Nope. I'm not.

Yes, privacy is important. However, the only information that I've ever put on Facebook is information that I'd want everyone else to know. That's why I have a Facebook; to give people who don't know me an idea of who I am and what I'm like, and get a little bit of personal branding out there. For instance, there's at least one little portion of my life that I don't want to be broadcast out to everyone, so it's conspicuously missing.

I don't feel that Facebook told anyone that their data would be private. Maybe I'm just naïve, or a little bit of an exhibitionist.

No, I'm really happy with the service that they provide. If there's something that's actually private, I'm not going to be posting it on the Internet in the first place.

I never went in - i still don't understand the point of FB or others of their ilk.

If i really want to keep in touch with far-flung family, friends - i pick up the phone or drop an email. If they are important to me i will make the effort. I also don't find the need to advertise on a daily/hourly basis what i am doing or tell people about the cool car/bike/tv/ipod etc. i bought. May be its just not for people like me.

I left and advised everyone I know to do the same. Privacy was never an issue for me, but Facebook keeps changing the rules. I can't keep up.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline/ http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-further-reduce...

I've stopped using mine, removed all apps, unfollowed (er, unliked?) all pages.

I'd guess the market is ripe for a fb-type site that, for lack of a better phrase, isn't evil. And doesn't have a horrible ux.

If you share something with your 300+ friends on Facebook, I think it's obvious it's no longer private. I have always considered Facebook a tool for _finding_ interesting stuff intead of _hiding_ it.

A more open, non-evil alternative would be cool, of course. But good luck rebuilding the whole social graph there. Almost anybody who has tried that has failed.

(I view this as somebody who follows the Facebook News Feed all the time, posts several times a day, and often participates in long discussion threads about news, politics etc. with my friends.)

We need a decentralized social graph. I should host and own my data not facebook or any other organization. Maybe browsers should innovate and solve this problem.

I honestly don't care. People shouldn't have private conversations or implicating pictures on Facebook, period.

If you don't do either of those two things, you'll be fine. No need to dramatically or publicly terminate your account.

I don't know why I would. I decided early on that I wouldn't use any of their apps, play any of their games, and actually introduce disinformation into the medium from time to time. (I went to the "Barnum and Bailey Clown College", "The School of Hard Knocks" and "How High". No really! I did!)

I view FaceBook as being purely frivolous, for casual interaction w friends & acquaintances, and treat it thus. There are other "social networking" sites (for instance, LinkedIn) for other types of (real/purposeful) networking.

I recently deleted mine.

I had it for a long time, and I just felt like it was keeping the most brain dead relationships barely alive. I was constantly seeing people in real life and saying, "oh yeah, I read that on facebook." I didn't like that, and the privacy concerns were just the last straw.

So yeah, I'm with you.

One thing to keep in mind: there are no signs I know of yet that the 'unwashed masses' are going to quit using Facebook: they love it and don't seem to care about the privacy thing overall. So by leaving, you're missing out on a significant perspective of what users (read: customers) experience everyday. It's like refusing to use Windows during the 90s. Not saying you shouldn't, but just that it's a cost to keep in mind.

Also: how confident are you that Facebook won't still be HUGE 10 years from now? Many smart people think FB will only expand in its importance on the web. Again, not saying it will be or that people shouldn't quit if it offends their sense of propriety, but I'd hate to reopen my account 5 years from now after publicly committing a principled FB suicide.

I am torn when it comes to this. In principal I want to. But my friends and family are spread around the world and in many cases FB is the only way I have of keeping in touch with them. My privacy settings are already as high as I can make them but I can't readily leave the silo.

Reminds me of this: http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-constantly-mention...

If you want to give up Facebook, just fucking do it... but realize that nobody else cares.

(For the record, I haven't updated facebook in about 5 years, because it bores me. But I don't go on and on about it...)

I did that, except I deleted, not deactivated. I'm not a hardcore privacy guy either, but they got to be a little too much after f8

I think the 'don't put anything you want kept private on the internet' is, generally, a good argument. I will say though, that I do think Facebook encouraged a reasonable expectation that certain data would be 'private,' and that's since changed.

Facebook made the decision for me yesterday. I declined to link all my profile data to business Pages, so everything I'd bothered to maintain was wiped out. It was clear I'm no longer part of their intended user base.

It's fine. I have no interest in participating in an ad network, so I wiped out the rest (friends, photos, etc) and publicized alternate contact info. Gotta keep the account for some of my clients' Pages.

Facebook was great for me ca. 2004-5. Now its goals and policies are very different. Maybe more people will get shocked away when tagging + image recognition start imposing on their family photos.

Nope, like many others here, I use Facebook as a public communication medium, which means I don't post private things there. It is not a tool for intimacy; it's a resume that I am handing out to perfect strangers.

Perhaps, over time, had they not compromised their privacy standings, I would have treated it more as a tool for intimate conversations with friends and family. I certainly will not do so now, or ever again. I will treat them forever like a public billboard.

I deleted my FaceBook account yesterday. For me, their absurd privacy policies are unethical, but the real reason is, I find it a complete waste of my good time.

