Russ,

I recall an interview where representatives of a major social media (or was it phone? I don't differentiate between the two much anymore; they're the same beast on the user's end) company were asked if their apps were listening in on people's conversations. The CEOs judiciously responded that no, of course their apps weren't collecting voice data.

Nobody commented on the fact that it's more judicious to have the phone transcribe it to text data and then send that. Seemed like an obvious loophole.

At any rate I hate their surveilance and more to the point, I hate what they do to my attention span. I broke away from FB a while back and it was a joy. The problem is that at the time I was trying to break away from it, FB didn't just passively let you deactivate your account. They had a really aggravating, stalker-ish battery of questions you had to go through, wouldn't let you deactivate the account for more than a week before starting it up again, etc...

After a while I realized the spell I needed to break was the notifications. That was the best place to start. So I just unfollowed everyone I knew. And suddenly FB had nothing more to notify me about.

After that tether was broken the compulsive "what are my friends doing?" notifications that FB used to hijack my attention had no more power. It was easy enough to disentangle myself from the app the rest of the way after that.

J