Month: July 2011

Dead to my Face(book)

This has been pending for months, as more information comes out about how Facebook.com is selling me and my info up the river to its marketers; as more Facebook privacy concerns come to light; as more annoying, unsolicited emails flood my inbox from Facebook services i never signed up for.

What pushed it over the edge tonight was three things:

  1. Carelessly and inadvertently missing a writers group meeting i was looking forward to, spending the time instead in front of a computer, checking (among other things) my Facebook account.
  2. This Mashable.com post — Users for Sale: Has Digital Illiteracy Turned Us Into Social Commodities? — making quite clear to me what i’ve known all along about whose interest Facebook is really serving.
  3. The realization that “socializing” — indeed, “living” — on-line is not healthy for me, and it’s time to back out and spend a little a lot more time and attention on the old way of doing things, i.e. face-to-face, or at least with my “content” not mediated and data-mined by a massive corporation.

So at about 10:40 p.m. tonight i impulsively began deleting my Facebook account. Continue reading “Dead to my Face(book)”