Why I Have(n’t) Deleted my Facebook Account

March 11, 2011 – 10:00

Hans de Zwart and I write a monthly series titled: Parallax. We both agree on a title for the post and on some other arbitrary restrictions to induce our creative process. Some people would consider Facebook a threat to the open Internet (e.g. Tim Berners-Lee), whereas other people see it as a key tool for promoting democracy in this world (e.g. Wael Ghonim). We decided to each argue both sides of the argument (300 words “for” and 300 words “against”) and then poll our readers to see which argument they find more persuasive. You can read Hans’ post with the same title here.

Facebook is the god of Mother Theresa

Actually, I do not have that much positive to say about Facebook per se. Fair enough, they provide a great, free (as in beer) service to stay connected to your global network of friends, exchange photos and recommend stuff you find on the web to each other. Moreover, by being such a massively used platform, they amassed enough resources to develop some really cool and interesting new technology like ‘HipHop for PHP’ or the Cassandra noSQL database. What’s even cooler is that they released those technologies as open source projects.

The web (the Internet) enables us to connect to each other and create interesting networks. Facebook is a succesful application developed on that web, leveraging some of the characterics and benefits of networks. The most famous cases being the recent uprisings in Northern Africa where Facebook was supposedly a catalyst of the revolution (which I do not believe, I think the web was a catalyst of the revolution, Facebook was just the application which happened to be most widely used and available at the time (o wait, this paragraph was supposed sum up the positive sides of Facebook, please forget the previous sentence.)).

So Facebook is cool if you want an easy, brainless way to stay connected to your friends, start a revolution or if you are interested in state of the art web development and system engineering.

But there is a shadow side!

Facebook is the god of Richard Dawkins

Facebook owns you and your data, period. If that doesn’t scare you enough already I’ll try to elaborate a bit on that.

Besides Facebook owning you and your data, Facebook is a centralised technology as opposed to a federated one. Centralised technologies are scary as well because it enables a ‘killswitch’. Theoretically Mark Z. in California could decide that it’s in his company’s best interest to disable Facebook access for Libya. Or he could decide to sell your data to some advertisement company or the government. The point being is that we and Mark have a conflict of interest. He makes decisions based on trying to maximize his company’s profit. Those decisions are for now still in favour of the user (that is, us). But that will not necessarily always be the case.

What you’d want is own your own data. So your pictures sitting on your server in your broom cupboard. You decide who gets to see what and you decide when it’s time to remove them, lock them up, disconnect the server from the network, whatever. Not some socially challenged clown from California.

The same story could be held for Twitter. A federated alternative to twitter is identica, developed by statusnet. Identica doesn’t own your data. In fact, you can set up your own identica node, as it were. Identica offers me choice. Choice enables freedom. Facebook does not offer choice. Facebook is not freedom. Facebook is the nail on your coffin. Liberate yourself and the web, ditch Facebook, embrace freedom.

Find some links on the bottom of this post to help you explore internet freedom.

After reading this post, I think