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!

Via Waxy links, from the who-on-earth-thought-this-was-a-good-idea department, AOL Proudly Releases Massive Amounts of Private Data. They pulled it, but it's too late. The data is in the wild. Here's a search engine and some profile musing. User #711931's log is justifiably referred to as "epic". Finally, Cynical-C notes that the NY Times uncovered AOL searcher #4417749. Perhaps, if I were the tattooing sort (and the AOL searching sort), I'd get my AOL search number on a barcode on the back of my neck. Amazing.

Analysts are worried about increased metadata embarrassments when the new version of Windows launches:

For example, a user might use "good customers" and "bad customers" as keywords on contract files. If such a contract is sent to the customer with the keyword still attached, it could cause embarrassment or even loss of business, the analysts wrote.

Since metadata and searching are going to be prominent, key features in the new version of Windows, folks aren't going to be able to casually sling Office documents around anymore.