Goodbye Facebook

Well, I just took the plunge. I deleted my Facebook account. I didn’t deactivate it; I deleted it. It will be deleted after two weeks of non-use now (This should be a simple delete button). Hopefully, Facebook deletes all of my data off of their servers, although I have my doubts. While I realize Facebook has some usefulness to many (Obviously, with over 400 million active users.), it no longer has any to me. Here is why I deleted the account.

1. Facebook, has never really had that much usefulness to me. I had around 200 “friends,” but about 180 where people that I didn’t talk to in high school. I ended up using the hide button so I didn’t have to see their inane scores in games and tales of binge drinking.
2. I kept my Facebook account for this long to keep in touch with family. Well, now I live close to family, so I can just go see them. I still want to share pictures and videos, but I can easily do that with my Flickr, Picasa, and Vimeo accounts.
3. I don’t really care about games whose sole purpose is wasting time. While many enjoy them, they really are just a nuisance to me.
4. All of the above have been true for three years. I only now decided to delete my account because of Facebook’s cavalier attitude to privacy. They have recently hired a high-profile privacy lawyer for protection. They regularly change their settings without notice or easy to understand explanations. I can figure it out, but my parents and grandparents are completely clueless about Facebook’s privacy settings. I use other services that share my data. Twitter, for example, is completely public. I started using it knowing that and I did not share anything that I did not want to be public. Facebook started as a personal service and they are now trying to make money off of our data by sharing it with advertisers whether we want to participate or not. Of course, we can change out privacy settings, but they become ever more convoluted and they’re always in flux. Making money is not a bad thing for a business. I just do not feel that they have gone about it ethically.
5. I had planned on making a Facebook Fan page for my class next year, but I feel that my combination of WordPress MU and Moodle will be far superior to what Facebook has to offer educationally.

Facebook has an ambitious goal of literally changing the entire fabric of the web. If they succeed, I may very well have to create a Facebook account several years from now. If you still use Facebook, there is nothing wrong with that. Just be aware of how they are using your data and manipulating users, and make an informed decision. CEO Mark Zuckerberg supposedly even called his users stupid for trusting him with their data.