Humanism, atheism and other freedoms

I asked Facebook to close my account. And it seems they obeyed. But there was something about the company’s reponse that made me uneasy.

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Caving in to pressure from users and the New York Times, Facebook has finally created a process by which you can delete your account entirely. Now let’s hope we can trust them to do this, because there’s really no way to check.

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If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. How often do we hear this from those who would promote surveillance, increased police powers and other forms of social control? But there is a basic flaw at the heart of this thinking: who decides what constitutes ‘hiding’? How do you decide what is acceptable behaviour?

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We all know Facebook won’t let you quit: you can deactivate an account, but not erase it. Many of us, who value our privacy, think this is disgraceful and arrogant. Facebook seems to think it owns us. But why worry? Just make sure all the information they have about you is false.

When I first heard about, and joined, Facebook it seemed like an amusing idea – for about a week. That’s about as long as it took to hook up with a bunch of old friends with whom I’d lost contact. Then the annoyances really set it – people badgering me to install applications to do things whose triviality and pointlessness make Big Brother seem positively constructive. Then there’s the advertising. And above all, the dawning realisation that I was doing all the work to make Mark Zuckerberg rich – by providing lots of intimate details about myself that he could sell.

Facebook is a waste of bandwidth. So why not leave? The answer is, they won’t let you. Your data is just too valuable to them. They can’t let you go.

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