2008 Woodie Awards
Breaking up with Facebook
Mike Maio
Issue date: 3/26/08 Section: Media & Entertainment
This may go down as one of the worst predictions in the history of student media at Vanderbilt, but I think Facebook may have recently hit an inflection point in its fortunes. Facebook manages to really piss off its users at least once a year - like when it let high school students join, or when the news feed debuted. Usually people complain loudly for a while and then after about a week learn to accept their powerlessness. But I think the company's decision last fall to introduce the invasive Beacon advertising feature - you know, the stupid thing that tells all your friends via their news feeds that you bought "Drillbit Taylor" tickets from Fandango - marked a turning point.
The unveiling of Beacon incited an open riot among users, led by MoveOn.org, and eventually Facebook had to scale back some of the more egregiously intrusive aspects of the new feature. Since then, it's been hard to escape the sense that Facebook has suffered a lasting hit to its credibility. Over the past several months, there has been a steady trickle of reports in news outlets like the New York Times and The Guardian about the unsettling extent of the site's data mining operation. Mark Zuckerberg's continuing role as the youthful, non-threatening avatar of Facebook notwithstanding, the site is more and more beginning to resemble just another faceless company trying to sell crap to us.
There are plenty of reasons to be on Facebook, like Scrabulous, but I recently decided to delete my account because I finally read their privacy policy and it sort of creeped me out. Plus, since I think there's a decent chance Facebook will go from being Mac to being PC within a couple of years, I'll be able to amass a ton of indie cred points when I'm able to say that I got off of Facebook before everyone else was doing it.
It turns out that isn't so easy, though.
It's one thing to "deactivate" your account, but actually deleting it is a much bigger enchilada. When you deactivate your account, all of your profile information is kept intact, and all you have to do to reactivate your account is log in to Facebook again like normal. Also, unless you opt out, Facebook will still spam your email with your friends' invitations to groups advocating causes you don't care about. In short, nothing really changes.
The unveiling of Beacon incited an open riot among users, led by MoveOn.org, and eventually Facebook had to scale back some of the more egregiously intrusive aspects of the new feature. Since then, it's been hard to escape the sense that Facebook has suffered a lasting hit to its credibility. Over the past several months, there has been a steady trickle of reports in news outlets like the New York Times and The Guardian about the unsettling extent of the site's data mining operation. Mark Zuckerberg's continuing role as the youthful, non-threatening avatar of Facebook notwithstanding, the site is more and more beginning to resemble just another faceless company trying to sell crap to us.
There are plenty of reasons to be on Facebook, like Scrabulous, but I recently decided to delete my account because I finally read their privacy policy and it sort of creeped me out. Plus, since I think there's a decent chance Facebook will go from being Mac to being PC within a couple of years, I'll be able to amass a ton of indie cred points when I'm able to say that I got off of Facebook before everyone else was doing it.
It turns out that isn't so easy, though.
It's one thing to "deactivate" your account, but actually deleting it is a much bigger enchilada. When you deactivate your account, all of your profile information is kept intact, and all you have to do to reactivate your account is log in to Facebook again like normal. Also, unless you opt out, Facebook will still spam your email with your friends' invitations to groups advocating causes you don't care about. In short, nothing really changes.
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