Calgary Herald Digital - Edmonton Journal - 14 May 2010 - Facebookers ... http://digital.calgaryherald.com/epaper/showarticle.aspx?article=0957bb...

Article rank 14 May 2010 Edmonton Journal MISTY HARRIS Canwest News Service

Latest settings changes ratchet up boycotts

(Quitting) wasn’t easy but I knew it was the right choice. Immediately, I was like: ‘Oh my God, I don’t have to check my
settings
anymore. I’m free!’
Yvonne Scott

Looking back, warnings of Yvonne Scott’s intentions were written all over her Facebook wall: the
hopelessness, the change in habits, the threats to end it all. But it was nonetheless shocking to friends and
family this week when she posted a note of final farewell and committed social suicide.
Scott’s Facebook profile is no longer with us.
The Edmonton woman, who likens killing her account to “escaping a cult,” is in the vanguard of a growing
movement to cut ties with the social networking site over its controversial privacy-policy amendments.
Google Canada reports that the top online search related to “Facebook account” is “delete Facebook,” while
the fastest-rising related query is “deactivate Facebook account,” up 40 per cent over the past 90 days.
Worldwide, the search engine’s results on Facebook account deletion ballooned from 15.9 million to 19.5 million
between Tuesday and Thursday alone. There are 400 million members in total.
“(Quitting) wasn’t easy but I knew it was the right choice,” says Scott, who convinced about a dozen of her
friends to delete their accounts with her.
“Immediately, I was like: ‘Oh my God, I don’t have to check my settings anymore. I’m free!’”
The bridge too far for Scott was Facebook’s recent introduction of a platform that, by default, gives
third-party companies access to members’ names, friend lists and hobbies to “personalize” their surfing
experience. Ergo, when a member logs onto a partner site, such as Yelp or Pandora, the content displayed is
shaped by their own interests, as well as the activities of their Facebook friends.
To disable this feature, a manual opt-out is required.
“I felt extremely used,” says Scott, who has since turned to Skype, Twitter and Flickr to stay in touch. She
explains that to have remained on “FaceCrook” would’ve been to passively endorse its exploitation of less
tech-savvy members.
But even experts, such as the University of Guelph’s Amy Muise, find the site’s settings confusing.
“After a while, it’s like you’re spending more time worrying about who’s seeing your information than
actually participating in your social network,” says Muise, a PhD candidate specializing in the social effects of
new media.
“To be on Facebook, and use it for what it’s good for, you do have to risk your privacy. And we’re starting to
see a backlash over that.”
Boycotts, protests and mass Facebook “suicide” pacts reached fever pitch this week, underscored by the
high-profile site departures of tech impresarios Peter Rojas, Matt Cutts and Chris Breen.
Facebook spokesman Elliot Schrage only made matters worse when he publicly rationalized that “everything
is opt-in on Facebook (because) participating in the service is a choice.”
Muise, who was given a grant to study Facebook by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada,
doesn’t think it’s curtains for the site just yet. She notes that people have too much invested to easily quit, with
roughly one in three Canadians having accounts.
But if Facebook’s image persists, Muise predicts larger numbers of people will start deactivating or deleting
their profiles.
The former option, easy to find, stores members’ information and doesn’t actually erase them from
Facebook; the latter option, requiring some digital digging to unearth, permanently removes members’ profiles,
provided they don’t log back onto the site within two weeks.
Calgary’s Jason Hampel announced to friends and family this week, via his blog, that he’s putting his “affairs
in order” for his own Facebook demise.
Railing against the site’s “bait-and-switch approach” to privacy — once championing it, and now
systematically taking it away — Hampel says people must choose between quitting altogether or learning to
keep a secret; that is, limiting what they share, which he feels “defeats the purpose of using Facebook entirely.”
Judy Bishop believes many naysayers are presuming corporate deviousness when it’s more likely a case of

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Calgary Herald Digital - Edmonton Journal - 14 May 2010 - Facebookers ... http://digital.calgaryherald.com/epaper/showarticle.aspx?article=0957bb...

“a bunch of guys with money in their pockets bumbling around in a large corporation.”
Nevertheless, if she perceives one more threat to her privacy, the tech-literate Vancouver woman plans to
bail — and believes that she’s only the “tip of the iceberg of people who’ll do that.”
“I’m at the point where I’m ready to pull the trigger,” says Bishop, who doesn’t think she would miss
Facebook in her life. “If anyone’s ever had a bad relationship, they’ll know that you don’t realize how much you
needed to get out of it until it’s gone.”
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