Facebook has taken some hits for repeated changes to its privacy policy that seem to compromise user privacy to the benefit of advertisers.
Well-known users like Cory Doctorow have canceled their accounts. As Doctorow tweeted on May 14th: “Never made use of #Facebook, but #privacy awfulness from #Zuckerberg has prompted me to delete acct http://tinyurl.com/6rezxv.” And a movement is afoot to designate May 31st Quit Facebook Day.
On May 01, Gizmodo offered its top 10 list of reasons to quit facebook. You can find detailed instructions on how to quit facebook so you really quit it instead of only half quitting it. You can even automate the process by using the web 2.0 suicide machine, although, at the time of writing, its server has been hacked so it is temporarily unavailable.
On May 11, the New York Times offered space to Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s VP for public policy, to answer reader concerns regarding privacy issues. See Facebook Executive Answers Reader Questions. The next day, in a curious act of counterpoint, the Times posted a helpful diagram in a piece called Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options. This was followed two days later by a challenge to Facebook’s claim that it was making the web more open, correctly observing that the web is already open, and that social networks represent compromises to that initial open design.
Then there’s the question of Mark Zuckerberg’s capacity to engage in ethical behaviour. Essentially, 400,000,000 people are entrusting their personal information to a kid with no experience. Does this make sense? I wouldn’t use a phrase as strong as “mass-delusion” to describe our collective trust. But I would go so far as to suggest that the level of trust we repose in this Machiavellian nerd requires a certain suspension of disbelief. I’m not alleging that Zuckerberg is a horrible person. What I’m asserting with something approximating certainty is that any kid who attains a net worth of $4.0 bn in the blink of an eye is going to find himself subject to pressures and temptations which are nigh impossible to resist. We all are being silly if we believe otherwise.
I’m currently discerning whether or not to join the May 31st exodus. You can see me pictured above with my head covered in a stretched facebook logo as if I’m suffocating inside a green plastic facebook bag. What’s so suffocating about facebook? I think maybe it’s the reductive way in which friendship is treated on facebook. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never ever been able to communicate to friends the simple fact that they matter to me without looking them directly in the eye as I speak. Most facebook communication is a mere exchange of information, but that information gets confused for something else. And that’s precisely the kind of confusion you’d expect from some kid with no experience.
A gathering of friends on facebook is a lot like a gathering of friends at the West Edmonton Mall. It’s fun at first. But it’s a distracting environment filled with lots of opportunities to shop for things and to play games. So, in the end, you don’t spend a lot of time with your friends. And after a while, you discover that even when you do, the moments of connection aren’t real.
Maybe another way of putting it is that facebook is to blogging what Wal-Mart is to local retailing. Every community feels compelled to open a Wal-Mart, yet in the end, the giant chain eviscerates the local economy, putting small business people out of work and leaving the community looking dull and culturally flat.
Update: I ultimately did quit Facebook and have never felt tempted to rejoin.