Why I’m closing the Facebook

Last Friday, I wrote about the sudden flurry of media coverage about Facebook’s contempt for personal privacy. I pointed out that on Facebook there’s really no such thing as privacy and those that can’t deal with that “shouldn’t be on Facebook”.

I’ve had a complete change of heart.

First, and probably most importantly, I’ve done more extensive reading. That Columbia Journalism Review article I linked to last week in turn linked to a piece on Wired by Ryan Singel: “Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative”. It’s a blistering look at what Facebook has done and become, and the view isn’t pretty.

First, Facebook drew people in with promises of privacy. Then, when its own needs changed (chiefly, to make money), they completely changed their privacy policies making nearly everything public by default. That led to the bewildering 50 settings in 170 different options that Facebook now has to control some privacy settings.

I say “some” because there are many things that are not only public by default, there’s nothing you can do about it. Facebook may also have broken US federal wiretap laws by censoring private messages between members. Add up all their anti-privacy behaviour, and on May 5 some 14 privacy groups filed an unfair trade complaint with the US Federal Trade Commission.

I first became concerned about their rogue behaviour when they suddenly announced that everything you posted on Facebook—every photo, every video—would become the property of Facebook, your own copyright be damned. The public fury was specific and angry enough that Facebook backed down, but I deleted all my own content because Facebook hinted they might still steal your content some day (one of the things I’d posted was my podcast show art, and there ain’t no way in hell I’m letting them have that).

Then recently a friend told me about receiving an email asking to link various email addresses together—personal, work, others, all listed out—to make it “easier” to interact with Facebook. Trouble is, my friend had never given those email addresses to Facebook or to the third party that now wanted to use them.

So, you’re thinking, it was a trojan or virus, right? Wrong: It was Facebook. What most people don’t know is that if ANY of your friends use one of those stupid applications like “What kind of cheese are you?” they give access to that application not only for their own private information, they give access to the private information of everyone they’re friends with.

And that’s the problem with Facebook: There are no options, there is no control. I can’t control who sees my profile (much of which is public with no other choice); I can’t be sure they won’t steal the rights to any photos I might post; There’s also far too much information that can’t be restricted to friends only.

So, over the weekend I spent an hour or so laboriously going through the privacy settings and setting them to the highest possible settings: Visible to me only. I deleted all my schools, my hometown, hid my birthday completely, my relationship status—in short, everything that makes the profile about me. And I’m not done: There are a few things I left temporarily visible to “friends only” so I can explain what I’m up to, but eventually I’ll reset many of those, too. I also deleted the link to Facebook among my links on this blog.

Why not quit Facebook altogether? Because at the moment, there’s no alternative—which is precisely why Facebook gets away with their contempt for their members (yes, MySpace still exists, but it’s mostly musicians now and membership numbers have declined sharply since Rupert Murdoch bought it).

Ryan Singel’s Wired article talked about the need for an open, distributed alternative and proposes a way that might work. One approach along those lines is being developed under the name Diaspora, which calls itself “the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network”. Whatever emerges as the alternative will probably be something like that.

Which brings this back to privacy. People ought to have a reasonable expectation of privacy at most times—even on the Internet. On Facebook or its eventual descendants, that means you should be able to restrict everything to people you actually know, and not have it open to the world; it means your content should be unquestionably your content, and you should have complete control over who can see or use it; it means that if you “Like” something, you don’t have to tell everyone in the world about it. In other words, the user should have control over their own information and online identity, not a company with a complete disregard for privacy.

In the Internet Age, it’s far too easy to unwittingly surrender one’s privacy. Facebook’s great sin is that it has forced members to do so by default, while making it impossible to have any real control over one’s privacy.

And that’s why I’m slowly closing the Facebook.