Jason Clarke did it first, and now I feel the time has come for me to say goodbye to Facebook.
For me, it started getting creepy when I kept getting status updates from people who are not even my friends, and who have no idea they're broadcasting their status to "friends of friends".
Sure, you can control that through the privacy settings. But how many people actually know all 170 privacy settings?
There's a huge difference between reading bad things about a company, and witnessing it yourself in the UI you use every day. And that's where it crosses the line for me. I mean, whenever a company does well (and Facebook is doing very well), there are detractors crying out about how evil it all is. Usually, this is just a knee-jerk response to a company growing large. I think that on some basic level, some people just don't like large, successful anything.
But today's Facebook actually has a split personality; on the one hand, it puts on a super-friendly, smiley-happy face for newcomers and non-geeks. On the other hand, to prevent your personal information from getting all over the place, you need to be a super-educated and "paranoid" geek.
Since when did privacy become "for geeks only"?
And it's also a matter of trust; Facebook has an interesting habit of opting users in to all sorts of new schemes. I suddenly found out I was included in their information sharing scheme with other sites. I just randomly discovered this. I'm just plain sick and tired of having to watch over Facebook's shoulder every day, trying to figure out what they added or changed to make my information more broadly available. Learning Facebook Application Development: A step-by-step tutorial for creating custom Facebook applications using the Facebook platform and PHP
The bottom line is that it's just not worth it, at least for me. Goodbye, Facebook.
For me, it started getting creepy when I kept getting status updates from people who are not even my friends, and who have no idea they're broadcasting their status to "friends of friends".
Sure, you can control that through the privacy settings. But how many people actually know all 170 privacy settings?
There's a huge difference between reading bad things about a company, and witnessing it yourself in the UI you use every day. And that's where it crosses the line for me. I mean, whenever a company does well (and Facebook is doing very well), there are detractors crying out about how evil it all is. Usually, this is just a knee-jerk response to a company growing large. I think that on some basic level, some people just don't like large, successful anything.
But today's Facebook actually has a split personality; on the one hand, it puts on a super-friendly, smiley-happy face for newcomers and non-geeks. On the other hand, to prevent your personal information from getting all over the place, you need to be a super-educated and "paranoid" geek.
Since when did privacy become "for geeks only"?
And it's also a matter of trust; Facebook has an interesting habit of opting users in to all sorts of new schemes. I suddenly found out I was included in their information sharing scheme with other sites. I just randomly discovered this. I'm just plain sick and tired of having to watch over Facebook's shoulder every day, trying to figure out what they added or changed to make my information more broadly available. Learning Facebook Application Development: A step-by-step tutorial for creating custom Facebook applications using the Facebook platform and PHP
The bottom line is that it's just not worth it, at least for me. Goodbye, Facebook.
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