Friday, May 28, 2010

Individuals to delete Facebook accounts on Quit Facebook day, May 31

May 31 is Quit Facebook Day. “How do I delete my Facebook account” is a top search inquiry on Google. Because of internet privacy issues, hundreds of millions of Facebook users are deleting their Facebook accounts and protesting. In April, Facebook changed default privacy settings to allow the Internet at large access to personal details once available only to friends and networks.

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

Facebook and privacy problems

Monday, Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg sought to reassure the public with an op-ed article within the Washington Post that Facebook would learn and adapt to accommodate Internet privacy concerns. Facebook’s privacy difficulties, including the “How do I delete my Facebook account” movement and the Quit Facebook Day were both inspired by a recent practice began by Facebook to make fast cash on the vast database of user information it has collected. Advertising companies were given info that might be used to look up individual profiles, which, depending on the site and the info a user has made public, include such things as a person’s real name, age, hometown and occupation. Various large advertising companies that were 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 have become harder to ignore now that there are more than 400 million Facebook users that have accounts with default privacy settings allowing everything but contact details and birthdays to be accessed by anyone. Facebook has also changed how personal info is classified various times in ways that many users see as deliberately confusing. Quit Facebook Day questions Facebook’s intentions and also 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.

Quiting the whole Facebook addiction

Those who began Quit Facebook Day surely have many work. They acknowledge at quitfacebookday.com that quitting the Facebook addiction wouldn’t be easy even if it were easy to figure how to delete your Facebook account. Quit Facebook Day admits that Facebook is “engaging, enjoyable and quite frankly, addictive.”. They equate the difficulty of quitting the Facebook addiction to quitting smoking. Perhaps most importantly, they say:

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

Internet and 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 suddenly, they are confronted by pictures of individuals 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 couple of a lot more steps to delete the account for good. Facebook doesn't lose all the data although the user will. This info 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 people were to share more, the world would be a lot more connected. Facebook said last week that it is fixing a privacy loophole that allowed advertisers to access user identification and potentially other info according to the Washington Post. Zuckerberg said there could be a simpler way to control user details. 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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