Prof asks court to protect his Unfollow Everything 2.0 extension from Facebook's ire A professor has asked the US courts to confirm he has the right to release a browser extension to help people disengage with Facebook by automatically changing certain settings. In a complaint filed on Wednesday in a Northern California federal court, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University asked the court …
"I’m suing Facebook to make it better" said Zuckerman
Well, that is the problem. There is no need to make social media better. It should be wiped out of existence.
Killer robots need to be sent back into the past to eliminate everyone who contributed to the creation of social media.
People should go out and spend time with other people in the old fashioned way, not via clicks and likes (or hates).
Back in 2008, when the infection started, I went to the pub with my colleagues, and one of them pulled out his phone to show me how many friends he had.
I told him, his friends were here, at the table…
This is 2024 and he still does not get it.
"Back in 2008, when the infection started, I went to the pub with my colleagues, and one of them pulled out his phone to show me how many friends he had.
I told him, his friends were here, at the table…"
I think you may be making the mistake of equating "work colleagues" with "friends".
While someone you work with may well be a "friend", just as often the are not. Even if you do from time to time go out for a drink with them after work.
Who remembers lunch time drinks during work?
I used to surprise the fuck out of people 10yrs ago who bragged about how many followers they had on twitter/facebook and so forth.
I had more than 5000 (without even trying, but having other people share me in their circles as a recommendation) on G+ and regular engagement because it was real people, not bots and fake people shitposting links for likes and expecting everyone else to do their work for them without ever attempting to engage with anyone.
When G+ went away... I'd left every other site out there... tried Diaspora briefly but was a bunch of old G+ cliques and full of bullshit... So when I found Mastodon a few years ago... I enjoyed it.
It's my only social media account... and I don't try to gain followers and am closing in on 1k. No algorithms, no ads, no data harvesting.. just regular people, sharing, talking and actually engaging with each other.... you know... like humans should.
There is no need to make social media better. It should be wiped out of existence
No. It's not social media as a thing that's wrong, it's the [insert your own set of NSFW expletives to describe the current corporations involved] providing what currently passes for social media that need wiping form existence.
As it's currently implemented - yes it needs nuking from orbit. The concept, well implemented - has many positive uses.
It's a bit like the toxic lake in The Simpsons. The concept of a lake is fine. It's the toxic contents people have put into it, and what that's turned it into that's bad.
Iceman v. Iceberg, or Zuckerman v. Zuckerberg, or Zuckerborg as they say -- the addictive collective of futile resistance (suggested by evening whiskey as well). Yes!
I'm with Unfollow's Unibrow 2.0's stern look down in this -- it must be legal for us all to righteously fight the Pavlovian doggism of manipulative algorithmics and resultant mental sedentarism, obesity, sclerosis, and clots; as broadbased public health issues.
Either that or legalize free content-filtering paliative marijuana, and both really (IMHO), for a spyman v. spyberg wine-wine Nash equilibrium of trick-cycling countermeasures (if that)! Live free, not dry (or somesuch)!
The fact that he feels the need to go to court for permission to release this software and that Facebook have form for banning similar add-ons in the past is the most worrying aspect of this whole situation. If I run some software on my computer and then run other software to make it better for me, why the hell should the creator of the first bit of software have any right or interest in what I do? AFAIK, the add-on doesn't change the code of the Facebook page, it just automates actions that I may want to take that Facebook have deliberately made difficult. ie "cumbersome process of unfollowing Facebook users, groups, and pages.". If they can put a "follow" button on things, then the page or app can just as easily take not of that status and place an "unfollow" button in it's place on "followed" account.
It's like ad or script-blockers. No one can force me to stop using them because they still get to deliver their shit to me, but I personally choose to not see some of the stuff they send me. I'm not changing their code or delivery mechanisms or affecting their IP in any way. There are many ways they can deliver ads to me in a way that would make it difficult for me to block them. But that would probably have to be static images and words with little to no tracking, which is not my problem.
Who the fuck do they think they are, those a-social media fucktards? How dare they be telling me what I must consume? It isn't up to the a-social media what I must consume. The reader and watcher determines that.
Its like someone telling you that you must eat that bad pizza twice every day, whether you like it or not. What a fucked up world we are living in!
/rant
"Unfollow Everything 2.0 hasn't been released because in 2021 Meta threatened to sue Louis Barclay, a UK-based developer who made a similar tool, Unfollow Everything"
@theregister surely an interview with Louis Barclay would be an interesting future article? Because I am trying and utterly failing to understand how, exactly, Meta would be able to sue - presumably in the UK - for this.
That Meta would probably fail to win isn't always worth the cost and effort of standing up to them, not by yourself anyway.
