I was drawn to Facebook several years ago because it offered things that no other sights offered. The most important thing was privacy and security. Over the last month, I have noticed that this is no longer the case. My personal information has been leaked out to third party web sites, my privacy settings have been changed to allow people to see stuff that was specifically blocked in the past.
I see all of this as a violation of ethics and the leadership at Facebook has violated my trust for the last time. I am no longer going to be participating in Facebook as a primary source of social networking. I will be maintaining my account, because I still find it useful. I will be limiting my use to cross-posting from my blog, general status updates and keeping tabs on my friends. I have removed all of my photos and personal information from the site (who knows if that will do any good as they probably have it sucked into a DB somewhere for fun and profit).
My photos will only be maintained on my personal gallery at: http://www.yourservice.com/photogallery/main.php.
My Blog can be found at: https://www.yourservice.com/blog
I strongly encourage those who care about their privacy as well as support only ethical business practices stop using Facebook. For more information on this, please read this posting from Jason Calacani: http://calacanis.com/2010/05/12/the-big-game-zuckerberg-and-overplaying-your-hand/
I think Facebook has a good product, but run by an unethical leader. The Internet does have a way of taking care of it’s own eventually and perhaps something new and better will come out.
People have asked me why I spend my time maintaining my own internet servers. The simple reply I have for them is: “I don’t trust anyone else” and it has served me well for almost twenty years. If I don’t like the policy or practice of my administrator, I only have to go to the mirror and slap him around.