One of my readers asked me how to go about removing Facebook completely from their online lives. After I pulled together the various links that you’ll see below, I thought I would share with you all. Now, I am not saying that I am contemplating doing this: sadly, my online professional life requires that I continue to be a part of Facebook, whether I like it or not. But that doesn’t mean I have to agree with its corporate policies, as I have made clear in several posts earlier this summer. But read on or save this column somewhere, just in case you are thinking about de-Facing your life.  And be prepared to spend a few hours going through the numerous steps.

Your first to-do is to download all of your data that Facebook has on you. I wrote about this process earlier (and covered the other social networks too) in this post. But if you just want the Facebook archive download, go to this page.  You might have to wait a few days until your archive is ready: don’t worry, you will be notified.

Next, decide whether you want a trial separation or a total divorce. Facebook refers to the former as deactivating your account. This keeps your data in their grubby digital hands, but at least you will disappear from your friends’ social networks. You can change your mind in the future and re-activate your account just by logging back into your account, so if you are somewhat serious about this but don’t want to inadvertently login, make sure you delete the login details from your password manager or any saved websites on your various browsers and computers.

If you still want to stick with Facebook, you might just want to cleanse your privacy settings. This post goes into detail about how to do this. You can see how complex setting up your privacy has gotten, when you need a full page of instructions to naviagate the various options.

Before you opt for the total divorce, take a look at the connected apps that you once allowed access to your Facebook account. You might not have remembered doing this, and in another column I spoke about what you should do for a social media “spring cleaning” for the other networks and for your various privacy settings. You should spend some time doing this app audit for the other networks as well.

Why do you want to deal with your connected apps before total account deletion? Because you might want to still access one or more of these apps, and if you delete your Facebook presence, your access goes away if that particular app depends on that. For example, a web portal that my doctors use to communicate with me could depend on my Facebook login. (It doesn’t, but that is because I decided to use another login mechanism other than Facebook.) By going to the connected apps page, you can see the complete list of whom you have authorized.

Still with me? I realize that it seems as if the scope of this project continues to widen, but that is to be expected. Let’s continue.

Mashable has this nice article that will walk you through the steps of both deactivation and a complete deletion process. I won’t repeat the numerous steps here, but you should take the time to review their post.

If you opt for deletion, remember you have to cleanse your entire computing portfolio of everything Facebook: this means all your browsers, your mobile devices, and your mobile messenger apps too. I don’t particularly like the mobile messenger app, as one friend described it accurately as a “rabid dog” that just grabs your contacts and other data. Indeed, if you have examined your downloaded archive you can see that for yourself.

Now for the final step, the actual deletion. The Mashable piece has a long list of what you have to do, aside from hitting the delete button in the Facebook interface. If you want a more visual aid, check out this screencast that shows you these first steps.

I realize this is a lot of effort, and Facebook has very nicely put in a number of “Are you sure” checks along the path, just in case you aren’t completely ready for the divorce. I would be interested in hearing from you if you do go through the entire process and what your reasons are for doing it.

If you want to completely cut the cable cord, it isn’t easy. I have been waiting for technology to become spousal-ready, and we are still about a year or two away. Today you have a lot of choices in the $40/month range that rival what the cable companies offer you for TV programming. The trouble is you have to make a choice between user interface and great TV resolution: you can’t yet have something that delivers both, other than your cable company.

I pay AT&T Uverse $125/mo. for my TV programming. That includes two receivers, one of which is a DVR and a boatload of various taxes and fees. Is it worth it to move to one of the online TV providers and save $85 a month? Eventually, I decided no, after trying two services, You Tube TV and Hulu Live TV. You can follow along with this column if you are brave enough: both offer a free trial of their services for a week, after which the monthly subscription starts. There are other services; my patience wore thin after experimenting with these two however.

