Quit Facebook Day, May 31st

Yes, there is actually a Quit Facebook Day scheduled for May 31st.

More and more people are leaving Facebook over different concerns; one being privacy issues (see for instance this), another being time wasting. My reason for not having a Facebook profile is privacy concerns. The idea that Facebook lays claim to everything you put on Facebook, including your photos and other data just freaks me out. You may think that the photos, text and even private messages you put on Facebook belong to you. Well, you are wrong. According to their Terms of Service it belongs to them and they can do with it whatever they want; they do not need your consentiii because you signed all your rights away when you agreed to the service. Even when you delete information from Facebook it is not really deleted. Facebook keeps it in their databanks for data mining.

It is not that I’m overly concerned about having information about me “out there.” I have this blog, after all, which is quite candid. From it people can find out where in the world I live (although not my address), my occupation, my hobbies, my interests, even find a gallery of photos of me. But at least Blogger do not lay claim to “ownership” to any of these in they way that Facebook does. These are mine. Actually, much of my material here is made freely available for people to use under a Creative Commons license. The difference is that it was my active choice, unlike on Facebook where your choices are obscured and privacy settings are by default overly open. The default privacy settings have actually worsened from 2005 to 2010 – see a visual depiction here.

It’s not that Facebook doesn’t have value. I think it is a great tool for reconnecting with people you have lost contact with. Be that as it may, if people are really searching for me, I’d prefer them to find me not through Facebook.

A life without Facebook, is that possible? Indeed it is. There are other alternative social networks. One I’m looking forward to is the proposed Diaspora-project. It is an open source project currently in development that will be a “privacy aware, personally controlled” social network. Diaspora will move away from Facebook’s “centralized social web” to a “convenient decentralized network.” Diaspora will probably only become available around September / October this year. While I will personally wait to for the Diaspora project to become active, here are some other alternatives to Facebook, not to mention Twitter, Flickr and conventional blogs.

Quitting Facebook is not easy. First of all, it is quite difficult to quit all those hours of  “social time” with your friends. Secondly, Facebook makes it exceedingly difficult for you to delete your profile; they prefer you to just suspend it. Deleting it takes lots of time and effort as I found out when I set out to delete my profile some years back. Also, with the whole world Facebook-crazy, you may find yourself left in the cold as some British students found out. But fear not, there are a whole movement against Facebook: Many people are living a Facebook-free life. Take for instance the Anti-Facebook League of Intelligentsia. There is even an Anti-Facebook page on Facebook! Although I think that they're "doing it wrong."