me. And if they don't have the power to negotiate with me, then what business do they have offering me a contract to sign?

This is why the solution to this kind of problem is industry-by-industry collective action. Once 10 people in a row tell the HR person that they're not signing that garbage, even the densest bureaucrat will take notice.

At that point HR wasn't the one making the decision to hire you, simply because HR isn't qualified to evaluate an engineer after initial screening. At least companies that actively try to find good engineers for their roles, HR is in no position to withdraw an already given offer by themselves.