The life I've built depends on communication, and the people and groups I wish to communicate with mostly use FB.
The non-profit I volunteer with organizes everything over FB. The union I work under announces almost everything over FB. I literally never look at my FB "feed" but I've got 5 private groups that I check every day. If I stopped using FB, I'd be completely out of the loop with almost everything I do.
I suspect that's how a lot of the world operates. FB is free and easy and reliable and everybody already has an account. It lets people post text and photos and comments, and tag other people, and report when they've seen something. That's everything we used to use email for (and a bit more), but more convenient.
I got my first cell phone a couple months ago. It's a lot easier for me to live without a cell phone than to live without FB. No cell phone means I have to wait a couple hours to read my messages. No FB would mean I wouldn't get organization news at all.
Even for people who hate FB on principle, they've never suggested an alternative that meets our needs better today. Possibly Google's services could, but a significant number of people I know don't have Google accounts (or use Gmail), and the people who hate FB usually hate Google just as much. Possibly Yammer, but ditto everything (and Microsoft).
Decentralized social networks are a cool idea, but until FB starts breaking so bad that we're unable to communicate about our upcoming project, we have no reason to consider switching to anything else.
I'm not saying that you're entirely wrong, because I've used that rationalization for keeping Facebook in the past.
What I do instead is just maintain an address book of everyone I know and send them an update on my life every once in a great while. It's much more fulfilling.
If you want to live life by what your family thinks of you, by all means, do so. Respectfully, however, if you can't consider what strangers on the internet have to say, you're significantly limiting its usefulness to you.
I'll turn that hypothetical question you posed around and ask how saying that email isn't sufficient for keeping in touch is any different from saying "Who needs greeting cards? Just let Facebook tell you to post on someone's timeline when it's a birthday or holiday."
I'm not denying that Facebook has some utility, but it's changed our definition of keeping in touch to value mass quantity over quality. If one values quality communication, Facebook is completely unnecessary and can be replaced with email which is an existing, standardized, ubiquitous, and sufficient means of keeping in contact with people. Your family would be statistical outliers if almost all of them didn't have an email you could send to.
In conjunction with "your life depends on facebook?", I'm simply saying that while one can use Facebook, there is such a thing as a viable alternative with its own advantages. It's controversial, I know.
I never use chrome except with gmail and other google services where I have an account. I think there's a market for this kind of systema.
I'm surprised anyone privacy minded still gets concerned about Google as they've been pretty open about everything since the launch of gmail. They give you free stuff in exchange for ads.
Chrome must send data, even if you aren't signed in. Google has a shadow profile for you anyway, so if you use chrome, you're logging to google.
> I'm surprised anyone privacy minded still gets concerned about Google as they've been pretty open about everything since the launch of gmail. They give you free stuff in exchange for ads.
They're open about the fact that they use your data but not as to how they use it. Even if they were, they have a high motivation to abuse it further and further since that is their business model.
Besides, I don't see how being open about invading your privacy makes it not invading your privacy.
Sub out Google/gmail with Facebook and see how that reads.
Unfortunately Vivaldi inherits some of Chrome's bullshit, like if you want to print something it will try use Google's awful cloud print thing tied to your account.
It even has the flag for this account-consistency feature. Who knows if it will be enabled - would you even notice if it was?
I use Vivaldi because the CEO is Jon von Tetzchner. Here's a quote from him from a recent interview:
Q: Other browser companies tell us that too many options and features confuse users, and they remove or limit functionality based on that claim. Is that true in your opinion?
I like the bookmarks, that I was able to customise it extensively, the sidebar is very useful and unobtrusive. I do like also that is based on chromium. All in all I feel like it has everything that other browsers have and just a bit more or a bit better.
Also the history view is a lot nicer than chrome, which is better than Firefox. Firefox's history pane is borderline unusable (search doesn't sort by last visit, it sorts by day and alpha or something weird like that).