Let’s first look at the user interface and mindset of the two online providers. You can obtain your TV programming in one of two ways: either by selecting your shows using a channel via your web browser or via an app that runs on your TV equipment. The web browser has the better UI because the developers working at the providers have more to work with and are more used to building web apps these days. And, you have a real keyboard for input, unlike your TV where you have to navigate around an on-screen one that can be infuriating.

So how do you get the audio and video signals from your computer to your living room TV? Two ways: either by connecting your computer directly to your TV with an HDMI cable or using one of several devices like Google’s Chromecast that does this for you wirelessly. If you use the direct cable connection from your computer, you will have to figure out a wireless keyboard and mouse to control it. If you use Chromecast, you will have to figure out the sequence of controls using the three apps that Google has (Google’s Chrome browser, Google Home and the Chromecast app itself) to get it setup. The workflow isn’t immediately obvious, and I suggest you learn the process before bringing your spouse into the room for the demo.

The nice thing about Chromecast is that any content that is displayed in a browser tab can be quickly transmitted to your TV by clicking a few buttons. I say a few: my wife got immediately weary of the process when I showed her what was involved. Your own experience may be similar. The bad thing about Chromecast is that the resolution is poor: nowhere near HD quality and even below SD video quality. Even if you have an old living room TV (and mine is more than five years old), you will be disappointed with the Chromecast video quality. And by the way, Google sells two different versions of Chromecast: one is for audio only; the other is for video and comes with the HDMI connector.  Make sure you buy the right one.

Another difference is how you access TV shows that have previously aired. Hulu’s web UI is very akin to the Amazon and Netflix web UI. In order to get the entire season’s worth of episodes, you have to click on the name of the show in the “My Stuff” guide. You can’t reorder the shows listed. If you click on the video itself, you are taken to the current episode. You Tube TV lists each episode as separate videos, much like the way ordinary You Tube does for its videos. (You can see the web version of the live TV guide above.)

So far I have only talked about using the web clients of You Tube and Hulu. There is a second method, which uses the native apps that run on your TV equipment. If you have a new TV, chances are it comes with apps for a variety of video providers, including Amazon, Netflix, You Tube and Hulu. I tried the apps that ran on my Samsung Blu-ray player: it didn’t have a You Tube app, again because it was more than five years old.

Sadly, there are UI differences between what you see with your web browser and the TV-based app clients, with the TV apps being far less capable than their web cousins. One big difference is how the onscreen channel or movie guide is shown. Netflix has the longest experience with developing its apps, and there are major interface and stability differences between its Android, iOS, web and embedded TV apps. On my Samsung device, the Netflix app frequently can’t find the Internet, or just quits working entirely. On the web client, that rarely happens.

Like Netflix, You Tube TV and Hulu both allow you to segregate your family’s preferences, so you can keep track of your individual tastes and what you have already watched. You Tube allows up to six different family members. Hulu is more restrictive and confusing, and there is also an unlimited extra-cost option.

Speaking of extra cost options, this is where the two providers are showing their relative youth. If you don’t want to watch live TV programming, Hulu has plans that start at $8/mo., or $12/mo. if you want to skip most commercials. If you want everyone to watch different streams concurrently, that will cost another $15/mo. There are also premium channel fees for HBO, Showtime and Cinemax.  You Tube TV has Fox Sports, Starz, AMC, Sundance and Showtime premium add-on channels.

Finally, Hulu with Live TV doesn’t support viewing live TV streams on all of its devices, according to this very confusing webpage. I read over the caveat several times and didn’t really understand what they were saying.

Alright, let’s move on to discussing the real benefit with using the TV apps from the online providers (or Blu-ray player, in my case).  Your video quality will be as good as anything else you run on the TV, full HD. But you have to put  up with a sub-par UI to get it.

So, what should you do? First, if you are in the market for a new TV, sign up for at least one of the online TV providers before you go shopping, and set up a simple temporary login password too. Go to your store and login to your provider, using the embedded app on the TV, and see for yourself if the UI is going to give you fits in selecting your programming with a couple of sets that you are interested in. If you really want a true A/B test, buy a Chromecast and bring that along with your laptop and see what the resolution will be if you don’t believe me.

