A website has been created where you can pledge to quit Facebook on 31 May. To date, more than 5,000 people have committed themselves to shutting down their accounts. What's interesting are the comments posted on the site. Infosolutionwiz writes, "Change your settings, don't put up your personal information, and stop complaining. If you don't want people to have personal information about you, DON'T POST IT IN A PUBLIC FORUM. In addition, there is no privacy on the internet in any case... Anonymity is an illusion" In response, meh says that's not necessarily true if you have apps installed. The reply to that, naturally, is not to install apps.
It's an interesting conundrum - I think people generally understand that their information on Facebook could be made public, but there's a difference between it automatically propagating all over the internet like a virtual billboard, and information appearing only if you look hard enough, like the classifieds section of a newspaper. Clearly there's a demand for information to be as private as possible, and for that information to be handled with care. Furthermore, while it's true that the internet is "public", we do do private transactions every day when we shop and bank online (although some of our information might be used by marketers or credit reference agencies). So why can't we trust our Facebook information be treated as such? Right now, it appears a lot of us can't.
Update: More than 13,000 people have now signed up.
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