Recode: Tinder and Instagram are ‘crippling’ relationships, sex therapist Esther Perel says.

"It no longer has to do with being socially isolated,” Perel said. “It has to do with experiencing a loss of trust and a loss of capital while you are next to the person with whom you’re not supposed to be lonely."

Sitting next to someone, face lit blue, doing the jiggery-pokery with their little screens, yeah. You see couples sitting, walking all over Santa Fe - faces glued to their screens. Every so often one of the pair will have a crestfallen look. But the photo here - could she be any happier about it all?

I wonder how useful leaving Facebook is, if you're on Instagram.

Since they own it (bought in '12), aren't those tracking results just feeding right back into the monster? The ad features work between FB Pages and Insta, so there seems to be significant sharing of some info.

TL;DR - If you want to stay on Insta, deleting FB may not do you one goddamned bit of good.

We must demand opt-outs. No compromise. No selling info without permission. If that means a monthly fee for use of a service, so be it.

The horrible thing is, if you want off both FB and IG, what do you replace them with? Where is an acceptable substitute?

Guardian.UK: No one can pretend Facebook is just harmless fun any more.

According to Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook, the company uses techniques found in propaganda and casino gambling to foster psychological addiction in its users – such as constant notifications and variable rewards. By keeping us hooked, Facebook is able to hold a huge amount of data on us. What is surprising, and worrying, is the derived data Facebook has – the profiles it can build of its users based on seemingly innocuous information.

Nothing particularly new here, really. But with all the current information coming out, I think it may be time ... time to prioritize another service. I've already been spending more time with Instagram and Twitter.

Facebook has to be, to be honest, the #1 source of hate in my daily newsreads. It's a bummer to go there, any time of day or night. I've not filtered anyone before, during or after the elections - I want to keep my finger on the pulse of all of America. What I see in Facebook is pretty ugly. I do see hope, but only if people get offline and start talking face to face.

Pounding a keyboard at each other doesn't seem to help a thing.

Recode: Here’s how Facebook allowed Cambridge Analytica to get data for 50 million users.

Back in 2015, though, Facebook also allowed developers to collect some information on the friend networks of people who used Facebook Login. That means that while a single user may have agreed to hand over their data, developers could also access some data about their friends. This was not a secret — Facebook says it was documented in their terms of service — but it has since been updated so that this is no longer possible, at least not at the same level of detail.

Woah, woah, woah ... WHAT?!!!

Probably announced via one of those popups, "Facebook has changed its terms of service." Go read a thousand lines of 7 point type, and God help you understanding the legalese. Remember the panics over use of images? People couldn't understand it, and Facebook rewrote it how many times?

I love the internet, don't get me wrong. But on certain days, I'd like to go back to colorful post cards and stickers. Really, these large social services really need to get serious about testing security vectors in their codebases. Including downstream, unauthorized uses of legally obtained info.

Euan Semple: Why I love Facebook.

Euan gets good discussions going on FB. But I suspect he's using a feature I never really paid attention to until now - friend lists. I think (think, because I've never bothered to look into it) one can click on a 'friend list' (I have a 'blogger' list), and just post to that subset of people.

I need to check this with my local social expert, @MarlitaH ... who will no doubt tell me "Of course you can." And I'll feel like an butthead for not realizing.

Up until now, I thought Euan had mastered some sort of alchemical way to get magic results out of Facebook. Maybe I can see my way to liking Facebook more, if I can leverage this concept. Thanks, Euan!

Dazed: How this 2014 Instagram hoax predicted the way we now use social media.

After analysing Instagram’s most popular profiles, she concluded that it was these three curated personas that amassed the most followers. Today, these personas are still ubiquitous – the wellness goddess, in particular, has a firm grip on Instagram’s 800 million active monthly users.

We make myths. Some are dark, twisted things behind the lightness of prose or poetry.  We don't have enough distance yet to really appreciate how significant this work was, how premonitory. We see this in our feeds every day. For goodness sake, Apple's News app feeds me Kardashian updates every day. Where they get the idea I actually care about such a thing, I just can't figure out.

Twitter purge.

I've gone in and eliminated about 170 of my follows. A slew of the old A-listers were no longer following me, and not really active. If you haven't been following back or contributing to conversations, I assume you no longer have an interest in being 'social' via Twitter. If my assumption's a mistake, and you're merely avoiding a meta-firehose (you already get me through RSS and don't need my Twitter feed duplicating all that), let me know.

I'm simply refocusing my follows on those who actually converse through Twitter and other social services. To do what I do requires an extremely tight corral of quality sources and discussants. Paywalls are getting up my nose, requiring more time to find a link I can actually use.

I'm always interested in solid new leads. Plenty of room for fresh ideas now.

But I feel it's sort of a watershed moment, this having to economize my time. It's getting close; I can see that sign at the end of the road. When being a link-and-comment blog won't work anymore. If, say, the Guardian, Reuters and/or NPR put up a paywall, I'll be out to sea without a paddle, and this long endeavor will be over. It already hurts to have to link low quality, ad-stuffed resources because all the authoritative ones are behind paywalls.

In the early days, when I was a one-man aggregator (before RSS or Twitter), it was time-consuming ... but I could practically fall over good sources all around the world. Like shopping in a great produce section in a supermarket - the time consuming aspect was choice. Today I have RSS, but it's twice as hard because of monetary blocks, and winnowing through the other, lower quality sources requires extensive research, comparison and contrast ... and trying to find sources without thrice-damned autoplay videos! Today, that supermarket has mousetraps set to snap your fingers if you reach for the best produce.

I just don't like paywalls. I understand the need to make money to continue to finance good newsgathering. But. In a world where everyone now buys their news, we're seeing more and more people only buying news that agrees with their preconceived notions. And news orgs gleefully embracing and encouraging these branded vacuum chambers. I feel that's a terrible risk for a democracy.

Ars Technica: Drone crashes in Arizona National Forest, starts a wildfire.

A vector of risk I hadn't thought of. Given our drought status, drones and forests may end up being a deadly mix. I'd recommend operators have buckets, shovels, and a 5 gallon container of water available, but likely not even that would be enough given how tinder-dry we are. A ban might be in order over BLM and National Forest land. You'll piss off the social media 'influencers', but who cares? It's the landscape we must live in and with.