If you just bought a TV within the last couple of years, try my experiment at home and see if you get better results that I did with my tests. The apps could be better than I experienced. If you have a large family and many different TV sets scattered throughout your home, you will probably end up sticking with your cable provider.

Facebook has been under fire for the past several months as Zuck does his World Apology Tour, both in DC and in Belgium giving testimony to the EU Parliament. That link takes you to a YouTube video from The Verge which shows him not answering very pointed questions from the body’s members. The EU format was very different from his US Congressional testimony in April: In Europe, the session was just an hour and a half, with much of that time taken up by Members’ speeches. In the States, he was there for a total of ten hours.  Business Insider called the EU appearance “a wash out.” That difference between the two geographies was noted by lawmakers quoted in Vox. “We are here in terms of regulation,” said Claude Moraes of the British Labour Party, gesturing upward with one hand, “And the United States is here,” gesturing downward with the other.

Sadly, the social media giant has paid lip service in protecting users’ privacy. There is this story in the NY Times about how it cooperated with the major cellphone vendors to give them access to vast amounts of private user data.

And the company hasn’t done very well towards policing its content for terrorist and hate speech. This recent post in the UK’s Independent talks about the effort that the vendor is going to try to block hate speech in Germany. The reporter takes us inside a 1200-person cubicle farm where analysts try to screen content in real time.

But to get a more complete picture, you should read this report last month from the Counter Extremism Project called Spiders of the Caliphate. It lays out a chilling analysis of how poorly Facebook has been in policing pro-ISIS propaganda. It documents how their supporters operate on that network and even leverage its features. ISIS’ online networks are growing and are used to plan and direct various terror attacks as well as to mobilize foreign supporters to fight in various places around the world. ISIS’ Facebook presence is pervasive and well organized. According to the authors, ISIS “has developed a structured and deliberate strategy of using Facebook to radicalize, recruit, support, and terrorize individuals around the world.” They found from careful path analysis that ISIS’ “Facebook networks are strong, extensive, and growing.”

The authors selected a thousand Facebook accounts that they claim are ISIS supporters, using positive language and geolocation to specific areas, usernames with pro-ISIS meaning, accounts from people that claimed they worked at ISIS or are from place names that are under ISIS control. You would expect many of these accounts to originate from the Middle East, but there also were accounts from Nepal, South Korea and South America too: ISIS has truly gone global. There were even American accounts.

They examined each account’s timeline and pattern of liking and sharing posts and then recorded the number of their friends or followers and other data. They then visualized this data using the open source network path analysis tool Gephi. While I am not an expert here, it seems their methodology is sound.

They found many disturbing things. There were 28 accounts that were used exclusively to post pro-ISIS propaganda, with some posts that have remained online for more than a year and racked up thousands of views. Also, “a group of American ISIS supporters holds weekly meetings on Facebook Live to discuss topics ranging from ISIS ideology to how to avoid detection from the FBI.” ISIS supporters live in more than 80 different countries. Most supporters had publicly visible posts, too.

Facebook’s misleading efforts to counteract terrorism

Facebook says they have worked hard to try to stem this pro-ISIS tide, but the CEP report documents how they have mislead the public and been largely ineffective. The report says that Facebook has been unable to do anything “in a manner that is comprehensive, consistent, and transparent.” Rather, it has enabled ISIS supporters to flourish and grow their social networks. Of the 1,000 accounts analyzed, less than half of them had been removed by Facebook by March 2018, and many accounts were reinstated multiple times after removal. “Perhaps most concerning is that Facebook’s suggested friends algorithm reveals how the company’s tools have aided in connecting extremist profiles and help expand ISIS networks.” The report goes further and says that Facebook executives have purposely misled policymakers and the public in terms of their cleansing of their network from pro-ISIS activities.

The post in New Europe was quite disparaging and called Zuck’s non-answers before the EU evasive and a disaster. It mentions his claim that Facebook “can flag 99 percent of the ISIS and al-Qaeda related content that we end up taking down before any person in our community flags that for us.” Clearly, that number (apart from being meaningless) is at odds with the CEP report.

