Facebook bans developer of timeline-cleaning browser extension

Article

 

I'm using AdBlock Plus + Element Hiding Helper to hide almost all ads shown on the Facebook pages, maybe they should ban me too!

 

2dat!

 

Another example of the "bad" Facebook. Thanks for posting.

 

I guess I will be banned from every site on the web
I won't lose any sleep over it

 

It would seem Facebook have changed their minds as the app is still available:
http://www.facebook.com/fluffbustingpurity

 

This Chrome Extension for the Facebook Timeline works good..http://www.socialreviver.net/en/?from_fbsd_site=1

 

Never heard of it until reading this thread. I just installed it. I bit much if you ask me. I'm not saying that in a bad way. Just a lot of options. I can see were this will be useful. I unchecked all of the defaults to let everything through to get a baseline for me to start with. It would be nice is it started up that way, but the defaults do illustrate power of this extension. So far it looks to be a keeper, one part of Facebook I don't really care to see is "People You May Know", this extension lets me hide that by checking "Sponsored Box / Stories". So that's the only one I am using right now.

 

I checked that page, and it says how it's supposed to free you from the tyranny of facebook. Kind of paradoxical, since you can simply not use facebook, and then there are no problems.
Mrk

 

That's the solution I adopted.

 

I guess not being able to customize every aspect of Facebook mean they are tyrants. Guess Yahoo! Mail, Outlook.com, Gmail are all tyrants too. Heck maybe Wilder's too.

I consider myself a reluctant facebook user. There was one basic and primary reason I joined Facebook, my kids are on Facebook. I joined to find out for my self what Facebook was about rather than listen to the rantings of others, many who I suspect have never tried Facebook. I am not about to ban my kids from Facebook, a nearly impossible task at any rate without some first hand information.

Most the "privacy violations" are self inflicted. Like posting something negative about your boss who you have also "Friended" Why is Facebook supposed to protected stupid from stupid.

I do not find Facebook as awful as some like to portray it. Most of what I heard was nothing but bullony. Now that I am on Facebook I found a lot of my Family was on Facebook. It's just another way to stay in touch. In fact it turned out to be a better way to stay in touch then snail mail or email. My Facebook experience is mostly reading what others post, looking at pictures posted by relations. An occasional comment here and there. That is about it. I don't do games, apps is turned off.

This extension lets me hide some of the annoyances of Facebook, such as the People You May Know section. The "Suggested Post" on my news feed (Adblock Plus handles those too by the way.). I also decided to hide the App Center and Games Feed link on the left since I have no use for them.

I could use Facebook without this extension and was until yesterday. Seeing the "People You May Know" (should be relabeled to "People You Have No Idea Who They Are") is simply annoying, it's not intrusive. Adblock Plus takes care of the ads, this extension ads to the experience by removing some of the annoyances. To bad it may go away. Not a big deal for me, life goes on...

 

Even that which you do not use can create problems for you, through negative influences on the market, crowding out alternative solutions, creating changes in human perception, etc.

I have seen several cases of a company that previously offered their sales prices through traditional means replacing that with "you must Facebook like/follow us". Plus several new companies choosing to go with the later approach exclusively. I have found it somewhat more difficult to maintain social ties with people after they shifted to the Facebook platform. Shifts which, AFAICT, were mostly to entirely driven by their own desire not to have problems communicating with people that shifted before them. It has to a significant degree become expected that one will have a Facebook account and thus those that don't are deemed "suspect". I've not only heard the stories, but personally seen that look in a few people's eyes. It may very well become even more costly not to have a Facebook account in the future, due to one reason or another.

The commercialization of inherently privacy communications and contexts would be very sad even if it didn't affect everyone. Unfortunately, I think it already has to some extent and will probably do so to an even greater extent in the future.

 

Jaron Lanier's take on Facebook, etc.

It's long....but a fascinating read from the January 2013 issue of the respected Smithsonian Magazine.

And so it is with Jaron Lanier and the ideology he helped create, Web 2.0 futurism, digital utopianism, which he now calls “digital Maoism,” indicting “internet intellectuals,” accusing giants like Facebook and Google of being “spy agencies.” Lanier was one of the creators of our current digital reality and now he wants to subvert the “hive mind,” as the web world’s been called, before it engulfs us all, destroys political discourse, economic stability, the dignity of personhood and leads to “social catastrophe.” Jaron Lanier is the spy who came in from the cold 2.0.​

Full article: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-...st-the-Web-183832741.html?c=y&story=fullstory

This really was meant to be a thread, but it's very relevant to the topic here.

 

That's an interesting article LockBox, thanks for sharing it. I think there is much truth to "there’s this idea that whoever has the biggest computer can analyze everyone else to their advantage and concentrate wealth and power" and a prime example of that would be the way personal information gathering, tracking, profiling, targeted advertising, dynamic pricing, etc, etc is used against consumers. Yesterday I came across an article about the airline industry adopting new standards to gather and exploit more information about consumers so as to drive up average ticket prices through personalized pricing and bundling. Ever since then I've been wondering to myself just how far this might go. One day, could most prices and offerings be limited to those that were determined by a sophisticated psychological, financial, situational, etc analysis of each consumer using the information they were driven to cough up and expose to such practices?

I'm drifting OT in way, but in a way not. I think we are very, very lucky that there are people who reject "accept it as is or leave it" and instead release tools that block things, modify how things work, fork software that has acquired undesirable features, create new alternatives, etc, etc. This is the spirit we *need*.