About two months ago I committed Facebook seppuku (ok, well maybe it wasn't that violent), but I wanted to remove myself from Facebook's servers. This wasn't done as any big statement or in the belief that it would change anything, but for me my time spent on Facebook was at an end. I thought I would try and capture the thought process that lead me to that eventual kill page, and provide some insight on how I've held up. A lot of this is going to be inside baseball. I'll state it early on, if you are happy with Facebook, and don't have any problems with it, then by all means stay with it. There are plenty of valid reasons to use Facebook. For me those reasons weren't enough to stick around.
To be up front, this isn't the first time I deactivated my Facebook account. The first time was back in 2007. I finally had signed up and shortly after my initial set up, Facebook rolled out Beacon. To boil down what the intent of beacon was for users to share their tastes and purchases with their friends. It was along the lines of "Oh John just bought tickets to the movie I want to see, I should join him!". Obviously it didn't work exactly as intended. They rolled it out in November, so the obvious Christmas gifts spoilers were present. For example, there was a girl who received notice that her boyfriend had just bought something from J-Crew. Curious, she looked to find out that it was the gloves she had said she wanted a few weeks earlier. In addition you may have decided that you were going to take you sister's kids to the movies. Little did you know your trip to see "Alvin and the Chipmunks" would be sent out to all your friends. This wasn't Facebook's first overreach, but it was one of their biggest to date. Beacon was shut down just under two years later in October of 2009.
Here was the other element that had bugged me. When I deleted my profile back in 2007, it turns out that I really hadn't deleted it. The standard method provided to its users is to deactivate the account. Meaning your information still lived on Facebook's servers, it just wasn't active. That may not seem like that big of a deal, but I'll come back to why it was a problem for me.
This misgivings of Facebook were a big reason why I didn't really use it too much. I reactivated my account when I had a surge of friends sign up in late 2008. I was pretty much a Facebook lurker, and the reason for that is the heart of why I dug down all those layers to find the very well hidden kill link. In a nutshell, I don't trust Facebook. Through their actions and posturing I can see where Zuckerberg and Co. want to take Facebook, and I don't approve of their methods or trust that their have their user's best interest at heart. Facebook has always operated on a "Just do it, and ask forgiveness later". If anyone has been through the several major site redesigns they always follow the same string of events.
- Facebook rolls out a radical layout change
- Facebook users are confused and not sure about the changes
- A group will spring up and demand they roll things back to the way they used to be
- The ruckus will grow and Facebook will apologize to the users, but essentially give them the finger and say this is how it is now, deal with it.
- Uproar dies down and everyone goes on with their life.
This wouldn't be a big problem if this occurred only with site layout, but everyone of Facebook's controversial moves have been opt-out. Meaning it is up to the user to stay abreast of what is going on and take an active roll in managing new settings and features. This plays counter to how Facebook's audience used the site. People just wanted to play social games with their friend, keep tabs on folks, and provide the opportunity for others to do the same with them. In addition, these changes were minor, but ofter complicated and wide sweeping. Back in December of 2009 when Facebook underwent a major privacy settings change, even the Zuckerburg, the CEO, didn't set his settings up right. As a result he had private photos exposed to the web and were sniffed out. A condition that was quickly remedied once discovered, but it hammers down the point. If the founder of Facebook couldn't figure out the settings, how could the average user. Heck, most of the Facebook population couldn't even tell you how the changes impacted them much less how to change it back. This is the danger of an opt-out system. Plenty of those folks who didn't know they needed to fix their privacy settings were blissfully ignorant because they had already gone in and set their privacy setting before the major change in Dec. of 2009. But what they didn't know was that all of those choices were reset. This wasn't just a expansion of the town's boundaries, this was eminent domain.
I've also noticed a trend of overstep your bounds by three steps, when people get pissed, take one step back from Facebook. This method has appeared every time there has been a major site layout redesign. They drop the new design on people out of the blue, when the get pissed, they make a few minor tweaks, but never a full rollback. This has lead me to believe that ultimate goal from Zuckerburg is to divorce it's users from the data. The amount of personal details Facebook's users have pumped into the site is a marketer's gold mine. The only problem for Facebook has how to cash in on it. Beacon was their first major attempt, and the next attempt has been to push everyone out from the walled garden and into the open web. If you take a look at the infographic of Facebook's privacy evolution, you can see the systematic breakdown of the walls, pushing folks more and more out onto the searchable web. This is why Facebook has lost my trust. For years they marketed themselves as the safety vault for you to store your information and serve as the custodian, allowing only those of your choosing to take a peak into your safety deposit box. But now they've turned on their own users, and are trying to move that safety deposit box out to a street side bazaar.
So that's a pretty good encapsulation of my feelings about Facebook, I really just don't trust them with my personal information. To prove that point I'll return to my issue with only suspending my account when I first quit Facebook. This can be seen as benefit, keeping all of your previously entered data, so if you do return sometime down the line it will save you the trouble. But there is the rub, if you are going to "save" my information let me know. At the time, I again saw this duplicity when I actually killed my page. The actual page is buried pretty deep down, with the distraction of disable my account option (puts it in stasis) put well before you can find the kill page. After lighting the fuse, you must stay away for two weeks (not clearly explained) because if you even try to log back into your account with in the that time frame, the kill order will be removed. That's right, if you try to log in to your account after you kill it with in those two weeks in order to verify if the account is gone, the account deletion will not occur. Again, there is a valid reason, a person may decide they don't want to get rid their account. Instead of using an elegant solution, such sending someone to a landing page that tells them their account is due to be permanently deleted in X days, and offering them the options: go ahead and kill it now or I've changed my mind, they again take actions behind the users back with out verifying them with the user. This mentality sets the picture in my mind that Facebook feels it is their data, not yours.
How have I held up with out Facebook? For me, it has been fine. With my reservations about the site being so high beforehand, I never fully exposed myself and limited my interaction on the site. Plus my closest friends never were that active on the site either. One think I've learned for the entire process was that while Facebook can be an excellent tool to remain in touch, it also can fool you into the belief that enhances, or builds on your more distant relationships. From my use of Twitter, I discovered that both Facebook and Twitter have more pseudo-relationships than actual. The mere clicking of a follow button, or accepting a friend request doesn't generate anything, it just a couple of bits passing in the night on the vast sea of the internet. Sure their updates and statuses will be delivered to you post-haste, but how often will you scan right past their posts. If you are not actively interacting back and forth, how is it any different than your mother filling you in on what a childhood friend is up to after running into their mother. You are aware of what they are doing, but that doesn't build anything, it is just information. Hence, my lack of participation on Facebook is what eased my exit. For somebody like my wife, who does maintain relationships via Facebook, it becomes a bigger dilemma, you may not like what Facebook has been up to, but what choice do you have if the cost of exiting the collective pool is the loss of that connection. It is a really tough call, hence why I've been pulling for a proper competitor to appear on the scene to provide folks options. I'm pulling for you Google.
Saturday, August 14, 2010 at 7:09PM 
One of the things that Scott and I love about living in the Midwest is the fresh food and produce. There are some major benefits to living in "America's Breadbasket"! We try to get down to the Farmer's Market, located on Saturdays in Old Market and Sundays in Aksarben Village, as often as we can in the summer. While the market operates from May-Oct, August is our favorite time because the variety (and amount!) of produce is amazing. As you can see from our picture, we were able to find everything from corn to watermelon, jalapeno peppers to fresh-made feta cheese, garlic to peaches (which were too good and didn't make it into the pic!). Oh, the best part is everything cost less than $30! ;)
