Quit Facebook Day flops Monday's Quit Facebook Day turned out to be something of a damp squib. Just 34,100 of Facebook's more than 450 million members pledged to quit over privacy concerns. The low number is probably more a reflection of how hard it is to break the Facebook habit, rather than signifying acceptance of the simplified privacy controls …
ugh, even if it was a video and not a trojan, I still wouldn't want to see it.
Too many videos with titles like "watch this and try not to laugh" or "you could watch this 100 times and still laugh" all end up being lame unfunny slapstick that makes the Chuckle Brothers look like Bill Hicks and George Carlin.
do not want.
... and it was quite refreshing, actually.
I've called up my friends and we went out this last weekend. Had a laugh, enjoyed each others' company....I even didn't care when a friend went off to the bathroom, they didn't need to tell me every moment of their evening out whilst they were out with me!
Perhaps it's not addiction to Facebook. Maybe, just maybe, the people who aren't worried about security are smart enough to not post private information on the site and only invite friends who they actually know. Maybe they have anti-virus/anti-spyware protection. Really, security on facebook is only an issue if you're stupid enough to open your computer up to getting hacked, and if you are, you'll probably end up hacked when you go to another online site. Hackers are everywhere, and facebook is one of millions of sites plagued by hackers and spammers. To be hacked is something everyone online will encounter at some point, but it only takes one complete wipe of a hard drive to teach you to protect your vital information.
"Facebook chief exec Mark Zuckerburg claimed during a press conference announcing the simplified privacy settings that what Facebook users shared had no bearing on advertising revenues"
That's because what you set as "visible" to various groups using the myriad of settings is unrelated to what applications and advertisers have access to : http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/handy-facebook-english-translator
I ditched Facebook a month ago when I had people I never wanted to see contacting me over the phone and email claiming to know were I was.. Even tho I had the maximun security setting on I was still found.. I soon got rid of the thing. I must admit it was hard at first as all my mates are on it. But if they want me they can txt.
Where did these people get your phone and email? My phone number is not posted anywhere on FB, nor my address. My email is "friends only" (pretty much all of my settings are "friends only", although it is not immediately clear that the cute new pointy-clicky settings only apply to *some* of the information in your profile, you need to fiddle elsewhere to lock that up). In addition, my "friends" (icky abuse of the word "friend") are people I know from work who I am happy to share some information with. I get FB's suggestions of people I've never met, I get friends suggesting people I don't know. All of which are ignored.
Nobody wants to know where I am or where I was. Nobody cares, most of all me. :-) The information I have put on FB is a highly clipped "minimalist" version of reality. That's all my cow-orkers need, that's all I feel like telling them. You people, here, on El Reg, could tell a lot more about me by clicking my pseudo on the left and browsing the crap I've written to these forums. But in both cases, without either being an El Reg/FB mod or hacking, you'll not get my email address. A bit of abstract thinking will probably get you that, but that'd be my disposable address with heavy filtering (i.e. "if you aren't in my address book, attachments AND containing message will be auto-deleted") that I read as and when I feel like it as opposed to any priority.
Care about what you share. Enough to make you look vaguely interesting, nothing more. :-)
I don't buy into this 'pledge to leave' rubbish, its facebook take it or leave it, you're a grown up.
But i do take exception at El Reg playing fast and loose with statistics as the media is wont to to!!!
36K people of 450 million is less than 1/100th of 1%
Turn on your TV and pay attention to any advert that says 'In our survey, most women thought ... ' which is normally done on a sample size of only 1 or 2 hundred. In the UK this is less than 1/1000th of 1% of the population. So, although only a drop a drop in the ocean indeed, a statistically significant one!
Let us not forget that 1% of the population of India is Hindu, yet that is more than 1 million people.
apparently your dumb ass can't understand the difference between a statistical sample and a group of people who are NOT selected for statistical purposes.
here, let me explain: if you take 1000 british people that live in london and ask them where they live, it is NOT correct to say based on that that 100% of british people live in london. get it ? nah, i doubt you do.
those 34k people got together for a reason: to quit facebook. so even if all of them did, it doesn't mean all the users of facebook quit the site. on the other hand the percentage of people who expressed interest in organizing this protest might be somewhat relevant - just 34k out of hundreds of millions is a very small percentage, and even if there were 10 times more, it still would be next to nothing.
now if you want to have something resembling real science you can take 1000 RANDOM users of facebook and ask them if they intend to quit because of the privacy concerns. of course it wouldn't be real science, cause your sample would influence the result, but this is what you have formulas for. formulas for deducting the proper sample size and the error margins for a sample. and of course proper sample sizes depend on the sampling technique, from random (basic, more error prone) to more advanced and less error prone techniques.
