Since just about everyone I know is now on Facebook (there are only 2 people I know who refuse to make a Facebook account), there will be a lot of questions why I decided to delete my account. As I posted before, Jonas Jacek’s post Why is Facebook bad? is quite good at summing up the reasons to delete your Facebook account. I’ll explain a bit further what are the main reasons for me to delete my FB account.
Probably the most important reason for deleting my Facebook account is the way Facebook treats my data, my posts, my photos and videos. I am a believer in copyleft, and as far as I know Zuckerberg isn’t. This wouldn’t be a problem was it not for Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities: For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (“IP content”), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (“IP License”). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it. Since I cannot control who shares my photos and videos, I cannot be sure I’ll be able to reclaim the “IP License” i gave Facebook. A license I didn’t really want to give them in the first place. At least I deleted all the photos and videos i uploaded to Facebook before deleting my account.
While Facebook is particularly bad since it has so much info on me, most reasons for deleting my Facebook account also apply to other commercial social media. For me the fact that it’s a centralized social network, run by one company alone is a big problem. Decentralization is for me the future of technology and as a result hopefully society. A lot of interesting technologies, like StatusNet, Diaspora, Bitcoin, etc. to me are showing the way.
Another big no-no is trusting a corporation with my data. Remember that “if you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold”. To Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Linkedin, etc. you are just a product and they won’t think twice before deleting your account or some or all of your content or giving it to a third party. You aren’t just a product in theory, but effectively being sold all the time.
That is why I not only deleted my Facebook account, but also my accounts on Delicious and Plaxo, and pretty soon will do the same with my Twitter, Linkedin, Google, Yahoo, MySpace and any other social media account. The ones i’ll be keeping and using a lot more are Identi.ca, Freelish.us and Diaspora decentralized, open source, non commercially hosted sites.
Leave a Reply