They don’t respect your privacy. They’re irresponsible. And they’re dishonest.

1. Facebook collects more information about you than they lead you to believe.

   • Facebook pays teens to install VPN that spies on them
   • You Give Apps Sensitive Personal Information. Then They Tell Facebook.
   • Facebook Well Aware That Tracking Contacts Is Creepy: Emails

2. Facebook shares specific personal details about you with third parties without asking your permission or telling you.

   • Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access to Your Shadow Contact Information
   • Facebook’s Work With Phone Carriers Alarms Legal Experts
   • Facebook’s Suspension of ‘Tens of Thousands’ of Apps Reveals Wider Privacy Issues
   • Now Facebook is allowing anyone to look you up using your security phone number
   • Facebook Shared Personal Information With Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, and Others

3. When Facebook gets caught doing things they shouldn’t, Mark Zuckerberg apologizes. As part of the apology he offers an explanation and an estimate of how many users were affected (so far so good). But, this estimate is always lower than the real number. Once they are no longer the center of attention Facebook revises the number of people affected to a much higher number.

   • Facebook says it ‘unintentionally uploaded’ 1.5 million people’s email contacts without their consent
   • Facebook stored millions of Instagram passwords unencrypted
   • Facebook Stored Hundreds of Millions of User Passwords in Plain Text for Years
   • Facebook Says Cambridge Analytica Harvested Data of Up to 87 Million Users

4. Facebook misleads users by offering privacy tools and settings which do not provide complete information, nor full protection. Regardless of how carefully you use them they still allow Facebook to continue using your data and personal information however they want. And Facebook regularly works around or disallows privacy tools provided by third parties.

   • The Facebook Privacy Setting That Doesn’t Do Anything at All
   • Facebook’s ‘Clear History’ tool arrives with ambiguous data privacy controls
   • Facebook Moves to Block Ad Transparency Tools — Including Ours

5. Facebook promotes content that is extreme – including reporting that is verifiably false or fabricated – and leads users to adopt more extreme beliefs over time.

   • Facebook Enabled Advertisers to Reach ‘Jew Haters’
   • How the Algorithm Rewards Extremism
   • How Everyday Social Media Users Become Real-World Extremists

6. A side effect of Facebook promoting progressively more extreme content is that all the bad PR has all but forced them to hire moderators. Moderators who tamp down the most extreme stuff. Truly horrific things. Unsurprisingly, being a Facebook moderator is not good for your mental health.

7. And finally, pretty much all reporting indicates Facebook is run by morally questionable people. And people with integrity eventually get pushed out.

   • 15 Months of Fresh Hell Inside Facebook
   • Old posts by Mark Zuckerberg have disappeared
   • Facebook’s internal documents about how it made money off children to be released

But Instagram…

These issues are not isolated to the Facebook app. Facebook, as an institution, uses whatever means available to pursue their goals. Instagram and WhatsApp can snoop through your contacts and photos, or log your location history just as well as any other Facebook property.

Also, Instagram is younger in its product lifecycle. You’ve probably noticed the increasing number of ads. It’s heading the same direction as Facebook proper, just 5 years behind. And the money they make on Instagram will fund other Facebook projects (like their cryptocurrency) and anticompetitive activity (like lobbying or acquiring competitors, e.g., Instagram and WhatsApp).