![]() I don’t actually understand the ramifications of quitting, whether everyone in my friend list is notified about it and whether Facebook gets to keep the photos I previously uploaded in intermittent fits of longing for recognition of my specialness. Maybe now is the time, but I do worry that causal acquaintances linked to me through the service will wonder what’s wrong with me. Facebook is surely counting on such apathy. As much as I complain about the company, my own profile often seems like a sleeping dog to me. I think about deleting it pretty frequently but am honestly too lazy to go through with it. It’s there like a listing in the yellow pages, in case I want to leverage my personal brand at some point. I have a Facebook page, though I share next to nothing on it and rarely check it. Others may find it abnormal and vaguely sketchy if you don’t have one. Sadly, in my view, we increasingly need a social-media presence to live what is recognized as an ordinary existence. Facebook, despite evolving into something of a utility, as Danah Boyd explains here (“People’s language reflects that people are depending on Facebook just like they depended on the Internet a decade ago”), is under no regulatory obligation to use that data in ways society would deem as socially responsible. Facebook seems to be intentionally creating a situation where users don’t know what is public and private, give up trying to figure it out, and then merely trust the company (on no basis whatsoever) to do the right thing with their data. ![]() Rather, the concerns revolve around Facebook’s ultimate ownership of users’ “shared” data, its eagerness to pimp users and their personal information to third parties, and its whimsical ways of introducing arbitrary layers of complexity into its privacy controls (see this NYT chart) to make sure the users who care about such things have a harder time understanding just what the implications of their privacy settings and the user agreements they have clicked off on are. It’s not a reaction to one security hole, as troubling as it is. The report largely misses the point about the privacy concerns with Facebook. We can trust Lord Zuckerberg to always administer to our social needs with due respect and expediency. (You see this also in the hero worship of überdouche Mark Zuckerberg, a phenomenon surely to worsen when the upcoming book about Facebook’s early days, David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect is published.) Those glitches “in fact” happened? Really? Haters didn’t just make them up? But of course the privacy risks existed “only briefly.” Whew. The last line of that report give you a sense of how institutional news media has come around to a certain guardedness when reporting on Facebook, whose good side they seem eager to remain on. A handful of glitches during the rollout of the changes have, in fact, put some personal info at risk, if only briefly. The campaign comes amid complaints that the social-networking juggernaut is diminishing users’ privacy with its “open graph” model that adds Facebook connections on other sites across the internet. CNN reports on a group organizing on Facebook to quit Facebook on May 31.įrustrated by Facebook’s recent privacy changes, a group is urging users to delete their Facebook accounts en masse on May 31.
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