Leaving facebook
It’s probably fair to say that facebook provided fair warning of things to come when they changed their policies such that anything you published on their website became their copyright. I guess, as most people, I figured that I wasn’t going to post anything worth copyrighting anyway – so what’s the worry?
The problems came as I began to release that the effort to retain a minimum level of privacy on facebook was becoming increasingly complicated, as well as knowing that if one didn’t keep up then facebook would be providing (selling) the data to other companies such as Microsoft (as part of their ‘instant personalisation’ service for docs.com). It had become faster to identify new privacy settings by searching for them using Google after reading about them in the news than checking the facebook.com website.
One could make the argument that posting anything anyway on the Internet cannot be kept private – fair enough. I guess my main compliant is that facebook pretends that you have some privacy while making very difficult to have and pushing the boundaries in their attempt to generate cash from my data. Twitter is for example more transparent in their approach to privacy, as they at least don’t pretend.
Here’s a selection of some the latest news:
- Wired.com is one of the most respected Internet focused magazines had this to say about Facebook: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/facebook-rogue/
- Network World has this to say:http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/050610-facebook-privacy-complaint-a-complete.html?hpg1=bn
- Here’s another very good blog about why quitting facebook is a good idea: http://www.rocket.ly/home/2010/4/26/top-ten-reasons-you-should-quit-facebook.html
And if you feel up for it then you can delete your profile here:
https://ssl.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account&__a=3
and it appears that I have been able to delete my facebook account… If you hit the delete button above, then don’t login (including by accident) for at least two weeks, as facebook re-activate your account. So you better delete cookies, iPhone facebook apps, chat accounts etc….
I had some strong comments on this particular issue
on my blog
If you have decided to leave Facebook, you’ll probably like to keep in contact with your friends – e.g., keeping a record of their emails and birthdays would be nice. A simple way to achieve this:
1. You can use the ‘export friends to CSV’ application on Facebook: this will give you names and birthdays, but no email address.
2. Sign-up for Yahoo! Mail, and you can import all of your Facebook friends into your Yahoo! mail address book – Yahoo! has made this very simple. Afterwards, you can export to whatever format you desire.