Saturday, May 29, 2010

May 31 is quit Facebook day meant for individuals to delete their Facebook accounts

Quit Facebook Day is May 31. "How do I delete my Facebook account" has recently been a top search on Google. Internet privacy issues are coming to a head as some of the hundreds of millions of users Facebook has attracted are turning against the social networking site in protest. Once accessible only to friends and networks, Facebook changed default privacy setting to allow the internet at large access to personal info in April.

Source for this article: Quit Facebook Day wants users to delete Facebook accounts May 31

Privacy troubles with Facebook

Monday, Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg sought to assure all of the public with an op-ed article within the Washington Post that Facebook would learn and adapt to accommodate any Internet privacy concerns. Facebook’s privacy difficulties, such as the “How do I delete my Facebook account” movement and also the Quit Facebook Day were both inspired by a recent practice started by Facebook to make fast cash on the vast database of user information it has collected. Advertising companies were given info that could be used to look up individual profiles, which, depending on the site and also the data a user has made public, contain such things as a person’s real name, age, hometown and occupation. Several large advertising companies identified by the Wall Street Journal are receiving the data, including Google Inc.’s DoubleClick and Yahoo Inc.’s Right Media.

Internet privacy issues

Internet privacy issues are now much harder to ignore since a lot more than 400 million Facebook users have accounts with default privacy settings that allow every little thing but contact data and birthdays to be accessed by anyone. Several times, Facebook users are confused by how Facebook changes what qualifies as personal information. Quit Facebook Day questions Facebook’s intentions and the fairness of the choices it gives its users. Individuals wanting to know how do I delete my Facebook account believe Facebook doesn’t respect users or their personal information.

Quitting Facebook addiction

Those who began Quit Facebook Day certainly have a lot of work. Quitfacebook.com acknowledges that whether or not it is easy to delete your Facebook account, quitting Facebook addictions are going to be much harder than that. Quit Facebook Day says that Facebook is “engaging, enjoyable and quite frankly, addictive.”. They say quitting Facebook can be as hard as quitting smoking. Perhaps most importantly, they say:

“the way to quit Facebook is not to start a group on Facebook about leaving Facebook.”

Internet privacy issues

Quit Facebook Day is May 31, but Future Tense reports that deciding to quit Facebook is a lot simpler than quitting. Users can search through menus until they then come upon a link to deactivate their account but all of a sudden, they’re confronted by pictures of people they have friended, along with messages from Facebook about how much they'll miss them. After deactivating, event invitations and messages nevertheless come through. You have to do a few more steps to delete the account for good. The user will lose all the data, but Facebook won’t. This information will likely be used by them for data mining.

Getting a privacy loophole fixed

In response to internet privacy issues and Facebook's privacy problem, Zuckerberg explained that if individuals were to share a lot more, the world would be a lot more connected. The Washington Post reports that Facebook said last week that it is fixing a privacy loophole that allowed advertisers to access user identification and potentially other information. Zuckerberg pledged to create a simpler way to control user details. In the coming weeks, Facebook will add privacy controls that are much simpler to use and provide an easy way to turn off all third-party services.



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