Mimeographs from the Future

That’s it. After all the idiocy, incom­pe­tence, mali­cious­ness and gen­eral sus­pi­cious behav­ior at Face­book, I’ve deleted my account. You too can delete yours.

First, it’s impor­tant to under­stand there’s a dif­fer­ence between “sus­pend­ing” your account and actu­ally delet­ing it. The first will sud­denly re-activate if you log back in, or do any­thing that might cause an appli­ca­tion to acti­vate it again. The sec­ond actu­ally deletes it, although you have to wait 14 days before it takes effect. If you log in at any point dur­ing that 14 days, your account is active again.

The past few months have demon­strated that only one of the two things can be true:

1. Face­book is run by epi­cally incom­pe­tent man­age­ment, devel­op­ers and admin­is­tra­tors who haven’t the slight­est clue how to deal with pri­vacy, and have been liv­ing in a cave for about 20 years.
2. Face­book is run by epi­cally evil man­age­ment that is intent on destroy­ing your pri­vacy for their finan­cial gain at any cost and will couch it all in “hon­est mis­takes” and apolo­gies, but con­tinue to rip it down.

You can decide which is worse, but the real­ity it is one of the two. The Elec­tronic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion has posted some excel­lent information:

• Six things you need to know about Face­book Connections
• A handy Facebook-to-English translator
• Facebook’s erod­ing pri­vacy pol­icy: a timeline

Are you ready? Go delete your Face­book account. If you do it “cor­rectly”, you should receive an email that looks like this:

Hi LoserWhoWantsToDeleteTheirAccount,

We have received a request to per­ma­nently delete your account. Your account has been deac­ti­vated from the site and will be per­ma­nently deleted within 14 days.

If you did not request to per­ma­nently delete your account, fol­low this link to can­cel this request:

http://www.facebook.com/account_delete.php

Thanks,
The Face­book Team

What are you wait­ing for?

Tagged: evil, facebook, privacy