Facebook deleted in 2017 and Twitter months before it was bought by you know who. I don't miss either of them. I love how Lemmy isn't all spammy.

Way ahead of you. I deleted all my social media last decade and never went back. Hardly used it to begin with

I was answering a technical question on Reddit last night when I realized that, while it might help the person asking it, I am also fueling Reddits profits, training AI, and supporting a big American corporation by providing free knowledge.

So I reconsidered and I deleted the answer I was writing.

I will use my reddit account read only from now. No more upvotes, no more downvotes, no more comments. AdBlock enabled using Firefox for all sites. I already use Linux instead of Microsoft. I don't have Facebook or Instagram. I de-googled my online accounts and e-mail and moved my domains and e-mail to a Swiss company. I drive German cars. I will consciously start vetting my purchases to be not from the US or China. I will buy local as much as I can. When I build software, I will not host it on Google or azure or aws. I'm looking at nextcloud for my next pet project.

The list is growing, and every little item I can add to it gives me a little more satisfaction and peace of mind.

I also went into NextDNS and put blocks on the news sites I got into the habit of checking. Fuck this, I’m not even in the US.

Here in Lemmy using Sync, one can filter words from headers and content. I sanitized my time-line and I'm just gliding through.

back to the basics.

I deleted them all back around 2015. Only use this, and not seriously.

What if I were considering deleting my conciousness for the next 4 years? I genuinely feel like I would be happier in a coma for the next 4 years.

I'm not joking. Let's do this.

The problem is beyond social media accounts. Modern life makes us to have digital things, "apps". As much as I'd benefit from it (I'm a programmer), I can't help but recognize how dangerous is this digital dependence and requirement. Not only our entire lives become bits and bytes across gazillions of platforms, they're out of our real control: from advertising platforms to hackers, the online information kind of awaits to fall on third-party hands.

How many of our information is now inside the training data from major AI models (as much as I like some aspects of AIs, that's a fact), such as GPT-4, Claude Somnet and, especially, Google's Gemini, whose company is responsible for more than 90% of the search engine market while also responsible for our smartphones' brains, not just Android but things embedded on Apple's ecosystems as well?

But people only notice how far our digital footprint goes when there's some serious thing such as the risk of persecution from the government. People decide to delete their accounts hoping that it'll lead to their data being magically erased and, as a programmer, I say: no, our data remains, there's no DELETE * FROM users WHERE id = your_id, there's actually a UPDATE users SET deleted=CURRENT_TIME() WHERE id = your_id that's not the same thing (it just marks your account as deleted, but all the data remains for whatever time period they wish, not even mentioning periodic database backups that'll preserve your data in the hands of that platform)... not even mentioning how your data could've already been assimilated through platform integrations (API) by third-party partners such as advertisers. There's no way to force the erasure.

Yeah, there's the law such as GDPR's "Right to be forgotten", but there's a Brazilian saying "O que os olhos não veem o coração não sente" (What the eyes can't see, the heart can't feel). A platform can "confirm the account deletion" but they can keep the data without anyone's knowledge. It's worse: there are laws that require the companies to keep the data for some time (here in Brazil, for example, companies need to keep data for five years, because the justice could need the data in order to solve some investigation).

So, I don't like to be a harbinger of doom, but our digital traces will never actually entirely disappear from the Internet.. especially if you guys are thinking of avoiding the incoming persecution from a new government. Online data remains as far as we couldn't tell. And this includes way beyond social media platforms: it also includes your apps such as, I dunno, your Starbucks accounts? Your Amazon accounts? Everything is data that can be analyzed among a big data and traced back to each one's preferences, including political preferences... I'm sorry to say that, but I need to transmit this knowledge as a developer.

How so?