Teetering on the edge of deleting my Facebook account, but it’s so damn hard. It is a lobster trap with your friends as bait, and I can’t resist the bait! The tension between hating Facebook and loving my friends (hooray for ambient awareness) puts me in a bit of a pickle. Here is the series of recent links that got me to teetering:
- Dan Yoder’s Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook seems like it’s pretty much the de facto voice of the current backlash.
- Why You Should Still Quit Facebook is Yoder’s followup.
- The Electronic Frontier Foundation laid out a timeline of Facebook’s eroding privacy policy.
- Matt McKeon created a great interactive visualization (with Processing.js, very cool), The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook showing how Facebook’s default privacy settings have changed over time.
- Arvind Narayanan chipped in some good solid commentary.
- Finally, there’s the fact that I set “Interests” and “Things I Like” to “Friends Only,” but my “Likes and Interests” still show up on my public profile. No way to view that as anything but deceitful or incompetent on FB’s part.
That pretty much lays it out. If nothing else, this makes me feel old. What I really want is for the Diaspora guys to do a bang-up job, and have all my friends move to that.
P.S. It’s not so much that I’m concerned with my own privacy, I just really don’t want Facebook to get away with this epic bait-and-switch. They have no honor, and I hate supporting them (under their business plan, participation=support). But again, love my friends. Argh!
