During the Easter weekend, a database containing the phone numbers of half a billion Facebook users went around the net. Among those telephone numbers there was also mine, along with that of 37 million other Italians. If you are registered on Facebook, there is almost certainty that your number has also ended up in the list. The social network immediately downplayed, arguing that the data in question were only the aggregate of information from already known “leaks”. On April 6, Facebook then posted a post to clarify “the facts” on these famous data that the newspapers talk about so much, trying to frame a flaw involving 533 million users as a trivial case of violation of the terms of service. The phone numbers, Facebook minimizes in the article, have not been stolen with a theft, but have been collected through a scraping operation, i.e. automatic data collection through the site interface. Those who put them together allegedly abused the procedure that allows you to search for an account starting from the phone number, a function with which new users can find their telephone contacts on the platform. This possibility was disabled by Facebook in September 2019, but it was already too late.
Leave or stay
Those who have been following technology for a few years and are familiar with the evolution of Facebook know well that the history of Mark Zuckerberg’s social network is studded with more or less serious privacy slips. The most famous is the Cambridge Analytica scandal. In that case, the theme was the mismanagement of the data of 50 million users (estimated figure) and the discovery – a few years after the facts – of the improper use of an official Facebook function that allowed third parties to access user information. without their consent. In 2018, when the case came to light, I seriously considered leaving the platform. In the end I decided to stay, trying to limit its use, deleting the application from my smartphone and adopting other palliative solutions, such as blocking the site through the Time of Use function of my iPhone.
Reading the details of the Easter “leak” and then Facebook’s arrogant response, disrespectful to journalists and especially to users whose privacy has been violated, I decided that the measure is definitely full. Why, despite everything we know about Facebook and the way it handles its user data, do I still have an account? Why haven’t I left yet? Why do I keep feeding Zuckerberg’s social leviathan with my interactions and engagement?
Until last week the answers to these questions were essentially two: why, as a journalist dealing with technology, “I have to be there for work” and because, as an Italian living abroad, I have always feared losing contact with friends and relatives living in Italy. After the Cambridge Analytica scandal, these responses were enough to put me off closing my account. At this round they are no longer enough.
A journey through time
On Facebook there is a function that allows you to download the entire history of your account in one click. Photos, interactions, likes on the pages and posts of friends, videos, comments: everything is there, organized in a coherent and easy to consult way. Just go to the settings, clicking on the triangle at the top right, then on “settings and privacy”, “settings”, and again select “your information on Facebook”. From here you choose “download your information”, you activate the creation of a database with all our data and wait for the system to make it available to download (it may take a few hours).
Convinced of my choice to leave the platform, earlier this week I downloaded an updated backup with all of my posts, from the time of my subscription until today. Intrigued by what I would find there, I started scrolling through the archive, from my first post in September 2008, a photo with the singer Max Raabe taken in Pisa, to my last post with which I announced my intention to close my account.
In a couple of hours I retraced thirteen years of posts, comments, shared links, videos, interactions, pages I liked. It was like traveling through time, but always with the impression of observing only a portion of my life, that glimpse that I had gradually decided to show.
There is my move to Berlin in 2014, there are some of the events I attended, some snapshots of my travels, lots of photos with my ex; there are reprehensible hairstyles and inconceivable attires; ideas and thoughts that at the time I found interesting and that today instead seem to me sometimes banal, sometimes naive, sometimes still shareable, often far from who they are. But it’s normal, after all, and this feeling has nothing to do with Facebook: I think it’s the same one you get when browsing an old diary.
The importance of forgetting
Exploring my very personal social time capsule, however, I was able to see how much the value of most of those interactions, saved for future memory, was exhausted in their present. I have reviewed connections, concepts, thoughts, comments, opinions and forms of expression stripped of their natural impermanence. A basement full of dusty objects that instead of recalling memories and emotions, like an old photo in a trunk, showed themselves for what they are crudely: simulacra of the ephemeral that Facebook has convinced us to raise from their forgettable banality. Not because he cares about making us all feel special (a narrative that would work best with millennials like me), but because those interactions that often deserved to end in the present are the crude oil running down the pipes at Mark Zuckerberg’s large refinery. A perfect machine that transforms into resources what we have always considered dispensable, if only because, before the Internet, there was no way to keep memory of it.
No intention of elaborating universal considerations: what I have just expressed applies to me. I can imagine that it does not apply to those of Facebook who have made an important piece of their personal history. For me it has never been like this, and if so far this has been implicitly the reason for keeping that account open, it has suddenly become instead the demonstration that there is no longer any obstacle to abandoning it permanently. And if one day I want to recall any of those fleeting interactions (unlikely, but who knows) I’ll still have my archive to browse, saved with my backups on a couple of different hard drives.
My decision to close Facebook, it should be specified, has no ideological or political basis. Of course, like everyone else, I care about my privacy and I am convinced of the need to regulate technological multinationals more strictly, but I am also aware of the digital reality in which we live. I will continue to use WhatsApp (owned by Facebook), despite having already migrated some of my main conversations on Telegram and Signal: closing the account would mean losing important contacts that I care about. I will not even leave Instagram, where despite profiling is as wild as and more than on Facebook, I have always been able to exercise greater detachment. After all, on Instagram you follow each other, you don’t become friends: a semantic distinction that has a value for me.
In conclusion, the decision to leave Facebook is a personal choice that I believe reflects, more than anything else, a change in personal sensitivity. I no longer feel like recording every single interaction. I no longer feel any need to express opinions for a bubble of acquaintances selected on who knows what basis by an algorithm. I want to give back to my social interactions their right to be transient and intangible. I want to let them get lost and fall apart in memory. Or that they remain, but fixed by an emotion. And that they surprise me in thirteen years as one madeleine, without the need for any digital archive of my forgettable newspaper.