Throughout my experiences with Facebook (c.2008 - March 2013) a gradual amassment of 'red flags' eventually turned me to distrust many aspects and manners, despite the site's incredible convenience. A primary concern, and one that is of increasing national concern following recent NSA document leaks, was the lack of privacy that the website provided. The social profiles, which include the user's name, birthday, 'friends,' 'liked' pages, pictures, statuses, etc., expose a great amount of information in a place where access to that information is simple to achieve. Advertising companies feed off of this surface info, which is why, many times, user's will notice in sight ads tailored to their personality, interests, and age. For me, this invoked questions regarding which personal information is shared, and which personal information is forked over to third party companies. If the user-custom advertising wasn't alarming enough, the Facebook privacy policy once stated, "We may use the information about you that we collect from other sources, including but not limited to newspapers and internet sources such as blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of Facebook, to supplement your profile," meaning that an individual doesn't even have to be on the site for Facebook to log personal information.
Another qualm with the social networking behemoth is its use of the term 'friends.' In the minds of many active internet citizens, Facebook has redefined what 'friend' really is. Before I traversed what seemed to be King Minos's Labrinth in order to escape the vice grip of Facebook (a topic I will cover in the proceeding paragraphs), I had amassed a total of 900 'friends.,' many who attended my high school, and many who had not, and many who I had never even met face to face before in my life. The fact that 900 people, who a majority of which I had never shared a handshake with, had access to my thoughts, opinions, pictures, interactions, and social timeline was a little unsettling as I grew out of my childhood naivety. Although I never feared that these individuals would collect my information and use it in a way that harms my well being, the fact that they could helped convince me to give up my 900 virtual friends. Facebook makes it possible to achieve the feeling of knowing someone without actually 'knowing' someone. The added 'timeline' feature made searching for an individuals past pictures, comments, and statues as easy as a click of a mouse. Lives became virtual archives, indelibly organized upon the site's massive memory storage. What's more concerning than having 900 virtual 'friends' is the inability to remove these friends with ease. Trust me, I tried. Two laborious hours later, I had whittled down the list to 800. In an ideal world for Facebook, everyone on the planet would be friends with everyone, or at least that's how it appears. The bigger the social network, the larger the margin for profit.
The biggest red-flag over the many years of Facebooking would have to be the difficult of removing content from the site. Facebook, through an arduous and gilt ridden process, allows its users to deactivate their accounts but not actually remove account content from its servers. The site asked if I was sure I wanted to deactivate my account and even went so far as to say <paste friend name here> would miss me if I left. This was only to deactivate the account. Any slip up or accidental give in by signing in to the website would immediately reactivate the account. And this was only to deactivate the account. To 'permanently' remove my profile I had to fill out a form with the reasons for my departure, which was then reviewed by Facebook. If a user wants to remove all personal information from the site's servers, one must individually delete each piece of information, a process that could be impossible in one lifetime for some individuals. A New York Times article discussed that emails and private user data remain on Facebook's servers indefinitely.
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These qualities, overtime, convinced me to let go of Facebook's convenient capabilities and 'delete' my account and so far, the results have been rather satisfying. I no longer use Facebook as an excuse to take a break from school work, or as a major means of staying in touch with friends. The transition was difficult at first (addiction?) but overtime, I don't regret leaving the site, especially after learning that Facebook now uses face recognition software to tag pictures. It only makes me wonder what could be next.
-Andrew M.
I really commend you for actually having the confidence and persistence to go through the arborous process of going and deleting your account. It seems that social networking has become a large part of our society, the need to "Friend" everyone that you meet a norm, even if you have only talked to that person once and probably never will again. In addition, not being part of the social networking frenzy seems to present the idea of a social stigma; if you aren't on facebook, people judge you, see you as weird, etc. The fact that Facebook actually puts in an effort to prevent you from leaving just further shows how much people see social media as a necessity and as a way of life. Well at least that's how society presents it to be. Because of this, the risk of being tracked and creating a larger digital footprint is even larger.
ReplyDeleteI congratulate you on your removal of Facebook. It is something I have not done, but wish I could. The closest I could get was a ritualistic removal of friends (under 400 so far) every few months or so. Unfortunately I do find that sometimes, people have become so engrained in the Events and Pages system, that I have found times where I literally only know about something because of Facebook, or from a FB event invite. This is the biggest mental roadblock in my leaving Facebook.
ReplyDeleteIn response to Bishop, I feel the same way about the Events and Pages system. Several times I have only known about events through Facebook invitations. With that said, so many large scale companies are now using Facebook as a marketing tool. The last two sentences of this comment are among the very few reasons that I do not see myself deleting Facebook in the near future.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I don't really worry about the privacy issue with Facebook because I am very conservative with what I post on the site and I know some others who feel the same. I think the privacy situation varies from person to person.