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Want to sign up to Facebook/Meta Messenger, how can I mitigate the privacy invasion as much as possible? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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I only plan to use it for messaging in a couple of sports teams and event invitations.

I'm willing to take a lot of measures as long as they don't get the account blocked - no phone app, dedicated virtual machine+VPN to isolate from other internet activity, purchased fake phone number in signup, adding fake interests and life details. However, I won't provide any real ID/photos, are these needed for signup?

Update: registered with a well-known VPN and an online purchased fake number. Added a couple of friends and made a few junk posts. Asked to confirm with selfie after 4 days, didn't have any activity whatsoever during the last two days so it wasn't as if I did any action which immediately triggered the check.

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[–] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Just out of interest: what's on FB messenger that makes all the things you are willing to do to circumvent the grubby data tentacles worth it? I'm just asking because I came to the conclusion not to use FB a while ago and I haven't looked back.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    Personally I use Facebook as a launchpad for IRL relationships. Kinda like Meetup or similar. Everything gets posted to Facebook. There are Facebook groups. They don't get posted anywhere else. FB basically has a Monopoly on group events and socializing/networking.

    Aside from that, Marketplace. Especially since Craigslist randomly banned me from posting for no reason.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Just out of interest: what’s on FB messenger

    It's the first line of the post ;)

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Touché. If I were in your place I would still try and find another forum, even if you ended up giving all your data to Discord or something like that.

    One of the reasons is adversarial policies. They will sniff out you're using a VPN and they will throw stuff at you. Oh, weird activity from your account. Oh, change your password. Oh, we need to get a proper ID from you. Unless you're getting $$$ betting info, it just doesn't seem worth the effort.

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