A group of people fed up with the recent Privacy Policy changes (and the difficulty in completely locking down your information) on Facebook have banded together to form “Quit Facebook Day“. On May 31st, those people (the number is currently at 1889 and growing fast) plan to permanently leave Facebook – unless, I assume, the social network’s coordinators change their policies and user-unfriendly privacy interface.
Personally I don’t have a big problem with the changes, albeit they are quite annoying and just keeping on top of the Privacy Policy is more of a weekly chore than anything else. My history on Facebook cannot be described as a pleasant one, however.
The first is the profile pages. Facebook’s original system was to simply list your favorite music, movies, TV shows, etc. in your profile. This was nice, as it didn’t add any extra clutter to my profile. The site’s staff didn’t think it was annoying enough, so they decided to change the system to use pages instead of simple text. The side effect of this being that you are completely subscribed to these pages if you like the artist. I knew this was the case so I delayed changing it for as long as I could. Facebook nagged and nagged me until I finally gave in and converted my profile. Now I’m receiving 50 updates a day from artists and companies that I honestly don’t care enough about to make a part of my daily social life.
The second is the stalker-like activity updates. If you’re a Facebook user, you know what I’m talking about. When I’m reading someone’s wall, I don’t really care that they liked someone’s comment 3 days ago from their mobile phone while in the restroom of the Flying 4 Truck Stop on I-5. In all seriousness, though, some of the updates I used to get on my wall were completely ridiculous. They have since fixed the nonsense activity updates, and I am a semi-happy camper.
Lastly, search by email. An interesting fact about Facebook, you may be in their database even if you have never visited their site before. There is a feature in the site called “search by email”. When someone looks for you via your email, they enter your email address into the site and it automatically jots them down as an affiliation to that email, even if it is not registered. If/when it comes time to register, you may already have 20 or 30 people suggested to you as your friends. Creepy if you ask me.
While these does not violate any laws, they are certainly not welcomes feature in my books, and I really hope that Facebook changes the way they treat user data and privacy in the very near future, or we may just need “Quit Facebook Day” every year.
mmm, do these people realise that you cannot delete a Facebook profile? It just becomes “inactive”, but all of that personal data is still stored.
Facebook’s been fun to watch the past few weeks as things go from bad to worse:
Email notifications from Facebook can be used to track down the IP address of the user that generated them. (via @piratepartyca RT of @vermicelli)
Facebook’s Privacy Policy is now longer than the United States Constitution. (via @4thguy)
This graph shows just how drastically things have changed since Facebook began.
The Zynga vs. Facebook issue is definitely an interesting popcorn-worthy spectacle.
Everyone seems to be asking themselves Has Facebook gone too far?. Others are claiming that Facebook’s gone rogue.
The sad fact for me is that even spending as little time as possible on Facebook, the site is practically essential to survive for many people today. There are stories coming out of people without internet access being alienated and feeling socially isolated because they aren’t able to be invited to events through Facebook, and aren’t able to join Facebook groups.
As far as the hometown/education/employment/interests/likes/music/etc. being switched over to pages, I was outraged and let my profile be completely blank rather than have no control over the visibility of that data. As of yesterday, it seems that you are able to control the privacy of those pages. It is literally a daily task to check the privacy settings to see what has been added, changed, and removed.
The next few months will be crucial for Facebook’s role of continued social networking dominance; but as they make one mistake after another, I certainly won’t be sad to see them go.
There is actually a way to permanently delete a profile, though it was quite hard to find: https://ssl.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account
I just had a look at the graph, I wasn’t surprised at all.
The voice here is not the people who are aware of the problems with Facebook’s privacy, nor the people who use the site to connect with friends, overseas family, classmates, basically people who want to keep their information private and localized. It’s the advertisers who are paying the majority income of Facebook, which leans towards these companies to maintain a viable income, at the expense of user privacy. It’s a very unfortunate situation which is all too common in silicon valley and it mostly comes down to greed.
It will be interesting to see how far Facebook goes with these changes. I believe that if/when they becomes publicly traded, a lot of changes need to happen to retain whatever they have left in the way of trust and corporate responsibility.