10 reasons to delete your facebook.

http://www.businessinsider.com/10-reasons-to-delete-your-facebook-account-2010-5

This article details one man's decision to delete his facebook and why; the second link is a timeline that's given in the article, but I think it's really interesting, so I reposted it separately here as well.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline/

As facebook becomes more and more embedded in our everyday lives (Some people mentioned feeling ostracized, or looked at strangely for not even having a facebook) and yet our control over what does and does not get published is being marginalized, hidden in increasingly harder to find settings and increasingly complex controls.

not too long ago, facebook updated its terms of use, stating that users no longer own any of the content on their facebook pages-- this means pictures, posts, status updates, notes, quips, conversations, messages (ironically, on most other games, blogs and applications, these would be called "private messages") etc all belong to facebook and can be reproduced, reposted with no legal repercussions.

That's pretty scary. Particularly the 'bait and switch' of allowing you to easily "deactivate" your account, without deleting it. This article made me reconsider what I was putting up on facebook, and now I'm probably going to empty out my profile.

It kind of reminds me about the concept of the programmers' intentions meshing with your own intentions in video games-- sometimes as players we come to learn the backstory of the characters we play; the reasoning behind what we do in-game, and we realize that it's not a quest for justice, it's vengeance; or that the character we're playing is not quite what we thought he/she was. Now that I think about it, this kind of bait-and-switch is almost never, if ever done in games. If you have a 'hero of justice', you keep him through the game, and vice versa (not including games where you may choose to go one way or another, but in that case, backstories are rarely developed) In this case, facebook is claiming to do one thing, but being something completely different.

So I think I'm going to start minimizing what gets put on facebook-- lately it seems that it's no longer trustworthy. What about you guys?

Chris Kwak
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