I'm with you. Although my personal problem wasn't with how they managed privacy but with how they used social links between friends and exploited it for marketing purposes. Plus, on facebook everyone is a fan of something and that's all they are and the people that claim their facebook page gives others a sense of what they are like in real life are delusional.

Facebook has certainly gone from being pretty straightforward about privacy to deceptive about it, but the real people who need to worry aren't tech savvy HN denizens, but parents of those types and kids who don't have the first clue or don't know what to check, etc. That said, there are some fairly easy ways to ensure that you're not "exploited" digitally using Facebook. You can't scrub it entirely of your presence, but you can at least ensure that people can't access anything about you publicly without being a friend of yours.

That's fairly reasonable. Now the stuff like making wall posts show up on news feeds and such are somewhere between annoying and intrusive, but that's where we can just choose to ignore it, pair down the number of friends we maintain or other tactics.

For better or worse, the site works.

This is about as interesting as the old "Microsoft sucks" circle jerks that would occur on Slashdot. I deleted my FB account six months ago and it wasn't a big deal. There are plenty of people who will continue to use FB and not care about most of these implications.

I am not only with you, I am ahead of you. I deleted my account(with some effort and patience)when I read that Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, had declared that"Privacy is Dead". Well he may think so but a of lot of people, including myself think otherwise.

I've never been under any illusions about Facebook's business model or intent, but the expansion of their boundaries and Zuckerberg's stance on privacy mean I feel I have to take an ideological stand. Professionally, I argue for strong access controls, user control over data and the ethics of privacy in web applications, and that's incompatible with my continued presence on Facebook.

It's not just hackers and Internet professionals who are worried by this. So I reckon it's up to all of us to create an easy-to-use, secure, friendly web-based framework for us to share and collaborate with our friends.

I'm a pretty big advocate of privacy, but in order to protect mine, I take certain steps in order to avoid letting people use any of my personal information.

For starters, any social media I use, I use one of my many nicknames. I never use my real name, birthdate, and none of the information I use in any of these sites is accurate. My address, my age, my DOB - NOTHING is real in my profile. Even the picture I use isn't me.

This way, I control who gets my information and what they use it for. If Facebook is using my information, it certainly doesn't represent me in anyway.

If you really want to control the information, you can.

Stop placing your trust in other people.

I considered committing Facebook suicide but decided against it for the primary reason that many casual friends I'm able to keep in touch with/share media with that would normally be quite difficult.

I have my privacy settings locked down, all 3rd party apps removed, and I never...ever say anything on Facebook that I would encrypt/sign in email.

I'm sure people had a similar upset over the postal service when it was first suggested! It has more to do with being mindful of your mouth and being aware of the options you have as an individual for privacy (GnuPG).

97 comments from 8 days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1289997

Ask HN: Anybody else quitting Facebook over privacy concerns?

Sort of, never joined so I guess I'm effectively joining you.

Already done that, but for an entirely different reason. I realized that most "social media" websites are meticulously designed to get people hooked. The "Like" button, for instance, was not added to FB on a whim. It makes sure people keep posting new status messages and keep logging in every day (or shudder every few minutes) to see if someone liked them.

My hosts file currently blocks Facebook, Twitter and Reddit, among other websites.

How about changing your name and birthday a bit

Winston Jonathan Smith -> W.J. Smith

01/03/1980 -> 01/01/1950 (this doesn't even have to be visible)

and not posting any sensitive information on there?

Nope, I'm not leaving.

But what I have done is sanitize my profile info and remove all of my 'likes'. I joined FB to communicate with friends, not to be a cog in another marketing machine. I'll still use it to keep up with friends and share pics, but that's the limit of it.

Their recent announcement that they are going to be sharing their databases with 3rd parties is what pushed me to take these steps.

As soon as tell me how to delete my data for real. Maybe they will let us into the datacenter to help them do it.

I'm already gone. They annoyed me after forcing me to link to pages in my profile.

No. YOU ARE with me. I deleted my FB sometimes back and lived happily ever after.

I've never really used it for much, so I don't see much gain in deleting it.

Relax. Just grow some crops on Farmville and don't worry so much.

I like Facebook, I also like the new features they are adding. I never posted anything under the assumption that the world couldn't see it. So no, I won't be joining you.

I just deleted my 0 karma Plurk account a month ago. I deleted my Friendster account (I'm from the Philippines) last week. I "MIGHT" delete Facebook next.

I will if there is a better place to go. Or even a place that isn't better yet but could be made better by the early adopters.

I haven't had a Facebook account for years. My leaving had nothing to do with privacy.

I've been purging my data every week for 2 years on facebook. It keeps things fresh.

Left it a year ago, but more because it was a time-waster than over privacy.

Isn't it easy just to change your name.

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How exactly did they violate it?

I really disapprove of what Facebook has done in the past year or two with privacy. It's disgusting.

However, I don't really "use" Facebook. I have an account but I rarely post anything on it, and I don't use any of the apps. I just use it to see what my real life friends are up to, including many that I don't actually see anymore because they have moved away.

So, their new privacy stuff doesn't really affect me, since I really only use Facebook on a passive level. So I am not deleting my account. But I still strongly disapprove of what they are doing.

I've got two words concerning Facebook (and feel free to downvote):

Fuck Facebook

and for the more adventurous:

Fuck Apple