It's been roughly seven years since I last posted on Facebook. I didn't like it as a platform, but I was too lazy, or perhaps too complacent to actually delete my account. I was annoyed at how I'd read a post, then go back later to look again and couldn't find it. I was offended at the increasing pervasiveness of Facebook's tracking as evidenced by their cookies and tracking gifs not only on their own site, but all over the internet. And I'd be damned if I was going to install another messenger application just to read the messages that Facebook could easily show me on their site.
I'd created my Facebook account back when I lived in Colorado. It must have been sometime between 2006 and 2008. At first, just like everyone else, I was amazed by the technology and the possibility of connections. But sometime around 2011 or 2012, I found that I no longer liked it. The Farmville posts, the obligation to wish casual acquaintances Happy Birthday, being called out for not 'liking' something because I hadn't logged in for a few days, and worst of all the political posts. I stopped using Facebook entirely.
After the most recent news about Facebook allowing outside companies not only to view users' friends lists, but also their private messages, I felt that I had to make some kind of statement.
For years, Facebook gave some of the world's largest technology companies more intrusive access to users' personal data than it has disclosed, effectively exempting those business partners from its usual privacy rules, according to internal records and interviews.
The special arrangements are detailed in hundreds of pages of Facebook documents obtained by The New York Times. ...Facebook allowed Microsoft's Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users' friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users' private messages.
The social network permitted Amazon to obtain users' names and contact information through their friends, and it let Yahoo view streams of friends' posts as recently as this summer, despite public statements that it had stopped that type of sharing years earlier.
This isn't the first time that Facebook has been careless with private user information. I'd be stunned if it was the last scandal they have. Mark Zuckerberg was in front of congress after it came out that the Trump campaign improperly used Facebook data to build tools to influence the 2016 election. Have you ever had the impression that Zuckerberg cares about user privacy more than he does about his company and the money he's making? I'm bothered at the amorphous complexity of basic Facebook navigation and the intentionally obfuscated menus. It bothers me that Facebook tracks your location even when you turn off Facebook location tracking. I'm concerned about face tagging and about where facial recognition databases may lead. And I seriously hate what's happened on Facebook and other social media sites in terms of politics and misinformation campaigns. People have more complaints about Facebook than I can recount. Eventually, some manner of government intervention will be necessary; it's likely inevitable. When there's no consequence to a company for being careless with your information, they have no incentive to care.
I hope I'm not coming across as a conspiracy nut on a crazy rant. And I understand that most people don't want to quit Facebook. It's not easy when it's the way you connect with so many friends. That's why I'm planning on going through my Facebook friends list before I quit to make sure people are able to contact me. This will include me finally accepting a few friend requests that may have initially been made in 2011 and never accepted because I haven't signed in for years. Some of those folks are friends who I see in life, some I've only seen a couple times in the past few years, and some I never talk to anymore. At worst, when I reach out, things stay status quo. At best I'll rekindle a few friendships. People can contact me via email, and if they're so inclined, they can follow what I write here on my site. I'm also still on Twitter for now.
If you're interested in urging your legislators to pursue this problem, you can sign Free Press's letter to Congress here. And if you're interested in quitting Facebook, here's the link along with detailed instructions on how to quit Facebook. I'm planning to follow through on this before the end of the year.