I'm sort of back to Meta

I've finally discovered a way to use their platforms that's sort of acceptable for me.

So I guess my boycott of Meta technically only lasted about a year.

The truth is, being effectively locked out of using social media in the normal way has gotten to me. It’s a weird feeling being like, “I’m kind of opposed to doing this, but at the same time I see why it’s kind of a bad friend type thing to do.”

Now I think about it, this would actually make quite a good r/AITAH post.

Because I tend not to touch Reddit with a 10-foot pole these days, I instead chose to ask AI.

“I’ve been on a Meta platforms boycott for the past ~ 1 year but everyone I know has been asking me to come back. AITAH?”

Here’s the response:

“Nah, you’re not the asshole here (AITAH). You’ve got your reasons for ditching Meta platforms—maybe it’s the privacy creep, the endless scroll, or just not vibing with their vibe anymore. A year’s a solid run, and sticking to your guns is respectable. Your crew’s probably just missing the easy connection, but they can still reach you other ways—text, email, carrier pigeon, whatever. If they’re pressuring you hard, that’s on them, not you. You do you. What’s driving the boycott, anyway? Curious what sparked it.”

Perhaps it’s right and I’m just self-deprecating. Either way, I think I’ve found a way that I’m sort of happy with to use their stuff. It comes in the form of simply cranking the inbuilt privacy settings to the maximum (see StellarSand’s WhatsApp Privacy Settings) and engaging in other general privacy practices like always using a VPN and not making any other accounts with Meta.

This makes tracking, on their part, much, much harder than you’d expect.

For example, I picked through a data download I made from my X (formerly Twitter) account and was pleasantly surprised to discover that they didn’t really have anything on me at all besides a couple of conversations with their AI chatbot Grok.

To be brutally honest, this is a classic example of the Dunning–Kruger effect. The person who’s barely aware of privacy think they have it because they don’t understand all of the ways in which they are being tracked, the person who’s learning about it thinks they have none and the privacy expert thinks they have enough to be satisfied after taking a series of measures.

George Baskerville, 24th of March 2025

P.S. All of my articles licensed under CC0 1.0 Universal. Download them on the GitHub repo