Got this charming notice from Facebook a few moments ago…

Like everyone else I know on Facebook who this has happened to recently, I have no idea what the hell they’re talking about. The notice helpfully declines to tell you what “content” it was that triggered the mindless algorithm and Facebook has also helpfully mucked up my activity log so I can’t check that. So I go scrolling back in my posts to see if I can remember anything I might have up up that got deleted. I still have no idea. Everything I remember posting is still there.

But I often put up random trivial happy little things now and then, including shares, that I might not now recall. It was easy with the smartphone app in a way that posting to my blog isn’t. So whenever I saw something online while I’m using my smartphone I’d “share” it o Facebook, just to give some online friends a smile.

That behavior stops now.

Facebook makes its money by selling your Facebook data to other businesses. In theory they let you opt out of that, and I’ve done as much of that as I can for now in their settings pages. But also I’ve deleted the apps from my iPhone and hopefully that prevents tracking. IOS has a setting you can use to block tracking from specific apps. Hopefully deleting the apps altogether takes care of it. They like they can use your smartphone to track you.

Old men like me are probably not a valuable source of data mining anyway. But to the degree I can, I’m going to try and be nothing to “Meta” anymore. Not going to delete my profile there just yet because I have too many dear old friends on the platform. That’s how they trap you of course. But all that happy little trivial stuff I used to put there for smiles and simple random pleasures isn’t happening anymore. That’s probably for the best since political data miners use that stuff to push disinformation at you and an election is coming.

Nearly all the younger friends I had there at one time or another have fled the platform for other online fields. Maybe they just got bored with all the older folks being on there. Or maybe something else about it creeped them out. Maybe I should have been paying more attention to that,