NOTE: The articles mentioned in my blog is for educational purpose only. I am not responsible for any damaged caused by you.

Thursday, 20 October 2011

Top 10 Reason Everyone Should Destroy Their Facebook Account

0 comments
Here are top 10 reason why everyone should destroy/delete their Account on Facebook.

Facebook’s Terms Of Service are completely one-sided.
Facebook’s Terms Of Service state that not only do they own your data (section 2.1), but if you don’t keep it up to date and accurate (section 4.6), they can terminate your account (section 14).


Facebook’s CEO has a documented history of unethical behavior.
From the very beginning of Facebook’s existence, there are questions about Zuckerberg’s ethics. According to BusinessInsider.com, he used Facebook user data to guess email passwords and read personal email in order to discredit his rivals. However, These allegations are unproven and somewhat dated. They’re particularly compelling given that Facebook chose to fork over $65M to settle a related lawsuit alleging that Zuckerberg had actually stolen the idea for Facebook.

Facebook has flat out declared war on privacy.
Founder and CEO of Facebook, in defense of Facebook’s privacy changes last January: “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.” More recently, in introducing the Open Graph API: “… the default is now social.” Essentially, this means Facebook not only wants to know everything about you, and own that data, but to make it available to everybody.
Facebook is pulling a classic bait-and-switch.
At the same time that they’re telling developers how to access your data with new APIs, they are relatively quiet about explaining the implications of that to members. Bait-and-switch means that Facebook gets you to share information that you might not otherwise share, and then they make it publicly available. Since they are in the business of monetizing information about you for advertising purposes, this amounts to tricking their users into giving advertisers information about themselves.
Facebook is a bully.
When Pete Warden demonstrated just how this bait-and-switch works (by crawling all the data that Facebook’s privacy settings changes had inadvertently made public) they sued him. So why sue an independent software developer and fledgling entrepreneur for making data publicly available when you’re actually already planning to do that yourself? Their real agenda is pretty clear: they don’t want their membership to know how much data is really available.
Even your private data is shared with applications.
At this point, all your data is shared with applications that you install. Which means now you’re not only trusting Facebook, but the application developers, too, many of whom are too small to worry much about keeping your data secure.
Facebook is not technically competent enough to be trusted.
Even if we weren’t talking about ethical issues here, I can’t trust Facebook’s technical competence to make sure my data isn’t hijacked. For example, their recent introduction of their “Like” button makes it rather easy for spammers to gain access to my feed and spam my social network.
Facebook makes it incredibly difficult to truly delete your account.
It’s pretty tricky to really delete your account. They make no promises about deleting your data and every application you’ve used may keep it as well. On top of that, account deletion is incredibly (and intentionally) confusing. When you go to your account settings, you’re given an option to deactivate your account, which turns out not to be the same thing as deleting it. Deactivating means you can still be tagged in photos and be spammed by Facebook. Finally, the moment you log back in, you’re back like nothing ever happened! In fact, it’s really not much different from not logging in for awhile. To actually delete your account, you have to find a link buried in the on-line help. Basically, Facebook is trying to trick their users into allowing them to keep their data even after they’ve “deleted” their account.
Facebook doesn’t support the Open Web.
The so-called Open Graph API is named so as to disguise its fundamentally closed nature. It’s bad enough that the idea here is that we all pitch in and make it easier than ever to help Facebook collect more data about you. It’s bad enough that most consumers will have no idea that this data is basically public. It’s bad enough that they claim to own this data and are aiming to be the one source for accessing it. But then they are disingenuous enough to call it “open,” when, in fact, it is completely proprietary to Facebook. You can’t use this feature unless you’re on Facebook.
The Facebook itself sucks.
Between the farms and the mafia wars and the “top news” and the myriad privacy settings and the annoying ads and the thousands upon thousands of crappy applications, Facebook is almost completely useless. Yes, I could probably customize it better, but the navigation is ridiculous, so I don’t bother. And, yet, somehow, I can’t even change colors or apply themes or do anything to make my page look personalized. Let’s not even get into how slowly your feed page loads. Basically, at this point, Facebook is more annoying than anything else.

Leave a Reply