Quitting Facebook Next Week?

The world's biggest social networking site Facebook faces a unique challenge next week when it will possibly get its 500 millionth user worldwide and India may get its 10 millionth Facebook account holder.

Soon after though, on May 31, hundreds of thousands of these folks are expected to quit their Facebook accounts. Not freeze, not suspend, just quit.

These folks may resort to that extreme step because they are angry with Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook's founder and CEO - and his merry band of privacy invaders. Some say Facebook deserves the quitters - it has been acting like an inveterate Web bully who steals your school lunch and then complains to your mother that there wasn't enough to eat.

This is what Facebook has done, according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based advocacy group: "Facebook now discloses personal information to the public that Facebook users previously restricted. Facebook now discloses personal information to third parties that Facebook users previously did not make available. These changes violate user expectations, diminish user privacy, and contradict Facebook's own representations." These allegations coincide with Facebook making several changes to its privacy settings on April 22 this year. In fact, users were shocked to see 50 different settings with 170 options easily making it the most complicated privacy settings form on the Web.

Ridiculous as these settings are, it drove millions of users to madness, if they weren't already rendered insane by the stupidity of Farmville and the absurdity of the hundreds of other games and apps that Facebook keeps encouraging you to play or share.

SO much is the furore online against Facebook that it is thinking of rejigging its privacy settings again. But would that be too little, too late? When Zuckerberg made the announcement regarding the new privacy settings, he said: "We think that the future of the web will be filled with personalised experiences.

We've worked with three pre-selected partners - Microsoft Docs, Yelp and Pandora - to give you a glimpse of this future, which you can access without having to login again or click to connect." What he forgot to mention is something that EPIC picked up and mentioned in its complaint to the Federal Trade Commission in the US along with 14 other groups. "Facebook has essentially forced many Facebook users to reveal personal profile information that they did not intend to make public," EPIC said.

A site called quitfacebook. com has been set up where users can pledge that they will delete their Facebook accounts on May 31.

Another site facebookprotest. com is doing something similar, but has asked that boycott day to be June 6.

The issue is more than just privacy; the Facebook case could define what information is made public in the future and what is not. It is, without exaggeration, our personal freedoms that are at stake here. With thousands of people opposed to Facebook's new privacy settings, it might well make it more "user-friendly". The only fear, however, is that it may remain so until the next change in settings.

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