[EN] Time to say goodbye: After the research of the NYT I have stopped using WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook

This is the updated and corrected version of my planned post. I am stopping to use Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. The original plan was to delete WhatsApp and Instagram from my devices, but still use Facebook, because I find a lot of friends there and I can generate reach for my blog posts reach and initiate discussions. Recent research and reports from the New York Times have caused the barrel to overflow and I will finally be consistent and leave „All Facebook“ by the end of the year. Facebook dominates its market segment with its social network, the messenger market with FaceBook Messenger and WhatsApp, and even Instagram is no meaner in the market.

I’m finished with WhatsApp as my dominating messenger. If you want to reach me in the future, you can do so via SMS / iMessage, Signal or „old-fashioned“ by e-mail or phone call. WhatsApp is the tool that I can best do without because I have alternatives. For example, I can chat with Apple owners via iMessage. And I also want to set a signal for SIGNAL. Signal is – as I perceive it – so to speak, the Firefox, the neutral Switzerland for Messenger, an open source project that also provides appropriate security with end-to-end encryption.

Genuine alternatives to Facebook
do not exist: competing products are
simply not availablethe number of
users in order to be attractive as a
social network. Anyone who wants to
completely escape the data octopus,
the only thing left to do without. –
about: There is probably no real
alternative to Facebook | BR.de

So far I have been in contact with friends around the globe and the sad or bitter truth is that most of my friends and acquaintances are on Facebook and you get the most out of your social life (if the friends post there as well ). I hope that does not break, even if I will say goodbye to Facebook now. There is currently no real alternative as a social network. So I will try to keep in contact through other channels and participate in each life.

The sad truth is that after all the experiences of the past months, Facebook is the interaction machine and platform. There you have comments, discussions, shares and you generate reach. I will now try to achieve this discussion and dissemination through other channels. Should the CIO Kurator continue to exist as a platform, others will have to maintain their presence on Facebook.

Instagram – the third pillar in the Facebook empire – does not really matter to me, so no big loss. So I have concluded with all three products of the Facebook empire. The next step against one of the GAFAM monopolies, after dramatically reducing my purchases on Amazon and doing away with Google and Microsoft wherever possible. There is still room to be more consistent and this may be a goal for 2019.

Dear colleagues and friends have been more consistent before such as Thomas Cloer, Volker Weber or Sascha Pallenberg – to name a few – are more consistent:

At the same time, user / usage figures in Western Europe an Germany are stagnating. But the mass exodus of Facebook does not take place, despite even greater mistrust …

Personal Comment: I have more or less stopped writing in English language since I changed my job within IBM from an European to a German-language centric role, so for quite a while. Time to rethink and start a new experiment: Use Google Translator to translate some of my posts with some significance beyond Germany into English language, while doing some minor editing after the initial translation. This is the first try. Let us see, how far this goes. As in the past the headline of those postings will be starting with [EN]. Feedback is more than welcome.

(Stefan Pfeiffer)