Meta can use every legal trick in the book to make your life a misery, including demanding extradition.
Fear of consequences is very real, and understandable, when those fears are credible.
That is true. The UK has no anti-SLAPP legislation I’m aware of yet, but there is a consultation open on it.
It feel like a massive PR disaster for Facebook had this gone to court, even by their standards. And despite being rather more partial to Nick Clegg than many around here, I’d have liked to see him try and justify this one!
" utterly failing to understand how, exactly, Meta would be able to sue - presumably in the UK - for this."
Firstly, to sue all you need is a lawyer. if you can afford one (because you are say a multi-trillion dollar corporation, hell you can hire an entire countrys population of lawyers), and your opponent cannot, then there is 1 of 2 outcomes
1) The court case happens, and the defendant doesn't turn up because he cannot afford a lawyer. Default win for the plaintiff, judgement and costs against the defendant.
2) The court case happens, and the defendant turns up without a lawyer. Win for the plaintiff because the plaintiff's lawyer runs rings around the unrepresented defendant. Judgement and costs against the defendant.
There is another British precedent in law judges subscribe to which can be summarised as "you knew what you were agreeing to." It's the same principle that car park owners use against people parking in their car-parks day in day out without paying. The argument goes "Your honour, there is a sign in the car park saying "Parking without a ticket will result in you being towed, he parked so we towed"". The judge then asks the defendant why they ignored it. 99% of the time the judgement goes against the defendant because "you ignored the sign dumbass!!!". Judges at the moment apply the same principle to T&Cs. If the T&C says "you shalt not", and you go ahead and do anyway, judges to date have typically ruled supporting "you ignored the sign dumbass!!!". For "unfair T&Cs" to become a successful defence, it has to win in court, many more times than it has at the moment. Judges (in the UK) do not like conflicting "case law" (case law in the UK is de-facto law, because so many court case have found in it's favour, it becomes law by default), so judges tend to follow precedent.
I use DuckDuckGo browser which stops many trackers. I also use Little Snitch… when I see a connection to FB or anything else come up that is not needed for a website to work I deny it and often blacklist it. So I >think< I’m stopping any trackers from “calling the mother ship” even if they get past DDG’s blockers. I frequently remove all browser history, cookies, etc. when going from one site to another and delete all temporary connections needed for previously visited sites.
I don’t know if this is the most effective way of handling all the tracking getting thrown at us… if anyone has any other suggestions please let me know!
If you want to try going full on at the network/gateway level rather than just browser, look to install pfsense as your firewall and then load a package called pfblockerNG. Utilising the latter it is possible to block both by way of DNS and IP. Also possible to block sites by way of geographical location.
So you could (by way of example) block via DNS e.g. facebook.com or any combination e.g. facebook.co.uk or even by TLD e.g. *.ru *.adult *.aero
Alternatively via IP you could block access to any ASN’s associated with Facebook e.g.
AS11917
AS32934
AS54115
AS63293
AS395291
(or anybody else e.g. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon etc)
The nice thing about pfblockerNG is that all the associated firewall rules are generated automatically and can be auto updated as often as you wish. Ditto IP’s associated with ASN’s
I use it to block vast swathes of the internet e.g. all of Google, Microsoft, Adobe etc. only allowing outbound access at an individual device level as appropriate. You can subscribe to (free) lists of malware site and compromised sites. Also know adservers. The list is almost endless.
I find it does provide more granular control, albeit at the expense of breaking things - e.g. Apples iCloud is not exclusively hosted on Apple’s infrastructure. You may find yourself the subject of family complaints and need to spend time unblocking (or just allow the other half white list access to everything, whilst protecting your own devices)
I’ll whisper this, but I never see any adverts when browsing a certain “biting the hand that feeds IT” site.
Of course your level of paranoia may be less than mine (now where did I leave my tin hat?)
Bottom line, only way to be totally invisible is to be offline, otherwise we aim to lose by the smallest possible margin.
BTW did I mention this is all available for free? Note you want pfsense CE edition - Community Edition, not the paid for Plus edition)
https://www.pfsense.org/download
https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/packages/pfblocker.html
Have fun!
Whilst I am yet to use the wireguard facility on my pfsense router, I do widely utilise Open VPV both as a server (for secure inbound connections to my local network) and also outbound client connections to route traffic of choice via my external VPN provider.
Pfsense is essentially an enterprise level firewall available for free. As you may have gathered its quite a handful to configure (albeit there is a lot of information available online) Just about any scenario can be covered and I would encourage you to explore. I have been “playing” with it for a few years and still feel like a “newbie” The more you play the more you learn!
