Thursday, May 20, 2010

Anti-Facebook part I

I believe almost everyone who reads this blog has Facebook account. But did anybody tried to delete it? It is not that simple as it looks on the first sight. Well, you can delete your account but this is not the first choice that Facebook is suggesting. Firstly you can just deactivate account and that means that everything that you put on Facebook will stay there and it will be accessible for almost everyone. And because of this kind of concerns about privacy I found anti-Facebook group.

The first one is QuitFacebookDay and they have almost 8000 Committed Facebook Quitters. On May 31st they will all quit Facebook and the main reasons for doing so are concerns about privacy and uses of personal data. They also believe that Facebook can be addictive as they write:

"Quitting Facebook isn't easy. Facebook is engaging, enjoyable and quite frankly, addictive. Quitting something like Facebook is like quitting smoking. It's hard to stay on the wagon long enough to actually change your habits. Having peer support helps, but the way to quit Facebook is not to start a group on Facebook about leaving Facebook."

Well I can agree with some of their statements and articles they are citing (very interesting are the instructions for permanently deleting your Facebook account: http://www.wikihow.com/Permanently-Delete-a-Facebook-Account), but comparing use of Facebook to smoking is just funny. I believe that it is not fair to be so technological deterministic and say it is all Facebook fault. People should be aware that web is open and public space. These are the characteristics that make web so unique and useful. Like every user can access almost every information (from news to government data) it is logical that this kind of exploitation will also be from the other side. And it is naive to think that it is just Facebook who uses personal information for advertisers and companies. Every time we open web browser our personal data, our search words and information about us are stored somewhere and can be used.

However Facebook is open network and should have some respect to their users. Users are those who are keeping Facebook so popular and favored between advertisers. And if Facebook will loose its users because of changing privacy rules, there will be no more Facebook. This is what Zuckenberg and others should think about and also take in account when they are changing conditions of use they should think about users and their wishes. Will you quit Facebook on 31st May?

1 comment:

  1. Hehe, no, I am not quiting Facebook today, but it might happen someday soon. I really got tired of them changing policies to suite the users but really mostly suiting themselves. Strangely, they are not aware that without users, there really is no Facebook as it is now. And changing policies to fit the laws or possibly get by them is just making fun of all (of us) users.
    And I am really not surprised that deleting an account isn't simple. Once they gained a lot of data on a user it would be such a loss to throw it all away...

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