May 10, 2010

WTF Facebook?

This post was written by derek on May 10th, 2010. Filed under Facebook, Reviews

So… as we all know, Facebook has been ramming some new privacy policies down our throat and also a few new grossly oversteped bounds in the area of making everything more social. Tonight I ran across the new “automatically like all of these things from my profile” box, which leads to this page (if you don’t choose to let it like everything for you).

This page has a listing of every single entity in your profile that is now a “likable entity” and by default they are already selected for you, how nice… ugh. To make things even better, once you’ve gone ahead and deselected everything, as I did, you are given this dialog

really Facebook? You’re going to get rid of all the information in my “Work and Education”, “Hometown”, “Current City”, and “Likes and Interests”? That’s just awesome… I’m glad that me opting out of letting you milk even more information out of me and my social circle will now pretty much clear out my information section…

All this does for me is pushes me one, very large step closer to deleting… erm, or should I say deactivating (as you can’t actually delete anything) my Facebook account. I really hate how this company has seemingly flipped completely on its ear in the past 4 or so years… when will it be enough Mr. Zuckerburg? When?

P.S. For another fun trick, once you’re on the page that allows you to pick and choose what you want to like, try clicking on the Facebook link in the upper left, as you would normally do to get back ‘home’… it doesn’t do anything, your options on this page are, “Logout”, “Save Changes”, or use the browser back button or manually edit the url to leave the page… awesome.

Update: It seems there is perhaps a way to actually delete your account, as pointed out by Mr. Berens in the comments. Going to https://ssl.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account you will find this: