Facebook Suicide

Effective Monday, my Facebook account is being deleted. I am committing “Facebook suicide.”
I have, over the last several months, become increasing uncomfortable with the changes to the privacy policy at Facebook. Weekly, I would have to go into my settings and make sure that they were still set to “friends only”. Time and time again, I would discover that Facebook had changed their settings so that more and more of the profiles, postings and pictures would default to a “public” setting.
The final straw came last week when an apparent “glitch” allowed applications to be added to a Facebook profile without consent. After reading about it, I looked, and sure enough there were 4 applications on my Facebook that I had not authorized. While Facebook said it was a “glitch” what it demonstrated to me is that Facebook is tracking where we surf, because each of the unauthorized applications were for webpages that I had visited (3 news sites, and one online retailer).
Now of course, I don’t put a lot of personal information on Facebook to begin with. But it’s now about principle. It’s about Facebook selling out to marketing firms and advertisers. I choose to not be a part of their “oops we did this, sorry, but our apology is only because we got caught doing it.”
While I will miss the crazy random musings of my Facebook friends, and I will miss Farmville (but definitely not ZooWorld now that it has been changed), I will not miss the hassle of the privacy settings and the worry about how my information is being used. I really think that Facebook has become Myspace, and it is only a matter of time before something new comes along.

So to my Facebook friends, I say let’s stay in contact via email, or you can stalk me on this blog.

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