Facebook Backlash Watch: Creepy, Clingy, Not Interested In Saying Goodbye

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November 27, 2007

Facebook Backlash Watch: Creepy, Clingy, Not Interested In Saying Goodbye

I think it's safe to say Facebook has managed to achieve an important stage in the lifecycle of any Web success story: The cool kids have decided they hate it. Maybe not any of the cool kids you and I know face to face, who probably still like it. Just that nebulous collection of Cool Kids out there on the 'net who usually start sniffing with disdain once the profit motive manifests. And in Facebook's case, it has.

So here are three Facebook Backlash Watch entrants:

CNET: MoveOn to Facebook: We caught you red-handed :

"Last week, a feud began to brew between leftist activist group MoveOn.org and social-networking site Facebook concerning its 'Beacon' advertisements, which broadcast information about users' activity on third-party partner sites to their friends' Facebook newsfeeds. According to MoveOn, it's a violation of user privacy because there's no way to universally opt out of Beacon ads. Facebook retorted, and the argument has turned into a legitimate debate over how far is really too far when it comes to sharing information about members' activity.

"Now, MoveOn is poised to launch a new offensive against Facebook, claiming that early screenshots of Beacon posted by TechCrunch indicated that the advertising application once included a 'global opt-out' that would allow members to block it entirely. According to MoveOn, this never made it into the final version, and the organization--which has created a petition and a Facebook group to raise awareness of what it sees as a hot-button issue--wants to know why.

Cory Doctorow: How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook:

"In the real world, we don't articulate our social networks. Imagine how creepy it would be to wander into a co-worker's cubicle and discover the wall covered with tiny photos of everyone in the office, ranked by 'friend' and 'foe,' with the top eight friends elevated to a small shrine decorated with Post-It roses and hearts. And yet, there's an undeniable attraction to corralling all your friends and friendly acquaintances, charting them and their relationship to you. Maybe it's evolutionary, some quirk of the neocortex dating from our evolution into social animals who gained advantage by dividing up the work of survival but acquired the tricky job of watching all the other monkeys so as to be sure that everyone was pulling their weight and not napping in the treetops instead of watching for predators, emerging only to eat the fruit the rest of us have foraged.

"Keeping track of our social relationships is a serious piece of work that runs a heavy cognitive load. It's natural to seek out some neural prosthesis for assistance in this chore. My fiancee once proposed a 'social scheduling' application that would watch your phone and email and IM to figure out who your pals were and give you a little alert if too much time passed without your reaching out to say hello and keep the coals of your relationship aglow. By the time you've reached your forties, chances are you're out-of-touch with more friends than you're in-touch with: Old summer-camp chums, high-school mates, ex-spouses and their families, former co-workers, college roomies, dot-com veterans... Getting all those people back into your life is a full-time job and then some.

"You'd think that Facebook would be the perfect tool for handling all this. It's not. For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there's a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I'd cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, 'Am I your friend?' yes or no, this instant, please."

And having winced over the bitter, wince some more over the bitterly funny as we go back to July, when Steven Mansour decided it was time to kill his Facebook profile:

"It's one thing when I choose to leave a web service (Flickr, Youtube) because I don't want them profiting from my content. It's another when they prevent me from leaving. Is this really the only choice we have left? Shitty web companies vs. shitty web companies that keep and distribute your personal data ad infinum even when you request your account to be closed?

"As it turns out, I had to 'contact' facebook and ask them how to delete my account, only to find out that I have to manually delete every single minifeed item, friend, post, wall writing, etc by hand, one-by-one, or else they will refuse to close your account. When you're a member of the Internet High Society as I am, you find that you have thousands of these items to delete."

I spent yesterday overwriting all the data in my profile with a lot of nothing, then dropping all my friends, networks, apps and groups. I think. The main point was to get rid of the personally identifiable information. Maybe I'll try to delete the account altogether and report back.

(thanks, Ed)

Previously:

Tags: facebook, privacy