Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook – Facebook – Gizmodo. Facebook’s privacy problems are no secret by now. It seems like the powers behind the social networking platform are always changing things, modifying user privacy settings without ever really notifying their users about the changes (and making it fairly difficult and confusing to change if they do). There has been a great deal of discussion about privacy and security on Facebook, and it continues to be a controversial topic. The article linked above lists ten compelling reason why users my consider bailing out on Facebook.
My take on the issue is simple: I have never posted anything on my Facebook profile that I wouldn’t necessarily tell someone in the course of a social conversation. If there’s something I wouldn’t be comfortable with anyone knowing, it doesn’t go up on my profile. One can never assume than anything on the Internet is 100% secure, and this is especially true with third-party applications. Whenever you place your data in the hands of someone else, you have to assume that there will be security leaks. Facebook has never helped in this area by making user information more and more accessible to the world and the application developers available throughout the site.
I have considered closing my Facebook account on several occasions, but not because of privacy issues. Instead, it’s Facebook’s Terms of Service clause that states that they own all of your data that you upload to your profile. As someone who is very interested in protecting my own copyrights of photos, stories, etc., that I create, I find this clause both offensive and disturbing. It’s another reason why I’m careful about what I add to my profile and why I generally choose, instead, to display my intellectual property on my own website rather than on my Facebook profile.
While there are any number of compelling reasons why Facebook’s policies are worrisome, I’m not yet quite ready to give up on the social networking giant. But I also know that I don’t ever plan to provide them with personal information that I don’t want anyone knowing about.
