With Friends Feeding the Data Monster, I Have Finally Had it With Facebook

A month back, J. Clifford explained his decision to deactivate his Facebook account:

…the EFF has had to file suit to get the Obama Adminstration to respond to Freedom of Information Requests about spying on social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Facebook has acknowledged, in a vague kind of way, that it assists the government in spying on its users, but when the EFF sought particulars, the Obama Administration refused to meet its legal obligation to respond….

I looked at my own part in this story, at my own account on Facebook. I saw that while Facebook brings me nice bits of little news about friends I’m not in touch with on a regular basis, the service also brings me a lot of irrelevant bits of information that has nothing to do with me or my relationships to my friends. I saw a lot of advertisements and pointless, relatively boring games. I remembered how it used to be, that when I wanted to know something about one of my friends, I talked to them in person, and if I didn’t want to know about something, I just didn’t ask.

I looked at what Facebook was doing for me, and asked myself whether it was worth allowing government spies to have access to information about my social life. The answer: No, Facebook is not worth it. So, my response to the Obama Administration’s refusal to be honest about its social networking spy operations is this: I’m off Facebook. I have deactivated my account, and I don’t plan on going back.

Even though I share J. Clifford’s concerns about government spying on social networking websites, I stuck with Facebook because of the one thing the website does really, really well: facilitate contact with old, long-lost friends. I have very fond feelings for my old, long-lost friends, and it’s good to know what they’ve been up to.

But today I’ve deactivated my Facebook account, for two reasons:

1. Facebook moves to share your friendship and personal information with the whole world unless you demand otherwise. In the guise of giving you control over privacy settings, last month Facebook set all users’ default settings to sharing personal information and contact information over the entire world wide web. You have to actively go into Facebook’s privacy settings to keep your personal information private from the whole world, and even then profile pictures are shared with everyone. Facebook’s acknowledged motivation: increased website traffic to their website and the larger advertising revenue that comes with that. I realized that I was being used to that end and didn’t like that I had to actively reaffirm my individual privacy.

2. No matter how you tweak your privacy settings, Facebook uses your friends to get information about you. Although I grumbled to myself, I stayed on Facebook after changing my privacy settings. I noticed that I had stopped sharing so much personal information about myself and my family, thinking about what was appropriate for the feds or members of the public visiting others’ pages to know. It was still nice hearing about my old friends’ lives, though.

Then I started getting notices over the past couple of weeks telling me, once or twice a day, that “A Friend Has Answered A Question About You!” Even though I’d dialed back my personal sharing on Facebook, the Facebook application “Friend Q&A” encouraged my friends to fill in the blanks, answering inane but harmless questions (“Do you think that ______ ‘recycles’ dirty underwear?”) and personal questions that really should not be public business (“Have you ever had a crush on _________?”, “Do you think that _______ wants to ‘come out of the closet’?”) except at the focal person’s discretion.

Of course, friends have always gabbed and gossiped about one another offline, but Facebook information is fed into something more vast and permanent than idle chatter: a data-mining operation that Facebook uses to sell advertisements and otherwise predict members’ behavior. When I realized that my friends on Facebook were filling in the details on me for these marketers without my permission, and that such information was a warrantless request away from the federal government, I just didn’t want to participate in that system any more.

If that sort of thing bothers you, too, consider deactivating your Facebook account. Before you do, change your name, your birthday, your birthplace, your residence and any other personal information you’ve put in there. Make these details fictional and gum up the system just a little bit as a nice parting gift to the corporation that has already gathered up so much.