Goodbye, Facebook. I Hate You.


Facebook.

If you know me at all, you know that I loathe Facebook. I had an account in 2005 or 2006 when some people I went to college with told me that I just HAD to sign up, that it was so fun and addicting. I ended up deleting that account later that day (but, a Facebook account is never deleted, I was actually able to sign into it again just last month).

I resisted signing up for another account for years because of all of the shady privacy things that I’ve heard about them. In 2010, I caved as I was searching for a job. I was looking in the marketing field, and how could I land a job in marketing with out a lousy Facebook account?

I kept it going, and actually used it for some time. I connected services like Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare and others, before removing all traces of those services from my account.

For a while it seemed like a week didn’t go by where there wasn’t a story about how Facebook was doing shifty things, tracking you online, uploading and storing your cellphone address book to your account, deceptive account settings that led people to give away information that they probably would have resisted giving and so on.

After Facebook bought Instagram (which was the worst news I could have heard from an app that I love so much) I immediately disabled location services for the app. I didn’t want Facebook to know where I was or where I had been.

I had revoked Instagram and Facebook from being able to work together on my phone for some time, but photos posted to my “Recent Activity” board on my wall without me knowing for a few weeks. I had revoked this functionality weeks prior, and never gave Instagram permission to post any of these photos to Facebook.

The other day I posted a photo, and tagged Ali, my wife in it. A few minutes later, one of her friends (NOT a mutual friend) posted a comment on it. This should not have happened because you need to be a friend of mine to see any of my photos. But because I tagged someone, those settings disappear and all of Ali’s friends can see and comment on the image.

Why wouldn’t my settings override this? Who decided it was okay to throw out my privacy settings in this case? As the poster of this image to my wall, how is that secure?
These two discoveries in the past two weeks were the final straw.

Since deleting my account won’t accomplish anything, I decided to go through and delete all of the information that I’ve put into Facebook, as well as delete any likes or whatever other garbage has collected there.

All map data has been deleted. I can’t be tagged in posts or places, it should be harder to find me in the search, and harder for people to add me as friends. That is, until Facebook changes everything again and undoes all of these settings.

I know my hatred of Facebook is irrational, but it’s mine, and I’m all in.

Just like before, contacting me through Facebook is the worst possible place to contact me. Email is the best, followed by texting, Google Talk and Twitter. If you can’t contact me through one of those methods you probably don’t know how to use the Internet that well.

I’m posting the link to this post on Facebook and it will be the last thing I will post there.

Good bye, shitty service. I’m sorry I caved and signed up for an account.

Smell you later.