Why I'm not on Facebook
I joined Facebook in late 2004 because... well, everyone else was doing it. I was a sophomore and CMU was one of the first universities targeted in Facebook's early aggressive expansion.
For many years my daily usage was north of Facebook's sitewide average of 55 minutes per user per day. In mid-2010, I started cutting back — first by no longer reading the newsfeed, then through rampant defriending — until ultimately deactivating deleting my account in early November. I did so because:
I can't control my personal information on Facebook. Privacy controls are continuously eliminated for increasingly more profile data1. Wide swaths of your personal information are shared anytime you use Facebook Connect with a third party. Your friends, without your knowledge or consent, can share your information should they connect with a third party. Contrast this with my own website, where I control the entire experience, and with Twitter, where there's much less personal data to reveal and the privacy controls are much simpler.
I don't trust Facebook or its CEO. Zuckerberg is on the record calling his users "dumb fucks" for entrusting their data to him. Facebook is at its core an advertising company and you, the Facebook user, are not its customer — you are its product. Your personal data will be bought and sold as Facebook pleases2. Facebook is not an environment in which I feel comfortable sharing because I'm never sure who has access to my information under what circumstances, to say nothing of data retention.
Facebook's new "Places" app is a great case study. You can check yourself in anywhere, tag your friends (whether they're there or not), and see where others are checking in. But I want to use Places to meet up with people, to organize events, to see where my friends' favorite places are. It's just not very good for that. And it reeks of poor design — enough people checking in at your house will force it to be a public location, and there is no process to privatize it again. Places seems like a better deal for advertisers and retailers than it does for me or my friends. It feels scummy.
I don't find Facebook useful. Simple social planning was probably the main reason I joined Facebook in the first place, and I still find their photo and event apps to be among the best-executed parts of the site. But the Farmvilles, the quiz apps, the ads, the constant droning drudgery of someone friending someone you don't know and relationship statuses and "Buddy McZynga needs your help to complete their3 castle!" — where is the value? Worse, it's boring. And it seems to be an increasingly large part of the site experience.
I haven't missed anything about Facebook. And I doubt any of my 560 "friends" noticed I'm gone.
1 Facebook Privacy Policy circa December 2009: "Certain categories of information such as your name, profile photo, list of friends and pages you are a fan of, gender, geographic region, and networks you belong to are considered publicly available to everyone, including Facebook-enhanced applications, and therefore do not have privacy settings." ↩
2 The EFF's timeline of quotes from Facebook's Privacy Policy as it changed over the years is well worth a look. ↩
3 Our generation's greatest tragedy unfolds before our eyes. How many of your gender-identifying friends have had their possessives rendered in your newsfeed as "their"? ↩
