Facebook Is Evil! and Deleting One's Facebook Account!

Facebook Is Evil! - Facebook is evil on several levels:

Facebook logs users' searches and tracks their real-world purchases.

Facebook exploits users' personal data by selling it to marketing firms.

Facebook archives users' search histories. Anything for which one searches will be logged. There must be an ad or data-mining payoff; else, there would be no reason for doing this.

Facebook has partnered with Datalogix—a company that uses Facebook users' data to track which users bought products after seeing ads for them on Facebook. Datalogix uses information from loyalty card and online purchases—among other things—and ties this data to users' Facebook identities by using users' email addresses and other personal information.

Datalogix partners with data mining giant Acxiom, which collects users' data regarding social networks, purchasing histories, and public records databases.

Datalogix works across a broad spectrum of industries, but its Web site does not disclose the names of its actual customers. Datalogix, then, respects the privacy of the multi-billion-dollar corporations from which Datalogix receives payment for data but does nothing to protect the sanctity of users' personal information.

The companies profess that they anonymize the identities before matching up users' Facebook email addresses. The emails and other identifying information are made anonymous and collected into groups of people who saw an ad and people who did not. Datalogix compiles a report for Facebook and its advertisers to measure which creative approaches and demographic targeting persuade people to buy specific products. How anonymous is that anonymization, who is doing it, and who could conceivably undo it? Security expert Bruce Schneier said, "Anonymity is really, really hard -- but we knew that already."

Facebook users can opt out of having their social networking activities married to real-world purchases. On the surface, this sounds good. Users cannot, however, do this on Facebook. In fact, it require one to search exhaustively to find anything about this type of data collection on the social network regarding sharing of data. If a user wishes to opt out, he must go to Datalogix, fill out a form, and wait 30 days. And this must be done for every member of one's household.

Add to the above issues the fact that Facebook is a virtual breeding ground for Trojans, viruses, and malware—as well as an open source of pirated work, and Facebook must be considered to be a paradigm of evil!

Ultimately, it is a matter of whether users can reasonably trust Facebook and its advertising partners to keep users' names and other personal information inviolate.

My recommendation is that Facebook and their advertising partners should never be trusted with users' real information! My overall recommendation is that one should not join Facebook, and if one has joined, one should delete one's Facebook account.

Deleting One's Facebook Account!! - I am often told by clients that they have been unable to delete their Facebook accounts. The procedure is not for the easily-discouraged or faint-of-heart user!

Rather than supply the circuitous methodology Facebook requires one to take in order to delete one's account, I offer the following simple method! Simply click on the link below to quickly and simply delete your Facebook account!

Delete Facebook