Goodbye Facebook!
Saturday, August 28, 2010 at 11:59AM This article first appeared in July '10 on the PCPlus magazine website, where you can find a fantastic selection of tech columns.
What’s my big news this month? I’ve quit Facebook. There’s been a lot of talk recently about the site’s privacy policy, and the increasing amount of data that the social behemoth is trying to make publicly available.
As always, it’s geeks and tech journalists that get irate about these kind of things, while most users don’t even bat an eyelid. But that doesn’t make the current situation with Facebook OK. It’s anything but OK.
I look at Facebook like a virtual form of smoking. In isolation, each cigarette you smoke doesn’t really do your body much damage. To the contrary, you even see headlines screaming statements such as ‘Smoking found to be good for you!’ But these stories only ever focus on one small side-effect of smoking, such as the way cigarettes suppress appetite or help to prevent the onset of various dementias by bolstering receptors in the brain. The problem is – and it’s a fairly big problem – that despite these little wins, half of the people that smoke will eventually be killed by their habit.
By no means am I trying to say that Facebook will kill you – at least, I don’t think it will – but what I am trying to say is that you won’t notice the negative effects of Facebook’s increasing lack of privacy and endless obfuscation until it’s too late.
Ask yourself these questions about Facebook: Do you know what information is publicly available about you? Do you know how much of your information advertisers and third-party developers can access? Do you know the last time Facebook made arbitrary changes to its privacy policy? I don’t, and neither do most people, and that really bothers me. When I signed up to Facebook, it was under the proviso that it was a closed network, but that’s not the case any more (if it ever was). The bottom line is this: it doesn’t pay for Facebook to keep your information private – it pays for it to make it public.
If Facebook’s default was ‘Everything private, unless you state otherwise’, then I’d be more than happy, but that doesn’t look likely. So, taking all these things into account, I deleted my Facebook account about a month ago, and the very act of doing so reassured me that I was doing the right thing. Facebook makes it very difficult to find information on deleting an account, and many people only ever ‘deactivate’ them (not realising there’s a difference). Also, as you go through the process you get little messages informing you that random people in your Friends list are going to miss you, which is just creepy. Very creepy.
Despite not getting one ‘Miss you’ message after leaving – damn you, real world! – I did start to receive some interesting messages from people I knew. I got messages like ‘Facebook has made my life hell on more than one occasion, just not sure I’m as brave as you are’ and ‘You went ahead and deleted? I salute you, I’m not that brave just yet...’. Brave? I found that a really interesting adjective to use in this situation, because if I had to use one word to describe how I’ve felt since quitting Facebook, it’s ‘liberated’.
However, it’s not all plain sailing, and there is a downside to quitting Facebook; again I’m left making references to smoking. As an ex-smoker, I’m the worst kind of zealot (is there a good kind?). I’m always the first to complain about those smoking near my children and me, and I’m always on hand to offer advice on the best ways to quit. Likewise, I’m now the person eagerly telling anyone who will listen – whether it’s in the office or via a magazine column – that quitting Facebook is something you can do, and that it isn’t followed by the appearance of a giant chasm that sucks you into the bowels of the universe, where your witty updates will never be ‘Liked’ by another living soul. But hey, this kind of zealotry I can live with.
You will get a few people confused by the fact you’ve quit Facebook, and you will miss a few of those people in your Friends list, but I don’t regret my act of deletion one bit. And, if you’re really worried about people losing touch, you can do as a colleague of mine Chris Phin did, and set up a very basic new account that points to a website or Twitter account of your choosing. If people really want to get in touch, they’ll find a way, and you can rest safe in the knowledge that the various information and media you’ve shared over the years won’t be used in a way you never intended.
To find out how to liberate yourself and delete your Facebook account head to this wiki.
