Facebook and Damage Control

Too little, too late. I just wanted to write a brief recap on my decision to quit Facebook from a few weeks back before I do my big blog post today, which will be much more awesome than this one.

Facebook is now scrambling to scale back the invasive privacy changes made several weeks ago, responding only belatedly to the angry public outcry about it. I see several reasons for the delay in their response: They wanted to wait and see if the complaining would die down as it always has (and to some extent, I think this probably happened) and they wanted to get as much out of the changes they made before they were forced to address them. That's speculation on my part, but given what we know about how badly Facebook treats its users, probably not wholly inaccurate.

For me, these revisions to the policy are too little, and way too late. I deleted my Facebook account about two weeks after I quit using it. I didn't deactivate it, I full-on no-holds-barred no-resurrection deleted it.

And you know what I found out? Even when you go in and go through the process of deleting it, Facebook keeps it on there for another two weeks, as though I cannot be trusted with my own decision and choices regarding my information. Given all of the recent actions of Facebook, that shouldn't have surprised me, but it did. And it made me mad.

Any chance of reconciliation between us evaporated at that point, no matter what changes they eventually decided to make.

I was a loyal user of Facebook for several years. I liked it, for the most part. I could chat with my parents and get information from groups and friends without too much effort. But that took a back seat to my concerns about the unethical and sly behaviors of Facebook. Any changes they try to make now are just a further slap in the face to people who are still using it, because we all know they'll just try to pull something else in a few months.

Conclusions

Without Facebook, I am a much more productive individual. I've been blogging regularly, writing every weekday for Suite101, getting my schoolwork done more quickly and even engaging in new creative writing endeavors. Facebook wasn't a useful tool for me anymore, and when they tried to make money off of my information, that was all it took for me to be able to say buh-bye.