Farewell Facebook
I’ve just deactivated my Facebook account. To be honest, I’m surprised it took me so long. Within days of signing up to the site, I’d set my junkmail filter to treat it as a spammer. Not an auspicious beginning. Somebody’s vampire attacked somebody else’s lieutenant zombie. And did I want to help in a fight between some people? Apparently I had a free “atomic punch” to offer. For a dollar I could send some bad clip-art to someone.
But the death knell was sounded late last year when I received an email from my new friend, Bono. Sending mass emails isn’t Bono’s style. At least that’s what the first line of his mass email said. But he was just so excited about his new song that he had to tell all his “friends”. I was his friend, you see. I’d used some facebook music-tracking widget, and then I’d played some U2. This made me Bono’s friend. Well, it made me his friend insofar as he treats his friends to mass emails about his new records. Something tells me our friendship doesn’t extend much beyond a marketer/marketed-at relationship. I probably can’t count on Bono if I need someone to help carry boxes next time I move house, for instance.
Anyways, I turned off all the various notifications and asked the site to stop emailing me. I disabled all the widgets and I upped the privacy settings. But then I found myself worried in case people were actually trying to contact me (about something other than facebook widgetry) and I’d be effectively ignoring them as I was automatically junking messages from the site.
By chance I intercepted an email from facebook before it got shredded as junk last night. It would have been a shame to have missed it. But I just can’t be dealing with the volume of complete nonsense generated by that site. It struck me that I’d much rather such messages didn’t get sent, than got sent and ignored. So I deactivated my account with immediate effect. My atomic punch forever unused.
And then there’s the fact that the social philosophy of the people who run it is way past dubious. There must be something in the air, I bailed out 2 days ago.
January 20th, 2008 | 11:50am
by Gyrus
I hear you – but I don’t mind it too much, and I was late on board having resisted for years. I’m able to ignore all the vampire/clip-art crap, and – fair’s fair – I have got back in touch with a few old friends through it. It’s also excellent way to share photos, I think.
January 20th, 2008 | 9:21pm
by Larry Teabag
It might also be worth bearing in mind that you can’t technically “delete” your facebook account, only “deactivate it”. Your information remains stored on their servers somewhere in the world, and they won’t delete it. To quote from their email:
“Since the information and content you upload is often stored in many different places within the Facebook file system, there’s no easy way for Facebook to remove it all at once. Keep in mind that Facebook does not use deactivated account information, and profile information ceases to be available to general users of the service immediately upon deactivation.”
This comes in between all their statements about how they value my privacy…
January 23rd, 2008 | 1:20pm
by Andy