Facebook is so popular that people expect you to have an account. And if you don't, you are probably looked at as the odd one out. I mean it's Facebook, what's the harm in having an account that is absolutely free! To be honest, if you are one of the may that do not have a Facebook account, you are probably ahead of the race. People around the world and especially in the United States are deleting their accounts by leaps and bounds.
If you have an account and you are wondering what on earth would go wrong, here are three very compelling reasons,
1. Facebook follows you
I am sure that you guys know about this for a long time now. I mean you enroll for free, you connect with your friends for free, you upload photos and vids for free etc. Ever thought for a second what Facebook gets out of all this? Very simply - your data. Your credentials like name (whether it's fake or not), contact, gender, age group, location, interests, your friends, and relatives list, the places where you visit frequently, the brands that you like, the check-ins that you make and many more. And what does Facebook do with all this data? Well, being the largest advertising platform in the world with over 2.19bn active users, Facebook uses its user data to serve ads. And they make a fortune out of it. It is estimated that 98% of Facebook's revenue in 2017 came from ads. Facebook can also track you when you are not using the website. Remember the box that you ticked allowing Facebook to access your Location when you installed the App? These are the simplest of ways in which Facebook tracks you.
2. Facebook forgot what it stood for
Facebook was a disruption in social media networking. The minute we opened it, our feed was full of posts made by our friends, relatives and more importantly of things that mattered to us. That's it. How about now, I mean this comparison is easy to make. Just open your Facebook page right now and you will be amazed to see that it is a big ugly clutter of posts from advertisers, news/ fake news and posts from pages that you have not even liked.
Facebook, in fact, realized this problem and Zuckerberg himself announced that you would be seeing more posts and feed's from your friends, family, and groups on your Facebook Page in the coming months.
3. Deliberately non-user-friendly privacy settings
Facebook's privacy settings will leave you as confused as the ending of Avenger's Infinity War. I mean, you know what happened towards the end, but you keep on guessing whether what you made of the ending is right or not. Facebook provides a privacy setting for almost anything, but you need a comprehensive manual to decipher it. They pretty much want you to overlook the privacy settings so that they can use your data.
I would like to limit the reasons to 3, but you already know there are many other reasons to quit, from the recent case of Cambridge Analytica in which Facebook aided social experiments/ human experiments to swing the user's judgments.
Facebook realizing that its user base is not growing as expected, has started advertising too. Did you like the "Find your kind of people" campaign interesting? I figured it as a desperate attempt by Facebook to lure in more people.
Having read all this, I'm sure at least few of you are thinking about why exactly you are on Facebook. I am also certain that you guys are more active on Insta, Snap, and Twitter. So why do you really need Facebook? I mean unless you want to see the ads that Facebook serves, there is no point anymore.
Now don't go and look at my Facebook profile, lol. If you are interested in understanding other platforms where you can do some social networking and personal brand building, do check out my next article on "Social Networks to use other than Facebook"
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