34,000 quit Facebook in protest

 

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Posted on 1 Jun 2010 at 16:49

You might have missed it, but yesterday, May the 31st, was Quit Facebook Day. According to the oganisers' website, 34,108 people committed to quit, although solid figures on how many went through with this are not available.

Perhaps you've lost a friend or two from your collection. Maybe you didn't notice until you just went and looked. More likely, though, is that no one you know left. With an estimated 400 million Facebook users, 34,000 or so people are just a drop in the ocean – around 0.0085 per cent of the total number of users, in fact.

A quick Twitter search shows people around the world declaring their support, but the numbers aren't overwhelming.

We spoke to anti-malware expert Andrew Lee, CTO of K7 Computing, who deleted his own Facebook account yesterday. His reasons for leaving the site are clearly defined.

"I’ve used FB to research the privacy issues that can arise from social networking, and don’t believe Facebook will ever change. It’s their business model - they don’t make money from subscribers, so they need to expose as much as possible to advertisers. That won't change, so I will make the change and simply remove myself - after all, I’m not paying for the service."

Lee also feels that the site is a massive time sink, noting that "one of the reasons FB works so well is that it’s personalized. On an internet forum, you don’t necessarily care if someone replies to your posts, but on a social networking site like Facebook, it feels rude to ignore them. You find yourself poised over your keyboard ready to reply to the most inane mutterings that your ‘friends’ post. That pressure, along with pointless junk posts, such as Farmville, makes it a very time-consuming operation. "

"Time and silence are two commodities that are of real value in research (and in extremely restricted supply) and with constant chatter and need to ‘interact’ we lose the most precious abilities, the abilities to think, consider, concentrate and produce work that is worthwhile and meaningful."

For Andrew Lee, quitting Facebook is an opportunity to make a clean break with the distractions of social networking sites, but others simply want to find to a social networking service that will take fewer liberties with their personal information.

If you want to leave Facebook yourself, there's an easy way to do it. Just visit the account deletion page and click submit. This will deactivate your account for two weeks and, if you don't use it in any way (including via third-party sites or applications), will then permanently delete it.

Despite all the controversy over Facebook's handling of its users' personal data, the vast majority of people will stick with the site. After all, all their friends are there. Facebook is also addictive, occasionally useful and provides numerous welcome opportunities for procrastination when you'd really rather not be working.

If you just want to cut down on some of the extraneous content in your Facebook news feed, you can install the F.B. Purity Greasemonkey script on most browsers. This provides a great deal of control over what you see on your main Facebook page.

However, no application can protect the information you choose to share. Facebook's privacy controls change frequently, so remember to keep an eye on them, but don't rely on them. Never share anything that you wouldn't be happy with the whole world knowing, whether it's your sexual preference, your feelings about your boss, or pictures of that amazing party you went to last weekend.

Author: Kat Orphanides