Leaving Facebook

I’m pretty sure I am going to close my facebook account next week.

I’m a very open guy about my life – hell I documented everything I did for years on my old site Scotsmanality, with pictures and everything. There’s not much people don’t know about me. But the more I think about it, the more I realize how creepy and fucked up Facebook is.

I was having a conversation with a friend about a month back. He had just hooked up with a new girlfriend, and he was telling me about her. He said “But check this weird thing she posted on her facebook” and proceeded to post a status update with her name attached to it.

Within 5 minutes, I was able to know all the intimate details of her life. Just by searching her name, I was able to find her profile. From there I was able to see pictures of her growing up, pictures of her with her family, what her nephews looked like, where she spent last Summer on vacation, what books she just finished reading, what TV shows she liked to watch. Hell, I knew she had an iPhone, what concerts she was planning on attending – everything. From there I was able to view her friends list, and if I so desired look at her parents facebook pages and find out everything about them.

That’s fucked up.

Me and my friend then had a long conversation about privacy on facebook, and how there isn’t any. Plus one thing that I always find fucked up is you don’t know who is viewing your profile, or who is spying on you. So I decided to do a quick test: my facebook profile and everything on it was currently open to everyone. Any random googler could find out everything about me, see pictures of my family, see what I did for a living, and everything else.

So I blocked it all.

I did all the privacy settings changes, so that only people on my friends list could see any information about me. Everyone else who was e-stalking me were completely shit out of luck. I wondered if the people that visited my profile regularly would then add me as a friend. I figured I might get 2 or 3 requests, but that would be it.

35 requests. in 48 hours. From people I barely knew, people who were friends of a friend, people who I went to school with, people in the industry I work on. 35 different people had visited my profile, saw it was all private, and wanted to add me as a friend.

Again, very fucked up.

I just don’t know how people can use facebook, especially with all the trust issues. Hell, there was a super easy exploit to view other peoples live chats history just a few days ago. God knows what they are doing behind the scenes at facebook.

I’ll sleep on it, but I’m pretty sure I am done. And seriously – if something like this creeps ME out, then it should really be making you think twice.