This is totally not interesting to those of you who don’t know me personally, but I’m deleting my facebook account.
As I go about notifying people and saving contact information, I keep getting asked why. This is the long, technical answer:
Facebook isn’t that fun anymore. I’ve actually been thinking about deleting my account for years, more seriously in the last year.
I don’t use it the way it’s meant to be used because I’m no longer comfortable posting information with the site’s convoluted privacy policy. It’s too hard to control who sees what (and I don’t even mean friends I just mean public vs. private). I hate that Facebook can just decide to share information like my name and profile picture with everyone everywhere just because it’s considered “basic” information. I want to make that choice. The fact that Facebook was recently hacked and seems determined to make privacy settings harder to manage every few months also helps.
I also prefer Twitter. It’s more my speed and it’s just simpler to manage and use. I don’t like logging into facebook to know what’s going on. I prefer communicating with email or cell phone so now I’ll have to.
I recently was talking to a friend about the whole public vs. private/personal persona thing and I’m finding that as my public profile is getting larger thanks to this blog and my library blog, I find that it’s easier to keep it all public instead of separating public and private. Facebook, well I wasn’t comfortable with it being public so I’m deleting it.
I recently told my mom about this and she, perhaps sagely, told me that between my blogs and book club I am really my own facebook. Probably not entirely accurate but I thought it was a good sentiment. So I’m using the information here to completely delete my account. I’m also pulling contact information (and birthdays) manually from facebook because I’m an idiot and didn’t think of a faster way to do it. Every time I remember something else to save and log on only to have Facebook say my perfectly fine password is not correct, I want to punch the site in the face. So there’s also that as a motivating factor.
Will I lose touch with people or miss out on some things only posted on Facebook? Maybe. Maybe not. Either way I’ll still be on here and on twitter (if you need contact information for me because I somehow missed you in my notification blitz, just let me know in the comments–with a valid email in the email box).