If you want to further your knowledge, check out Lawrence Systems on You Tube (advert free via Invidious) Tom the owner is a fan and has created quite a few videos hi-lighting its potential.
BTW, if you are looking for something straightforward to setup (perhaps as an interim measure whilst you explore pfsense) try Pi Hole
https://pi-hole.net/
Comparison here
https://www.virtualizationhowto.com/2022/04/pfsense-pfblockerng-vs-pihole-pros-and-cons/
Legislate so that social media companies are classed as 'publishers' and not just conduits... make them 'liable', for the deliberate spread of lies and misinformation for profit.
I know... wishful thinking. I long for the days before antisocial media became the norm for spreading hate and bile around the world quicker.
This is how this stuff typically works:
a) Give the users a free service to do whatever, email, social media, free maps blah blah
b) Once enough users start using it, harvest the user data and sell it.
c) When get caught selling user data, harvest more data but provide a plethora of confusing controls to the users to control their own private information sharing which, BTW are all turned off by default.
Why the F do I have to control what information is harvested/shared? None of it should be shared by default.
It is not just Facebook. Everybody today wants to know what you are doing online. Which links you clicked, which websites you visited, which items you browsed on Amazon, how much time did you spend looking at each item, what comment you posted, read your emails, read your files in cloud services: everything is up for grabs and sale. AI is fueling this grab and peek effort more egrgegiously than ever. Wholesale privacy invasion is going on in the name of innovation. This is not innovation.
But no one will do anything about it because hey, free enterprise...
Unfortunately, they (along with others) have been able to persuade enough people with money (a.k.a. investors) that they had a business model so they could persuade a significant majority of the internet users that "everything should be free". So people now expect stuff to be free. But it isn't free to provide, so that money has to come from somewhere - the rest simply follows from that.
It would be interesting to muse what might have happened if, right from the start, they had a) been honest, and b) offered a number of pricing levels. So something along the lines of :
Free - you don't pay anything, but we'll collect your personal data, profile you, and serve you ads.
£X/mo - we won't collect your data, but we'll show you untargetted ads.
£Y/mo - you won't see ads and we won't collect your data.
I do wonder what the breakdown between the groups might have been. Unfortunately there's no way to get to there from here - because FB have proved time and time again that they cannot be trusted, and if they did introduce any paid options, we can assume they'd still be stalking us. What's even more unfortunate is the number of organisations that have come to assume that you will have a FB account and make that the only way to interact with them - and before you say it, no it's not always possible to just ignore them and go to another business.
I connect to FB to get news from a few (5-6) cycling or caving-related groups. Of course, I'd prefer them to just run a plain website, but I understand FB is much easier to setup. I don't care about sponsored content, suggestions from algorithms or this whole friend/follower craze, so my friend-free profile is empty and I access FB through its website with Firefox and the FB Purity plugin installed. I just get what I clicked for and nothing else.
It's quite easy to unfollow a group. You just click a button. It's also easy to unfriend people. I'm not sure what the problem is. There's even a hide button to stop showing those people in future. What does this software do? Automate that for you, or just block the showing of anything related to a person without actually unfollowing them?
These might sound like daft questions, but it's really not clear what this unfollow software is actually meant to do, that you can't do already
It does it en-masse. I used the un-follow 1.0 about 2 years ago. It got me off my social media addiction, and it is an addiction.
It took a couple of hours to run, but each time I logged in there was nothing on my news feed, no news, no recommendations, no posts from friends. Just a "you are all caught up" type prompt. I still had my friends, my messenger still worked (which I used), I just wasn't presented with anything when I logged in. 6 months of logging in to nothing (cos being a social media addict, I had to log in whenever my mind wasn't occupied with, well anything else) and I stopped logging in. Another 6 months of not bothering logging in, and I then used messenger to let everyone know I wasn't bothering with facebook any more, and then I deleted FB and messenger. 12 months on, I haven't looked back, and I don't social media.
Congrats if you don't understand it, you are one of a few that hopefully never have got hooked on the addiction in the first place.
I am gross and perverted
I'm obsessed 'n deranged
I have existed for years
But very little has changed
I'm the tool of the government
And industry too
For I am destined to rule
And regulate you
I may be vile and pernicious
But you can't look away
I make you think I'm delicious
With the stuff that I say
I'm the best you can get
Have you guessed me, yet?
I'm the slime oozin' out
From your Internet
You will obey me while I lead you
And eat the garbage that I feed ou
Until the day that we don't need you
Don't go for help, no one will heed you
Your mind is totally controlled
It has been stuffed into my mold
And you will do as you are told
Until the rights to you are sold
That's right, folks
Don't touch that dial
https://genius.com/The-mothers-of-invention-im-the-slime-lyrics
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