By Pascal Oparada
Remember the days of #DeleteFacebook, when major celebrities and influential personalities across the world led massive campaigns to completely log out of and have the app removed from their devices?
That is not going to happen anymore because Facebook has inked deals with major operating systems to have its app preloaded and become undeletable when they buy phones running with these operating systems.
According to Bloomberg, Nick Winke, a photographer from Seattle was alarmed to find that his new Samsung Galaxy S8 came with the app preinstalled and when he tried to delete the app, he found he could not but only found an option to disable it.
“It just absolutely baffles me that if I wanted to completely get rid of Facebook that it essentially would still be on my phone, which brings up more questions,” Winke said in an interview. “Can they still track your information, your location, or whatever else they do? We the consumer should have a say in what we want and don’t want on our products,” Winke told Bloomberg.
With what happened to Facebook about Cambridge Analytica and other instances of a data breach, more people are wary about how their profiles and data are shared on the social network.
Some people have deleted Facebook in protest of the company’s privacy lapses and others want to have the option to do so.
A spokesperson for Facebook said a disabled version acts like it’s been deleted and so it doesn’t continue collecting data or send information back to Facebook
Samsung said it “only ships the stub version of Facebook on their phones. It’s basically a non-functional empty shell, acts as the placeholder for when the phone receives the “real” Facebook app as app updates”
But the company declined to comment on how many of its phones have the app preloaded.