One final personal note about Facebook’s inadequacies.  Two months ago, I tried to download information from Facebook and other Internet sites that they have collected about my usage, and documented the experience in my blog here. It wasn’t an easy exercise, but it was sobering to see how many advertisers had my name in their sights, and in their sites as well. None of the Internet properties make this easy for you to do, but the effort is worthwhile and another eye-opener.

The New Europe post says, “It’s not like Facebook doesn’t have the resources to do better. Facebook’s market capitalization is more than the GDP of Belgium. Until Facebook finally tells the truth, it will be difficult for lawmakers and the public to hold it, and other tech companies, accountable for the level of disturbing and harmful content that proliferates online today.” Finally, I speak to this issue of corporate and leadership integrity on Shel Holtz’ For Immediate Release podcast this week. (Skip to 12:15 if you don’t want to listen to the entire hour.)

I am a bit slow to the whole escape room phenomenon, but it seems like a great idea to me. While I am not a computer gamer, I have run sites with that editorial content and know many professional gamers as a result. I am also a big Sudoku and crossword fan, having done those puzzles for more than a decade.

The idea, if you are still not tuned in, is to bring a few friends to a facility and try to escape from a locked room within an hour. You have to solve various puzzles. Actually, you have to find the clues and then figure out the puzzle, without a lot of guidance. If you haven’t ever done a room, you first have to be very observant, looking at what objects have been placed in the room, what information is written on the walls or displayed on various monitor screens, and what objects might lead you to other things. For those of you that don’t like solving puzzles, this is probably not something you are going to like. If you do like puzzles, or if you go to haunted houses every fall (or even build your own), this is probably something you have already checked out.

While I am not a computer gamer, I recognize that many years ago I spent weeks of my life trying to solve the puzzles of Myst. Back then, I said that “Myst starts out a total puzzle, and as you gain skills and understand the sequence of play involved, you get drawn into the universe of the game and lose track of real life and elapsed time.” You can say that about many modern computer games too. The problem with this is that you only have an hour to escape your particular room, and you don’t know how many puzzles you will have along your journey.

Given that there are thousands of rooms in cities all over the world, if you want to try one out the next hurdle is going to be to find one that suits your particular skills, experience, and group. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone reviewed rooms with some sort of consistency? Fortunately, there is a site that does called EscRoomAddict. I spoke to one of their editors, named Jeremie Wood. (You can see a sample of one review here.)

The site has teams of reviewers in LA, Chicago, New York, Kansas City, Denver and Toronto, which is where they began four years ago. They have reviewed more than 400 rooms in North America. There are other sites that have reviews, but not as well organized or as consistent in their evaluations as ERA, as they call themselves. The site doesn’t pay their reviewers, but usually the room operator comps the reviewers to do the room. Many of his reviewers have played 50 or more rooms during their tenure, and Wood himself has lost count but thinks he has been party to at least 180 room reviews.

He told me based on his experience that he doesn’t think the escape room craze has peaked yet, and there are still new rooms being built. One opportunity is to try to attract more corporate customers, who use the room as a team-building exercise. And part of that effort is what motivated the founders to start ERA, so that corporate customers could find the best rooms in a particular location.

The escape room landscape is also changing. “Many of the early operators have closed, mainly because the standards for the best experience keep going up.” You might think that the best rooms are the ones that take the most money to build, but that hasn’t been his observation. “I have seen great rooms that didn’t cost much, and lousy rooms that were very expensive,” he said. ”You don’t have to spend huge amounts of cash, but you do have to know what you are doing and design something that has really great puzzles and a great story.”

One of the reasons I like the ERA site is that it attempts to have consistent review metrics for all of its room reviews. The teams from the various cities met earlier this year here in St. Louis to try to iron out consistent style and to set up minimum requirements for their reviews. The reviewers also try to take into account a wide range of puzzle solving ability in their write-ups. Each room is done by at least three different people, who then collaborate on the review, and they usually agree on their evaluation.

