Is Facebook good?

“What is so bad about Facebook?” Whenever I hear this question, I usually start a – seemingly – never-ending, heated discussion about why Facebook is bad and how stupid it is to use Facebook.

The more you know about the hidden costs (e.g. giving up privacy and private conversation) of the so called “free” social network, the more the cost-benefit function gets out of proportion.

From my point of view there are millions of very good reasons to stop using Facebook immediately. However many of the reasons stated below are not only valid for Facebook, but for other closed and centralized social networks as well, espcially Twitter.

Political Reasons to quit Facebook

Facebook is based, registered and run in the United States of America.
This is bad because of the “Patriot Act”. Even if Facebook starts respecting your privacy, your data is still easily available to every governmental institution in the Country through open backdoors or requests, as this Facebook.pdf-file documents. Think about what this means to your freedom.
Facebook is a deliberate experiment in global manipulation.
Facebook and Government institutions have a history. Since the article was released in 2008 it got a lot worse. In 2010 the U.S. Government started developing and using a software which creates fake profiles on social networks to spread messages and to spy on people.
Facebook wants to go public.
When the time comes, everything that counts is money. They will try everything to make money out of Facebook, thus you, your friends, your communication, everything. At least, I bet on it.

Technical Reasons & Internet Politics

Facebook is a centralized social network. It is run by Facebook alone.
Not only does this contradict reality (you do not meet all your real-life friends only (!) in the same, single real-life place) it also makes the whole network prone to attacks and breakdowns. Think hacking attacks or software failures. The real-life complement would be destroying the one, single place where you meet all your friends making impossible to contact them anymore.
Facebook adds an unnecessary layer to the Internet.
Facebook hasn’t introduced anything new, apart from being able to “like” something. Facebook Mail resembles Email, Facebook Chat resembles chat software, Facebook Threads resemble forums, Facebook Pages resemble normal web sites, galleries, videos, links…they all have an equivalent in the regular Internet world. Why put all of this in the hands of a privately owned company like Facebook?
Facebook and the Open Social Web.
There are plenty of people working on the idea of an open social network, which would work decentralized, with whichever social network you prefer. For example Open Social. Instead of joing these people, like Hi5.com, MySpace, orkut, Netlog, Sonico.com, Friendster, Ning, and Yahoo!, Facebook decided to present something stupid, called “the Open Graph API”. Facebooks idea with this is to use it’s market power to install a Facebook-owned pseudo web standard. The name just disguises its fundamentally closed nature.
Facebook Like-Buttons on External Web Sites – I can only warn you about the everywhere emerging Facebook Like-buttons on external (non-Facebook) web sites. When you are logged in to Facebook while browing the Internet. Due to the fact that the buttons are loaded through an embedded iframe (the non-Facebook web site embeds a Facebook web site), these buttons provide your personal browing habits to Facebook, even without you clicking on them.
Mark Zuckerberg is an evil hacker.
When Mark Suckerberg started Facebook he scraped student’s profiles (names, images and other personal information) from several University websites to get his network – The Facebook – started. That is only one aspect of unethical behavior in his “sketchy” past. The question you have to ask yourself is: “Do I want to entrust a hacker like Mark Zuckerberg with personal information of myself and my friends and our communication?” Let me help you out: No!
Even if you want, you cannot protect your privacy.
You automatically entrust all your Facebook friends with your personal information, even against third-parties (like web applications (web apps) and data-sharing partners of Facebook). You would never do this in real life, maybe not even with your closest friends. On Facebook you even let the least tech-savvy person you know (or maybe do not even know) manage your online privacy issues. How sick is that?
Data-sharing deals.
Anyone who connects the American Amazon web site with his or her Facebook account, gives Amazon not only his own personal data but also the data of all his / her Facebook friends. There are other, similar data-sharing deals.
Datasharing for personal purposes.
I do not understand why Facebook allows everyone to access and import my personal data, contacts, chats, etc. but me. Why can’t I export my Facebook address book but only parts of it? I do not like that kind of “nannyism”, at least, I do not need it. Do you?
Constantly changing privacy and account settings are annoying.
The Electronic Fountier Foundation has a nice chart, you might be interested in. Time tells: What’s private now, will be open in the future. You have to constantly re-read the changes Facebooks settings. Those changes used to be communicated to every memeber up until 2010 (I believe). This is when Facebook started to have you join the Facebook Fan-Page to be informed about TOC changes. Fail.
“The default is now social…”
Mark Zuckerberg says. Meaning, we will share all your information, there is no more private, learn to live with it. “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.” No, it just made your business model work.

Personal & Social Reasons to quit Facebook

Facebook doesn’t let you delete all your data.
When I tried to edit or delete my checkins to the newly introduced Facebook Places in Q1 2011, I realized, there is no way functionality for this. The Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities reads: For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (“IP content”), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (“IP License”). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it. As sharing data you and your friends upload to Facebook is what all the fun is about, this actually translates into “We will never delete anything”. Think about this.
Facial Recognition
Facebook’s facial-recognition feature – or “tag suggestions” – which allow users to identify people across multiple photos at once using facial-recognition software invades my privacy. The more photos of me are tagged with my name, the better the software works, the lesser privacy I get.
Facebook takes too much of my time.
I have better things to do than wasting my time on Facebook.
Broken Social Circle.
I have a huge friend list full of people who are not actual friends. I don’t know how that happened but my real-life social circle looks kind of different.
Friend or Foe?
People whom you would rather not like to be connected with, find and contact you. It is hard not to accept friendship requests.
You are being stalked.
Generally speaking, Facebook is not really helpful when it comes to relationships. It usually just causes ridiculous jealousy.
It just feels bad.
I live my life in a free world with plenty of freedoms. They range from free thinking, free software, freedom of speech, …simply freedom in all my decisions. Why would I want to be stuck in a walled garden like Facebook?
Facebook makes it incredibly difficult to really delete an account.
It is easy to find the “deactivate” option, but deactivation is not the same as deletion.