Facebook’s the world’s most popular social networking site even though some of its biggest fans aren’t very happy about many of the site’s privacy features and controls. Some are even irate.
With this frustration in mind, a pair of Canadian muckrakers set up an online petition calling for the site’s almost 500 million members to shut it down and delete their accounts as a cyber protest of sorts.
But as Datamation found out, quitting a site that lets you snoop on your ex-girlfriends, share and view pictures of your relatives’ kids and actively promote the benefits of gluten-free foods or hybrid automobiles is almost as hard as giving up cigarettes or heroin.
Despite all the rumblings about privacy concerns and the never-ending swell of malware and cybercriminal activity on Facebook, a staggeringly small fraction of one percent of Facebook’s members actually followed through and deleted their accounts.
When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg described a litany of new privacy features last week, he told reporters that the recent firestorm over how the company collected and uses hadn’t resulted in any mass defection of its users.
The experience of the movement organized to abandon the world’s biggest social network would seem to bear that out.
Frustrated with both Facebook’s privacy policies and the company’s seeming opposition to many hallmarks of the open Web, a pair of technologists from Toronto set up an online petition and declared May 31 “Quit Facebook Day.”
