Garrett Kelley

I’m thinking about quitting Facebook and you should consider leaving too. My reason is simple: I do not trust Facebook with my information. More importantly I do not trust Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook have repeatedly demonstrated their disrespect for their users and their privacy. Facebook touts the granular control of their privacy controls. Sure, they are there, but for the average person are almost impossible to use or understand. Furthermore, Facebook on multiple occasions has experienced privacy leaks. For example, earlier this year a glitch caused private messages to go to the wrong users (link). Zuckerberg himself has demonstrated disrespect for Facebook users’ privacy and his own lack of moral standards. For example: when Zuckerberg was building The Facebook, he was also allegedly working on a competing project, HarvardConnection, with other students. Instead of building HarvardConnection Zuckerberg stole their ideas and built his own social network (link). Another example is his instant messaging conversation (link) where he labels Facebook users as “dumb fucks” for trusting him with their private data. More recently a New York Times blogger shared that Zuckerberg does not believe in privacy (link). Clearly Zuckerberg’s interests, company, and money come first. The safety and privacy of Facebook users are of little concern to him.

Facebook needs to restore trust in their company. To do this Facebook needs to make a couple of changes. First, change the default privacy settings for user data from public to private. ALL of my information on Facebook should be private until I expressly change it to become public. Not the other way around. When I delete my Facebook account ALL of my information and data should be COMPLETELY and PERMANENTLY deleted. Rather, Facebook holds onto your data for 14 days in case you change your mind. I can see this as useful for people who are unsure they want to separate from Facebook, but there should also be an option to delete my data instantly. Making the situation even worse is the fact that if you delete your account not all of your data is removed. Facebook Help states “Copies of some material (photos, notes, etc.) may remain in our servers for technical reasons…” (link). What is SO hard about deleting my data? Please, just remove it from your servers!

The one thing we all need to remember is that Facebook’s goal is to make money. To make money Facebook sells advertising space. Facebook uses your information to show you advertisements you might be interested in. While Facebook states that no information which can identify you is used for this purpose, there is nothing stopping them from using identifiable information. Combine that with Facebook’s demonstrated disregard for user privacy and I believe it is only a matter of time.

Do I trust my information with other companies, to some degree I do. Can I actually trust any of them? Maybe, maybe not. The emphasis here is that Facebook and Zuckerberg have repeatedly demonstrated a blatant disrespect and disregard for their users’ privacy. This we cannot ignore.