Thinking of deleting your Facebook account? This is the question my colleague Cristina Costa is asking herself on the University of Salford’s post-graduate research team blog.
As far as I am concerned, I am in no way thinking of closing my Facebook account … for I have already done this about ten days ago. One needs to draw a line somewhere and I feel Facebook has crossed it one time too many.
The lack of respect for his users which Facebook has recently showed for his users is well illustrated by Matt McKeon who has produced a most remarquable visualisation of The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook, which shows the changes in default profile settings betwwen 2005, 2006, 2007, Novembre 2009, Decembre 2009, and April 2010, which I have come accross thanks to a this post on the always excellentVizthink blog.
This was not the first time I was trying to close my Facebook account, but one must say that FB makes it extremely difficult to do it. This was incidently one the things which I found most irritating with Facebook, but the list is long. The instructions available on Wiki How on How to Permanently Delete a Facebook Account, have allowed me to do it, as it was not obvious at all.
This is of course only a personal choice and anyone is free to do what he or she feels like doing.
CC Frances Bell. Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic
Frances Bell, one of our colleagues at the University of Salford, has chosen to remain on Facebook, but has launched with Peter Kawalek a protest campaign, which is a good example of hacktivism. She explains how to go about it in her post No face or no Facebook privacy meme, which is accompanied with a photo on which she is masking her face. It is a matter of
- Taking a picture of yourself that represents your rejection of Facebook privacy management
- Uploading to Facebook and make your profile picture
- Circulating to your friends (via feed, message, Twitter, etc.)
- Use the hashtag #privacymemee #privacymeme
This is such an excellent idea and it is a real shame that this campaign has not gone viral.
How about you? What attitude have you adopted?
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