Over the past few weeks I’ve become increasingly concerned about Facebook. I even considered deleting my account (idea I haven’t really discarded), but the amount of people I’m going to lose contact with is making me hesitate.

So, why the concern? I’m glad you asked. You can get a rough idea by reading these articles:

After reading all that, for me it’s pretty clear that Facebook doesn’t give a flying fuck about your privacy. Actually, even Zuckerberg presumably said so. That is for me the big issue: the exact problems we might have now, the current workarounds, the fact that you now have this or that option to counter some of the automatic changes by Facebook… is all irrelevant. To elaborate a bit:

  1. Facebook started as a much more “private” space in which you only shared information with your friends. This has radically changed, and I somehow find it disrespectful toward their users. We’re not talking about evolution here, but of pretty big “philosophical” changes. This is not what I signed up for.
  2. It has happened several times that Facebook has changed your privacy settings on updates. Some of those changes can’t even be countered, or it’s fairly hard to do so. That pisses me off.
  3. The “Facebook messing with your privacy settings” will no doubt happen again. So now, instead of using/enjoying the service, I have to fight against it.

So the current situation is that I know that Facebook can, at any moment, change something I don’t want it to, and I’ll have to read a bunch of articles to understand the threat and counter it. I don’t want to review my privacy settings from time to time “just in case”. I don’t want to wonder if my data is available to more people I’d like it to. I don’t see the point in using a service that is designed to do the opposite of what I want. And that makes me wonder why do I bother at all. Or if I want to support a company or service that behaves like that.