Gizmodo gives us 10 reasons to quit Facebook
photo via Gizmodo
Facebook has become ubiquitous in our lives, but it’s not been without its problems. Of course, there were the redesigns and the changes, the real-time updating, and the TOS that allowed them full copyright to your photos. Then there were privacy violations, and incorporating your information to other sites, and what? Why are we still even on facebook? Is it simply because there’s nothing better?
Dan Yoder of Gizmodo listed 10 very solid reasons why we should start moving away from Facebook (more details on each point in the article):
10. Facebook’s Terms Of Service are completely one-sided
…Facebook’s Terms Of Service state that not only do they own your data (section 2.1), but if you don’t keep it up to date and accurate (section 4.6), they can terminate your account (section 14)…
9. Facebook’s CEO has a documented history of unethical behavior
…According to BusinessInsider.com, he used Facebook user data to guess email passwords and read personal email in order to discredit his rivals. These allegations, albeit unproven and somewhat dated, nonetheless raise troubling questions…
8. Facebook has flat out declared war on privacy
… the default is now social.” Essentially, this means Facebook not only wants to know everything about you, and own that data, but to make it available to everybody. Which would not, by itself, necessarily be unethical, except that …
7. Facebook is pulling a classic bait-and-switch
…At the same time that they’re telling developers how to access your data with new APIs, they are relatively quiet about explaining the implications of that to members…
6. Facebook is a bully
…why sue an independent software developer and fledgling entrepreneur for making data publicly available when you’re actually already planning to do that yourself? Their real agenda is pretty clear: they don’t want their membership to know how much data is really available…
5. Even your private data is shared with applications
…Which means now you’re not only trusting Facebook, but the application developers, too, many of whom are too small to worry much about keeping your data secure. And some of whom might be even more ethically challenged than Facebook…
4. Facebook is not technically competent enough to be trusted
…For example, their recent introduction of their “Like” button makes it rather easy for spammers to gain access to my feed and spam my social network. Or how about this gem for harvesting profile data?…
3. Facebook makes it incredibly difficult to truly delete your account
…They make no promises about deleting your data and every application you’ve used may keep it as well. On top of that, account deletion is incredibly (and intentionally) confusing. When you go to your account settings, you’re given an option to deactivate your account, which turns out not to be the same thing as deleting it…
2. Facebook doesn’t (really) support the Open Web
…It’s bad enough that they claim to own this data and are aiming to be the one source for accessing it. But then they are disingenuous enough to call it “open,” when, in fact, it is completely proprietary to Facebook. You can’t use this feature unless you’re on Facebook…
1. The Facebook application itself sucks
…Between the farms and the mafia wars and the “top news” (which always guesses wrong – is that configurable somehow?) and the myriad privacy settings and the annoying ads (with all that data about me, the best they can apparently do is promote dating sites, because, uh, I’m single) and the thousands upon thousands of crappy applications, Facebook is almost completely useless to me at this point…
If you’re interested in some of the common objections, he also wrote a followup addressing those.
There’s no question that Facebook hasn’t been the best of anything, but as we all know, there just isn’t anything better that we can all jump ship to at the same time. Still, what I choose to do is keep my information and photos/media to a minimum, and bide my time until there’s something better out there. Be careful, Facebook isn’t as safe as a lot of us would like to think.
