Social Networking Site 'Facebook' Could Be Trouble For Users - And Here's Why

Wow. So there is absolutely no way to delete your account, short of hiring hackers to attack or something? They really are out of control, I'm glad I never signed up with them.

You could always restart the account and empty all the information and set up a dummy email to grab all of the updates. That way you won't be bothered with it.

There was actually a blog post about this recently. The guy found out the only way to delete the account was to completely empty the account (manually delete EVERY SINGLE NOTE AND WALL POST) and then have Facebook manually delete it. Not an easy task.

The massive number of silly emails I received from my good-hearted friends at Facebook became more than I could handle.

*coughcelestinaclausdenniswaltcough*

=P

I was introduced to Facebook by friends. At first, it was nice to see all the people from my graduating class I didn't know what happened.

Then they opened it up to high school. OK, I guess that's not too bad. I know a few people still stuck there.

Then they opened it up to everyone. Umm...sorta ruins the closer community, but...ok...I guess.

Then I started getting requests from people I'd never met. You went to the same school I went to how many years after I graduated, but you don't know who the heck I am, yet you want me on your list? Not so fine anymore.

Then came the third party applications. Well...some of these are cool...I guess. I wonder what my friends have. *page loads for 30 seconds, crashes browser* Okay, we've reached MySpace here.

Then came the emails from third party applications. New mail rule: Message contains "Facebook" = Junk.

Then they started using me to sell stuff to other people. Where's the "delete and destroy" button?

Robert, I'm clipping your column for future reference, I know what you mean about all the silly add-on's.

That's so interesting. Thanks for telling us. Maybe facebook really is the right hand of satan... haha!

I was addicted to Facebook for about a minute. I haven't checked my page in a couple months. I get those emails all the time, I just trash them. To me, and this is just my opinion, Facebook isn't so much about keeping up with friends, it's about friends keeping up with you. It's narcissism at it's core. "Hey, look at me, look at what I listen to, look at what I read." In truth, most people don't even look that much at their friends pages, they are too busy building up their own pages, hoping that all of their friends are looking at it, thinking how cool they are, when in reality they aren't, they are looking at their own pages, thinking how cool they are.

It's kinda sad, really. I remember when my sister was in her freshman or sophomore year at college, and she was telling me about this awesome site that had so many people from school, and made it real easy to find your classmates. She'd go on an on about how simple it was to get assignments she might have missed, find someone whose name she couldn't quite remember, get notes, find a study partner, etc.

Now, it's just MySpace with slightly less awful formatting.

I had a similar experience with myspace. After I endured their rigorous please-don't-leave trials and they said they'd deleted my account, I continued to receive emails from myspace. I complained, telling them to delete my contact information, but they didn't. After a few responses from their illiterate support staff, which entirely neglected to address the subject of my request, I gave up. I just report whatever they send as spam.

Facebook was better, but now all these feed items about tootsie and jim bob comparing movie compatibility and bubba got a new super, super, mega, mega wall post, I'm about ready to leave facebook.

Honestly, I don't think this is a huge thing to worry about. It's not like Facebook employees are snooping around your personal information snickering to themselves over the messages you've received and sent. And if they're giving or selling your personal information to third parties, or even just continuing to send you unwanted emails, you can probably bring them to court over it. All they've done is made it so that if you change your mind later on, you can do so easily. No harm in that. Just like the way WoW keeps your characters in their database after you cancel service, so you can still come back to them later if you want.