Why I deleted my Facebook account

I finally deleted my Facebook account. 

I did so with some regret because Facebook had allowed me to reestablish contact with many high school and college classmates, distant relatives, and old friends I hadn't heard from in years.  But recently I came to the conclusion that the risks associated with Facebook outweighed the benefits.  While I accept that being on the internet inevitably involves some loss of privacy, what concerned me with Facebook was that I no longer could figure out what was private and what wasn't, and how to control it. 

Especially with the recent introduction of Facebook Connect, the imminent expansion of the Open Graph, and some changes like the way that schools, workplaces and so forth were handled, the privacy controls had become so opaque or convoluted that I no longer had any confidence that I had control over anything.  The privacy controls, which were already a mess, were now spread across even more pages, with descriptions that were opaque, and seemed to require lots more clicking and reading of additional web pages to understand what was going on.  This NY Times article pretty much sums up how much of a cesspool the privacy options on Facebook have become.

What especially concerned me was that whatever I did in terms of setting privacy controls on Facebook didn't seem to propagate to its partners.  I went to some lengths to prevent my list of friends from being displayed on my Facebook profile.  I had it set so that it was not only concealed from public view, but also from my friends.  But I noticed when I went to Pandora and Yelp, my public profiles there had a list of my Facebook friends who were using those services.  With Facebook rolling out Facebook Connect and Open Graph to hundreds, perhaps thousands of partners, keeping track of what was going on at those sites looked like an impossible task.

Finally I decided that I was wasting my time.  I have a PhD, it shouldn't be this difficult to understand what is going on with the privacy controls.  Either Facebook is stupid or deliberately making the privacy controls time-consuming and confusing to force people in the direction of sharing more information than they would like.

Why, for example, are the settings for relationships, workplace etc., all separate, so that changing them requires modifying each one individually?  And for the highest level of privacy, why does it require two steps, first clicking on Customize in a dropdown menu, and then on Only Me?  Why does restricting my information so that only My Friends can see it require me to navigate through several different pages, and then at multiple locations on each page, choose My Friends for each of the items, or Customize/Only Me for things I thought no one had any business knowing.

Why isn't there a single dropdown menu or radio box that sets EVERYTHING on the profile, and the wall, at once?  There could be a SINGLE MENU for all information with a set of choices like "Everyone", "Nobody", "Friends" and then for people who wanted to fine tune, there could be a series of nested menus that would allow someone who really cared to drill down and set each element separately.

The only explanation I could imagine was that Facebook in fact wanted to make the process as convoluted as possible in order to encourage errors in the direction of exposing information that people wanted to keep private.

This called to mind the repeated controversies over the last few years that suggested that Facebook had a nasty habit of exposing information without warning, then tightening briefly in response to outcry, and then a few months later quietly loosening again?  For example, I remember at some point last year they made it impossible to hide the friends list.  Previously I was Customizing to prevent display of my friends list to anyone.  But one day I logged in and my friends list was exposed and it was no longer possible to keep it concealed.

At that point, I threw up my hands and decided to delete the account.  I don't mind the lack of privacy associated with being on the internet, but I would at least like to have some idea what is being kept private and what is being exposed.  With Twitter, for example, the controls are pretty easy to understand, because they are simple.  A feed is either public, or protected.  But with Facebook, it was simply no longer possible to understand what was being exposed, and I didn't really understand how to control any of it.  And given Facebook's history, I concluded the confusion was deliberate.  At that point, I decided it was time to say goodbye.