Having been to so many rooms, Wood told me that the average Canadian rooms are smaller and more suitable for 4 to 6 people, whereas in the States, they can hold more participants. Also, in Canada, you usually book a room exclusively for your own group, even if it is smaller than the room capacity. In the US, your team is sharing the room with others if the demand is there.

If you have particular room experiences and want to share them with my readers, please post a comment here.

The story sounds almost like a Hollywood plot, except it is true: A young starlet doing nude scenes as a teenager, goes on to invent a critical wartime technology that is ignored by the US Navy but ultimately forms the basis of WiFi and cell phones that we use today. Of course, I am talking about the life and times of Hedy Lamarr, the subject of a 2017 documentary film called Bombshell that is available from the streaming services.

She was also the subject of a 2011 biography from Richard Rhodes. I heard Rhodes back when he was promoting his book. Rhodes is the author of many intriguing history of science works, including the story of the Manhattan Project, and his book is worth reading. So is the film, which is also based on a 1990 taped interview that was recently found.

She is a fascinating study in how someone with both beauty and brains can not necessarily make the best of both thee worlds, but was constantly reinventing herself.

The movie traces her acting career and has various clips, including scenes from the provocative film Ecstasy, the one cited earlier that began her career and was banned by Hitler eventually. Lamarr was even the basis of one character in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles.

Both the film and the book show how one of Lamarr’s many inventions, which she developed with her music composer neighbor George Antheil, came about through an odd inquiry. Lamarr was interested in a boob job and Antheil had written about early efforts in that area, again presaging another important intersection of Hollywood and technology. The duo went on to get a patent for a new technique for frequency-hopping radio communications. While not taken seriously at the time, it ultimately was deployed by the military in the 1960s during the cold war. While the technique involved piano rolls, the basis of frequency hopping continues to be used as part of spread-spectrum radio communications that are in common use today. Along the way, Lamarr made many movies and married and divorced six husbands, the first of whom was a Nazi arms merchant that got her interested in developing new technology for the war effort once she fled to America. She lived to be honored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation a few years before she died in 2000.

It is hard for many of us to grok a movie star with her trips to the patent office and test tube rack in her trailer on the movie set, but she was the real deal.

Lamarr once said that “Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.” She was anything but.

I have been living with Tinnitus for 20 years, but until recently, I didn’t own it. Before I tell you how this came to be, a little background.

In 1998, I was diagnosed with Meniere’s Disease. I was experiencing intense dizzy spells, and many of you who are readers of this journal have heard or lived through what follows: dietary changes, a series of unsatisfying visits to various MDs, and a great deal of frustration. Back then, it wasn’t easy to do Internet research, but eventually my attacks stopped. What I got out of that experience was a case of Tinnitus.

My situation is a bit unique: I have been deaf in my left ear since birth. My right ear hears just fine – except for this continuous tone that sometimes is louder, sometimes is softer, but is always there. Over the years, I have learned to deal with it, but owning it? Nope. Sometimes I would hold a pity party for myself, sometimes it was more than annoying, especially when I was in crowded noisy rooms or restaurants. I remember one time I was at a professional conference of about 300 people. For dinner, we were seated at a very long tables and the noise was literally deafening. I quickly ate my meal and literally ran back to my room, in pain from the noise. I know it looked odd to my dinner companions.

I have been a member of ATA for most of those decades, and appreciate the amount of knowledge that the association provides its members in trying to understand and cope with this disease. But I didn’t own my Tinnitus. That is, until I went to the Iowa conference this past summer.

The conference is small – less than 100 attendees and that includes many of the speakers over two very full days. The audience is 90% professionals, including nurses, MDs and audiologists, with a few of us patients scattered in and allowed to participate. It was very worthwhile, and I want to describe some of the things that I learned during the event. I was surprised at how much I didn’t know, and it wasn’t just learning medical jargon, but actual, actionable, useful stuff that helped me begin to own my disease.

