Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook

10. Facebook’s Terms Of Service are
completely one-sided
Let’s start with the basics. 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). You could argue that
the terms are just protecting Facebook’s
interests, and are not in practice enforced,
but in the context of their other activities,
this defense is pretty weak. As you’ll see,
there’s no reason to give them the benefit
of the doubt. Essentially, they see their
customers as unpaid employees for crowd-
sourcing ad-targeting data.
9. Facebook’s CEO has a documented
history of unethical behavior
From the very beginning of Facebook’s
existence, there are questions about
Zuckerberg’s ethics. 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
about the ethics of the CEO of the world’s
largest social network. They’re particularly
compelling given that Facebook chose to
fork over $65M to settle a related lawsuit
alleging that Zuckerberg had actually stolen
the idea for Facebook.
8. Facebook has flat out declared war on
privacy
Founder and CEO of Facebook, in defense
of Facebook’s privacy changes last January:
“People have really gotten comfortable not
only sharing more information and
different kinds, but more openly and with
more people. That social norm is just
something that has evolved over time.”
More recently, in introducing the Open
Graph API: “… 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. What this amounts to is a bait-
and-switch. Facebook gets you to share
information that you might not otherwise
share, and then they make it publicly
available. Since they are in the business of
monetizing information about you for
advertising purposes, this amounts to
tricking their users into giving advertisers
information about themselves. This is why
Facebook is so much worse than Twitter in
this regard: Twitter has made only the
simplest (and thus, more credible) privacy
claims and their customers know up front
that all their tweets are public. It’s also why
the FTC is getting involved, and people are
suing them (and winning).
Check out this excellent timeline from the
EFF documenting the changes to Facebook’s
privacy policy.
6. Facebook is a bully
When Pete Warden demonstrated just how
this bait-and-switch works (by crawling all
the data that Facebook’s privacy settings
changes had inadvertently made public)
they sued him. Keep in mind, this
happened just before they announced the
Open Graph API and stated that the
“default is now social.” So 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. It’s one thing to talk to
developers about how great all this sharing
is going to be; quite another to actually see
what that means in the form of files anyone
can download and load into MatLab.
5. Even your private data is shared with
applications
At this point, all your data is shared with
applications that you install. 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. In practice, what
this means is that all your data – all of it –
must be effectively considered public,
unless you simply never use any Facebook
applications at all. Coupled with the
OpenGraph API, you are no longer trusting
Facebook, but the Facebook ecosystem.
4. Facebook is not technically competent
enough to be trusted
Even if we weren’t talking about ethical
issues here, I can’t trust Facebook’s
technical competence to make sure my data
isn’t hijacked. 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? These are just the latest of a series of
Keystone Kops mistakes, such as
accidentally making users’ profiles
completely public, or the cross-site
scripting hole that took them over two
weeks to fix. They either don’t care too
much about your privacy or don’t really
have very good engineers, or perhaps both.
3. Facebook makes it incredibly difficult to
truly delete your account
It’s one thing to make data public or even
mislead users about doing so; but where I
really draw the line is that, once you decide
you’ve had enough, it’s pretty tricky to
really 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. Deactivating
means you can still be tagged in photos
and be spammed by Facebook (you actually
have to opt out of getting emails as part of
the deactivation, an incredibly easy detail
to overlook, since you think you’re deleting
your account). Finally, the moment you log
back in, you’re back like nothing ever
happened! In fact, it’s really not much
different from not logging in for awhile. To
actually delete your account, you have to
find a link buried in the on-line help (by
“buried” I mean it takes five clicks to get
there). Or you can just click here. Basically,
Facebook is trying to trick their users into
allowing them to keep their data even after
they’ve “deleted” their account.
2. Facebook doesn’t (really) support the
Open Web
The so-called Open Graph API is named so
as to disguise its fundamentally closed
nature. It’s bad enough that the idea here
is that we all pitch in and make it easier
than ever to help Facebook collect more
data about you. It’s bad enough that most
consumers will have no idea that this data
is basically public. 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. A truly
open implementation would work with
whichever social network we prefer, and it
would look something like OpenLike.
Similarly, they implement just enough of
OpenID to claim they support it, while
aggressively promoting a proprietary
alternative, Facebook Connect.
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. Yes, I could
probably customize it better, but the
navigation is ridiculous, so I don’t bother.
(And, yet, somehow, I can’t even change
colors or apply themes or do anything to
make my page look personalized.) Let’s not
even get into how slowly your feed page
loads. Basically, at this point, Facebook is
more annoying than anything else.
Facebook is clearly determined to add every
feature of every competing social network
in an attempt to take over the Web (this is a
never-ending quest that goes back to AOL
and those damn CDs that were practically
falling out of the sky). While Twitter isn’t
the most usable thing in the world, at least
they’ve tried to stay focused and aren’t
trying to be everything to everyone.
I often hear people talking about Facebook
as though they were some sort of
monopoly or public trust. Well, they aren’t.
They owe us nothing. They can do whatever
they want, within the bounds of the laws.
(And keep in mind, even those criteria are
pretty murky when it comes to social
networking.) But that doesn’t mean we
have to actually put up with them.
Furthermore, their long-term success is by
no means guaranteed – have we all
forgotten MySpace? Oh, right, we have.
Regardless of the hype, the fact remains
that Sergei Brin or Bill Gates or Warren
Buffett could personally acquire a majority
stake in Facebook without even straining
their bank account. And Facebook’s
revenue remains more or less a rounding
error for more established tech companies.
Click to viewWhile social networking is a fun
new application category enjoying
remarkable growth, Facebook isn’t the only
game in town. I don’t like their application
nor how they do business and so I’ve made
my choice to use other providers. And so
can you.