Send no flowers. My Facebook profile is dead. A little after midnight, on Monday May 31, I permanently deleted my Facebook account. I even made a Facebook suicide playlist, starting with The Clash (Should I Stay or Should I Go) and ending with — well, it couldn’t really be anything else, could it — Sinatra’s My Way.
I realised, even before I pushed the “kill” button, that my Facebook suicide would not be a particularly big deal to the site’s 26-year-old co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, with his estimated personal fortune of $4-billion. And I’m confident not too many of the nearly 500-million other Facebook users will even notice I’m gone. Although my mother has said she’ll miss me. Most of my friends acted as though I’d suggested they give up smoking. Although none of them smoke anymore, now that they have kids and houses and bonds and digital family photo albums.
In one of those neat coincidences, May 31 was declared Quit Facebook Day by a pair of Canadians. The campaign received some press coverage but by D-day fewer than 30 000 people had signed up to die. Not quite a Facebook apocalypse.
In retrospect I’m not sure why it took me so long to mix up the Kool Aid. The signs were on my Wall. For months my 284 friends spent the majority of their online time enlightening me about the colour of their chakras, their Wednesday night armchair opposition to whale hunting or Julius Malema. Or their decision — despite some pretty strong evidence against this last bit — to name their offspring after Britney Spears’s two boys.
The truth is I found Facebook annoying. And I hated myself for going back to it, again and again, to do nothing more than browse through photographs of beer-drinking expats in London or Dubai. Or to see what the wife of my ex-ex-ex-ex-boyfriend looked like.
But that’s not the reason I quit. I put up with the mind-numbing photo albums, the stupid “groups” and campaigns (you want to see “Disney’s Most Shocking Hidden Message”? Be my guest. It’s a spam scam), and even things such as Farmville and Mafia Wars because, like many people on Facebook, the site actually helped me connect with people I like and hadn’t seen for years. If the price of that was to connect with 100 people I wasn’t so interested in, I thought it was a fair trade.
So why did I pull the plug? First, a little over a year ago I joined Twitter. The online joke is that “Facebook is the people you went to school with. Twitter is the people you wish you went to school with.” I like Twitter a lot; it’s faster and a thousand times more interesting than the banalities of Facebook. And it doesn’t pretend to be private. Second, and this is the important bit, since 2009 Facebook has changed its privacy policies not once but several times (best summed up by one blogger as “We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever”). I’m not under any illusions about how privacy works online. We leave a trace on every site we visit, every link we click. There are no ghosts in the machine. But Facebook, initially, promised to be different: A containment unit for your personal shit. Until that “shit” became public currency: Your likes, dislikes, personal connections, the tags on your wedding photos.
Facebook’s current privacy settings default to something along the lines of “share everything” — it’s a social network after all, say the site’s owners. Until last week (when the site changed its privacy options yet again), this also meant sharing your information with applications outside of Facebook, including every Facebook game or site you liked or added. Remember that quiz that tested your knowledge on 1980’s movies trivia? They know the name of your first-born child. Oh, and guess what — when you okayed the application, it gave them access to pretty much all your friends’ details too (at least, the information you are able to see about your friends). You can manually increase your privacy levels — until last week there were 50 settings and 170 options; these have now been simplified but remain, essentially, the same choices.
Or you could do what more and more online users are opting for: Create a “shallow” Facebook profile, use a fake name, lie about your details, post nothing personal. Fakebook.
For me, the only real response — in what researcher Danah Boyd calls a “battle over choice and informed consent” — was to quit outright, rather than live a Facebook lie.
Zuckerberg hasn’t really made a secret of what he thinks of Facebook users. In a transcript from a chat conversation Zuckerberg had in 2004, he called us “dumb fucks” for trusting him with our information. And I’m like: “Fuck me? No, fuck you.” So, er, here’s the bird, Mark. I’m flipping it to you.
You can find Nechama Brodie on Twitter at twitter.com/brodiegal