urgh i feel unclean

Was forced to immediately login to Facebook outside my twice-yearly check of my privacy settings due to unexpectedly getting an email at my primary (but not Facebook-primary) address that I thought I"d removed. After hunting, discovered it as a backup and removed it with vicious satisfaction.

Yeah, I was that worried about Facebook sending something to that email.

I was never really a user, I just set it up because family was on there and social media why not; this was at the same time I set up my twitter account, according to dates. In the normal course of events, I would have started using it from sheer 'it's there' except the normal course of events didn't occur; before I even had a chance to let inertia and existing friends on there do their thing, Facebook had its first privacy problem and I noped out for a while.

Now again, memory is short, my primary email was still Facebook's primary email, so again, it's social media and there; given a year or two, I should have started using it and I sort of took vague steps--and then a bigger privacy breach. At which time, I set it to a throwaway yahoo email with no function but to handle facebook, and promptly forgot it existed (except when I went to clean it out, which is when I would also double check my privacy settings). At which time memory being short was used for good.

Logging in used to be an event; I used to open a new, clean browser to do it, carefully type in my username and password, close the tab when done, scrub the browser, close it, then restart my computer (with malice aforethought). Now, I just use Chrome Incognito. I've gotten soft, you see.

The thing is, I give the 'because privacy' reason and don't get me wrong, it's true, but. I also of my own free will own five Alexa devices, have multiple gmails and a Google Home Mini (Free gift with Nest purchase), belong to many social media outlets, and even have finally gotten LinkedIn under my wallet name (through work, I get access to classes there). I am compromising my privacy dramatically and voluntarily in every other way, but not and never with them.

Yes, Google and Yahoo and Twitter and Amazon are not at all less guilty when it comes to breaches. I am not significantly increasing my privacy by banning Facebook from my life in all forms (including many settings in AdBlock and deactivating and hiding it on my phone).

It is privacy, though; specifically, the day I sat down and went through every screen and sub-screen in settings because at the time (I have no idea now), to get the equivalent of a full friendslock required it. What I could do on literally any other site in one or two (adjoining) screens at most required a full and endless search of everything there to make sure I got it all. Somewhere I have notes about it, because when a friend--who's a goddamn programmer--couldn't work out the settings, I gave him my notes and my login to Facebook (a very very close friend, yes) so he could match mine to get a basic friendslock. I was on AIM with him the entire time so he could double check.

Facebook didn't just make it hard to even work out how to get your desired privacy; they used that difficulty as a get out of jail free when they breached it. It was just Privacy Theatre--look how thorough we are, how careful--while simultaneously making it hard to find the settings, much less work out exactly what they applied to, and then failed to actually respect those settings anyway.

So it's mostly a matter of spite, tbh. Google and Amazon and Yahoo et al will screw me--are probably doing it right now--but at no point did any of them make me enter the Privacy Labyrinth of Plausible Deniability first.

(That they apparently run random ass social and psychological experiments on their userbase just confirms me in my feels of nope. Just the five seconds of being on the homepage made me feel like I was being hunted by Mengele's psychology soulmate.)