What does owning mean? It means that you control it, rather than it controlling you. You aren’t defined by your Tinnitus, you aren’t at its mercy, and you manage your own treatment and your own response to the disease. The noise you and I hear may be all in our heads, but we have to use our brains to figure out a way to cope and live our lives. Many of the stories here in this journal have carried this theme, but for some reason I didn’t really understand what they were getting at until I was sitting in the conference, listening to the various presentations. Then it all clicked, so to speak. (Sorry for that pun.)

Here are a few other things that I heard and took away from the event.

While I knew that Tinnitus is different for everyone, I didn’t realize how different it was. Meeting others who have it and hearing their stories was good to understand its individuality and the different paths that patients have taken to understand and cope with Tinnitus. When you see the breadth and depth of variations of research that is going on around the world, you begin to understand this is a huge problem – or many problems – to solve. You can get some of this by attending one of the local ATA support groups, too.

Another thing that I liked about the Iowa conference is that you get to put yourself in your doctor’s shoes and see Tinnitus from his or her perspective. This is helpful in understanding how they will treat you and respond to your needs and concerns. There were several presentations from audiologists, therapists, and other professionals so again you could appreciate their different points of view.

Meeting the ATA staff and board members attending the conference (ATA is one of the sponsors) was also a treat. It helps to put a face with the organization, and also gave me an opportunity to thank them personally for all their hard work in helping us.

The conference is also a good place to get first-hand knowledge about cutting-edge research, particularly by the University of Iowa team that has been involved in Tinnitus work for decades. By the end of the two days, you feel like you know these folks quite well.

At the conference, vendors present their devices and explain how they are used and whom they are intended. During one of these sessions, I learned that hearing aids are ways to manage Tinnitus, even if you don’t have much in the way of hearing loss. This is because they ca be programmed to block out the frequencies that you think you are hearing with your Tinnitus noise(s). Now I know I am a bit of an unusual situation – no hearing in one ear, and the opposite in the other. Not to worry – there are specific kinds of aids for this problem. Years ago I investigated in using a BAHA hearing aid, which involves implanting a microphone in the side of your skull (in my case, the left side) and transmitting the sound through your bones to your hearing ear. When I tried on the sample aid back then, I could actually hear stereo and locate the source of the sound coming from behind me – both of these for the first time. I opted not to use the aid then. But the advances of technology with regards to digital signal processing are significant, and now there are wireless CROS aids that can work with your cellphone via Bluetooth connections. At the conference, I could talk to audiologists who have installed both BAHA and CROS aids and get their first-hand experience. That kind of insight would be nearly impossible as an ordinary patient.

As patients, we tend to interact with the medical/industrial complex at the moment when we have a problem: we break a bone, we want it fixed. We have an infection, we want to get rid of it. But the single point of contact with our doctors method doesn’t work with a chronic condition such as Tinnitus (or Meniere’s or whatever). That is because research is ongoing: new drugs, new procedures, new devices, and so forth. We aren’t watching the medical literature like our doctors are doing, because we are busy living our lives. And even if we are willing to put the time into doing Internet research, we aren’t going to medical conferences and learning about many of the latest technologies and techniques. Until I attended the Iowa conference, my knowledge of Tinnitus was limited to what I read in this journal. While that is great it can’t provide me with everything that is going on in the world. The Iowa conference can quickly bring you up to speed in a way that doing your own net-based research or reading a medical journal article, even one intended for patients, can’t easily do.

Now, most medical conferences are way beyond my skills and knowledge (or so I imagine), and probably yours as well. The jargon of just understanding the different parts of the human body alone is daunting enough. The Iowa conference certainly had its moments when I was totally lost. But it had plenty of other moments when I got useful information that was clearly explained and in terms that any layperson could understand.

Next summer, put Iowa City on your calendar and plan on coming to the conference. You will be welcomed, and you might get to understand more about our common affliction. The cost is minimal for the benefits I received.