Paul’s right.

I’ve been saying this for reasons that are on a somewhat abstract basis: we have to own our words, we have to not be locked in to a single client, we have to own our behavioral data. It’s become much less abstract lately.

I took my Twitter account private this week, for reasons I couldn’t quite put my finger on, and logged out of Facebook (and deleted the cookies, and let Privacy Badger do what it does). A couple days later, a number of my Twitter followers mentioned having done the same thing. It wasn’t organized, to the best of my knowledge, nobody said “we need to do this,” it just felt right.

The problem is, I still have to log in to Facebook every morning, download all the data from the Pages I follow, and log back out, because that’s the only place those businesses post events and news and such. Which is really sad, because I see the viewer stats on the neighborhood Page I run, and engagement is <5% unless you pay for it, or really really work on grassroots stuff. They’ve really got that lock-in down pat.

Preach.