ICT Article Summary 2 - 10 Reasons to Delete Your Facebook Account

Beside a badly taken picture of the top half of Mark Zuckerburg’s head is a statement encouraging people to delete their Facebook accounts after the author has done the same because he thinks Facebook is unethical but also because he’s starting up his own Social Network and he wants to branch away from Facebook (This is fair warning that these reasons are probably somewhat biased).

The Author then goes on to give 10 reasons (in descending order) why people should delete their Facebook account (in fairness to him none of these involve his new site). They are as follows:

10. One-Sided Terms of Service Agreement: Evidence is given including clauses detailing that inaccurate profile data can lead to account termination. Supposedly this is because Facebook sees its customers as “unpaid employees for crowd-sourcing ad-targeting data”.

9. Unethical Behaviour of CEO: Facebook has always had the question of how ethical Zuckerburg is overshadowing it. He has supposedly used Facebook’s user data to read rivals emails and discredit them. He also paid out millions in a suit over how he stole the original Facebook idea.

8. Facebook’s War on Privacy: Through reading articles with quotes from Zuckerburg the author has decided that: “Facebook not only wants to know everything about you, and own that data, but to make it available to everybody.” He also explains that this in itself is not unethical but the technique it uses is.

7. Facebook – Classic Bait-and-Switch: As they tell developers how to access your information they remain quiet on the implications of this to users. Facebooks gets you to share personal information and then make it public. “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.” This is why Facebook is worse then Twitter.

6. FB the Bully: They sued Pete Warden (software developer) for showing how their Bait-and-Switch worked as he made data publicly available. However pretty soon after they did the same thing themselves. “Their real agenda is pretty clear: they don't want their membership to know how much data is really available.”

5. Sharing Private Data in Applications: When you install an App the App developers instantly have access to all your information so your data should now be considered completely public

4. FB – Not Technically Competent Enough: Facebook is not currently competent enough technically to stop a user’s data from being hijacked. Their “Like” button is a gateway for spammers, for example. According to the Author: “They either don't care too much about your privacy or don't really have very good engineers, or perhaps both.”

3. FB – Account Deleting Difficulties: When you delete your account they don’t fully delete all your data and any Apps you have still have it aswell. Deleting your account is also confusing as the easiest part is “deactivating” your account which is not the same as if you log back in it’s as if you never left. To actually delete your account you must sift through all the online help to find a link so in essence, Facebook is tricking people to keep their data

2. FB Doesn’t Support Open Web: This is us pitching in to allow Facebook to collect more data about us and aiming for Facebook to be the one source that has access to it. They also call it “Open” a misnomer as only those with a Facebook account in the first place can have access to it as it is completely proprietary to Facebook.

1. “The Facebook Application Itself Sucks”: With it’s abundance of useless gimmicky Apps, ad companys that even with access to our personal information still don’t give us proper ads (the Author illustrates this by saying most of his ads are for dating sites because his status is single), the customisation navigation is too ridiculous to bother and the feed page loads extremely slowly.

The Author concludes the article by stating that Facebook is trying to monopolize the Web by adding every feature of it’s competitors. He thinks Facebook is doing whatever it wants within the confines of the law. But we don’t have to put up with it as Facebook could be forgotten about (as Myspace has been). “Facebook isn't the only game in town. I don't like their application nor how they do business and so I've made my choice to use other providers. And so can you.”

Here's the link if you would like to read the full article on the BusinessInsider website:

www.businessinsider.com/10-reasons-to-delete-your-facebook-account-2010-5

Beany Out!!!!