Tales on Digital Privacy: Resetting Facebook (again)

From the archive. Originally published on migmol.com on 2019-06-02, recovered and republished here in 2026 at its original address. Unedited except for formatting.

Over the weekend, I had thoughts about privacy again. I watched a YouTube video about the company iRobot earlier in the week. The following day, I checked out models of robot vacuums on Amazon and Lazada. A few days later, I get an ad for an obscure Chinese company that’s selling a robot vacuum cleaner.

My immediate question was: who sold the ad to whom? My second reaction was that the ad was totally ruining the aesthetic of my feed. It was on Instagram after all.

I’m pretty casual about ads following me around, partly because I’m part of the marketing industry. At the end of the day, most of the ad-matching is anonymous and can’t be tied to your personal account. However, I am pretty anal about spammy ads. So I started thinking about cleaning up my digital footprint again.

This isn’t the first time that I’ve tried to clean up my digital footprint. A few months ago, I swiped my entire Twitter feed clean. Having been on Twitter for more than a decade, it was a depot for random thoughts which may now be off-brand. When you grow up on the internet, your blunder years are saved for the world to see. So Twitter had to go. I also did an incognito Google on myself and tried to shut down old accounts on obscure services that I’ve forgotten.

I actually considered eliminating Facebook altogether last year at the peak of the whole Cambridge Analytica scandal. It didn’t take long for me to dismiss the idea though since 100% of Filipinos are on Facebook, I couldn’t be off the platform because it’s part of my work.

I was browsing Facebook this morning and realized that probably 75% of what I was reading were articles from websites. I had been using Facebook as a magazine that occasionally had news about my friends’ lives. At that moment, I found another opportunity to reduce the time I spent on Facebook: I should transfer my article browsing into another medium. My top of mind solution was to use Flipboard as I loved using that app in the early 2000s but unfortunately Flipboard also just announced a data last week. I ended up trying Feedly. I then proceeded to ‘unlike’ all the websites I follow on Facebook and move them to Feedly.

I’m pretty curious about what’s going to happen to my feed. I’m also exploring resetting my ‘hidden profiles’ to really shake up how my feed and the algorithms change.

All of this, after a week when the Facebook board tried to remove Mark Zuckerberg to radically change Facebook’s approach to privacy and Google announcing that ad blockers would stop working on Chrome (for non-enterprise users).