I’ve had several people ask me why I’ve left Facebook over the past few weeks, so I thought I might as well just summarize it right here¸that way if anyone in the future asks why I left, I can simply point them here and call it a day.
The main reason I left Facebook is because I didn’t feel safe. Now many of you are thinking that this is related to privacy issues, it is not. If I was worried about ‘privacy’ in that sense of the word, I wouldn’t be running a blog, under a domain name which directly correlates to my own name, and use it as a pseudo journal. I signed up for Facebook realizing everything I put into it would be completely public, and never changed my position. In fact, I originally signed up with a pseudonym Kakistocracy Joe (my usual nick at the time, TBOL3((.)14), or Mr. Pi wouldn’t work), however, I rapidly switched to using my actual name after realizing that I couldn’t keep it a secret anyway, and it just made life harder, so I switched my Facebook name to my actual name, my twitter name to my actual name (well, actually, I just created a new account, oddly enough the old account still gets a bunch of followers), and created this blog, originally on wordpress.com with the domain of leifandersen.wordpress.com. As such, everything I’ve ever put on Facebook I try to treat as if anyone in the world could see.
The reason I didn’t feel safe was due to their latest feature (at least as of mid August), which is called places. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t generally mind services that allow you to public your geographical coordinates, and if that’s all it was, I would have been fine. However, they also had the feature which allows other people to tag your current location. I am afraid that someone will be at a place they shouldn’t be, and they’ll tag me as being with them (when I’m not), than in a court of law, that will be used as evidence against me when it shouldn’t have been. Also, to make matters worse, Facebook doesn’t let you have the ability to ‘untag’ your location, although you can request to have it be removed. Yes, it is still possible for someone to ‘tag’ me, or for other forms of false evidence to come up incriminating me for something I didn’t do, but this is a start for a more secure environment.
For those of you who say I can just turn that feature off, I know I can. To be honest, if that was the only issue, than I would have just turned off that feature and continued on with my life. However, Facebook has a reputation for creating new ‘features’ with very little security in mind. True, as I said, I generally opt most things to be public, but that doesn’t mean I want a live webcast of everything I do following me 24/7, published on the internet. Thus, I’m also worried that Facebook will release another feature in the near future that will compromise my security, and not bother to make much noise about it, or I’ll be to busy to notice. As such, until I get the time to deal with it, I’ve deactivated my account. Other things such as it being a time sink, as well as it being harmful to other relationships helped in this decision as well.
Also, it wasn’t just a large publicity stunt. It seems like several large people on the internet such as Jason Calacanis left Facebook only as a publicity stunt, as he never really left Facebook. Even Leo Laporte who seemed to have been somewhat honest in leaving Facebook came back a few days ago. My Facebook profile isn’t deleted per say, it’s still in there, it’s only deactivated, and it will remain that way until such a time that I see fit to rejoin it.
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Actually, I agree with you, the 4 is a step up from the 3G. 