Permanently DELETE Your Facebook Account

CAUTION: This article uses bad language, when quoting the founder of Facebook. I normally never use such words. I felt it was necessary in this case. I think my readers are mature enough to understand.

FILE UNDER: Deceptive Business Practices / User Retaliation.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg calls users "dumb fucks" for voluntarily submitting personal data on their accounts.

He happily exploits the users by changing the Facebook privacy policy -- without informing users of the change.

And by making it necessary to Opt Out, rather than Opt In. Sharing your personal data, in other words, is by default. You have to somehow know what's going on behind your back, then go change your account's settings to thwart the silent exploitation.

Since Facebook users often give out way too much personal data, like the town where they were born, their birthday date/month/year, their mother's maiden name, the name of their pet cat, etc., criminals can harvest that information, guess your passwords, and do other things to commit Identity Theft.

It's obvious now: to preserve User Rights & Dignity, you must Delete your Facebook account and spread negative buzz about Facebook on all your social networks.

Read:

* The Consumerist "We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever"

* Wall Street Journal "Looking to Delete Your Facebook Account? You're Not Alone"

* Rachel Levy "Am I Being Naive About Facebook?" (see my comments there)

* Business Insider's "10 Reasons to Delete Your Facebook Account"

* CNET Facebook backlash

* Gizmodo "Top 10 Reasons You Should Quit Facebook"

* ReadWriteWeb "Quit Facebook Day" website

* Gawker "Facebook's Great Betrayal"

* Ars Technica "Facebook Caught Sharing Secret User Data with Advertisers"

* INC. Magazine "Mark Zuckerberg's Privacy Settings"

* Wikipedia "List of Social Networking Sites"

* Diaspora, the anti-Facebook social network of NYU students

* AppStorm "6 Alternatives to Facebook"

* PC World "Kill Your Facebook Page".

The New York Times explains the ridiculous and abnormal Opt Out aspect of Facebook user privacy...which is called Instant Personalization, but is really Instant Exploitation.

Facebook's arrogant attitude toward users and their privacy is nothing new. Wired ran an article about Facebook privacy and backlash, back in December 2009. At that time, Facebook was being criticized for a rash of Facebook phishing attacks on users, as Fast Company reported.

At first, on Twitter, I called for a mutiny of Facebook users. I suggested that they change all the information in their profiles to mis-identify their interests, school, job, hometown, hobbies, age, sex, etc. This is called Data Scrambling, a form of blogocombat that I have perfected for extreme cases of corporate exploitation.

Then I recommended setting up multiple false accounts, to flood Facebook with bogus profiles of unreal people. My reasoning was that once advertisers heard that the Facebook user data was poisoned, they would refuse to advertise on Facebook.

Someone commenting on ReadWriteWeb has done that: he set up a false account with bad information. See Winston's comment #19 on the post "More Web Industry Leaders Quit Facebook".

Now my advice is to DELETE your Facebook account -- permanently.

Not "DEACTIVATE". That just makes your account dormant, while retaining all your personal data and keeping it available to advertisers who want to spam you or persuade you to buy their products.

Why fight deceptive business practices with deceptive user data? That would be imitating the oppressor. But deleting your account permanently, now that's a more noble and effective way to fight!

PERMANENTLY DELETE your Facebook account, and strike a blow against greed and arrogance.

If you don't need an explanation of Delete vs. Deactivate, and you're sure you want to permanently delete your Facebook account now, go to this link: Delete My Facebook Account.

Here's the HTML code of that link:

http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account


You must not log into your Facebook account for 14 days if you want to complete the delete process. I suggest you remove Facebook from your brower's bookmarks (favorites). If you accidentally log into your account, you'll Reactivate it, and have to start all over again.

Sign the MoveOn.org petition against Facebook invasions and exploitation of personal data.

Hey Zuckerberg!

Who's the dumb one now?






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