PS: what the fuck is this facebook i keep hearing about ?
Most people don't quit facebook, they just leave. I don't know how many people I've talked to (In real life, imagine!) that say, "Facebook? Yeah, I went there, tried it for awhile... I probably still have an account."
Kind of like Second Life, where people played with it awhile, then moved on to the next toy.
Since the privacy hoo-ha people have been leaving (see past Reg stories about "delete Facebook account" rising in the Goolge search rankings). I've got various social networking accounts that have lapsed but I deleted Facebook.
I'm tempted to re-register to see how much of my info Facebook "remembers" but fear that reattaching the "hosepipe of shite" (it's how I've come to imagine the FB news feed) might mean I don't delete it again.
It is one of those critical mass things. FB really irrelevant unless your friends use it.
If you're in your past your mid 40s, probably few of your friends use it, so why should you?
Games? Farmville? Most FB users block those game applications because they are time wasters.
So you probably made the right decision for you given your circle of friends.
I was one of the few who wanted to quit. It is almost impossible to find the page where you can delete your account. I found it with a search engine and with documents about how to delete the profile, not because Facebook allowed me to do it.
Moreover, I requested my account to be deleted. It wasn't delete as I requested but i was informed that it will be in 14 days if I won't login during this period of time. I didn't and I am absolutely sure NOONE did with my account.. With all these I today got an email from Facebook that informed me that my account was reactivated.
This is lowest than I imagined a legal entity could perform in a civilized society. I am deeply disgusted by their tactics Today again I asked for my account to be deleted. I again have to wait for 14 days and maybe the'll inform me again that my account is forcefully reactivated.
Facebook owners are kind of guys you really don't want to mess with. I regret the second I tried their services and I think authorities should really step in.
I have a facebook account, and I use it for exactly what it's for. Free advertising. I know employers are going to look for my facebook under the table, so I have things on there like, "Put in a good 8 hours, feel like I accomplished a ton. Nothing better than feeling productive!" ( something I actually believe, btw ).
Yes, facebook has my "social net". It knows who my friends are...sorta. Big whoops, it's the price of the advertising I get through facebook.
Never heard of the quit-day thing until just now.
Not that I have security issues with the Good Book anyway - I have everything open access to all as it is the best security - it forces me to never post anything I wouldn't want every passing stranger to know. The test is - would I be comfortable writing this on a big sheet of cardboard and sticking it in my front window. If the answer is 'no' then don't post it!
Not that I use FB much anyway. Just a token presence to keep friends happy.
Hard to view something that every paper and news site is talking about as a flop.
I quit facebook to raise awareness about online privacy in general and facebook specifically, a website I no longer can support due to Zuckerberg himself, facebook's 'opt-out' attitude and their absolute lack of a meaningful and trustworthy apology when they screw things up.
I didn't sign up or use a site to signal my intentions, so I'm wondering how accurate this harmless opinion piece is when determining the numbers who quit?
Thanks for helping me spread the message Register. ;-)
Or possibility #5: everyone who wants to quit over privacy already has, except for 30K of folks out of 450 million. That's 0.00006% for those who like infinitesimally small pie graph slices... real world example: a sliver of cherry cheesecake cut with an electron knife. Not enough for a taste of cheesecake, let alone the almighty Z to care about privacy issues any more than he does. The only reason 'action' is being taken is to shut the media up about it.
I think a large number of people are concerned about their privacy on Facebook, but aren't so fatalistic as people who choose to leave: It's possible that people who have privacy issues with Facebook might still want to use Facebook.
I quit fakebook in a heartbeat a few months ago and really don't miss it at all. Instead of getting invites to events through FB I get an email, a text, phone-call or a personal invite in the pub.
Nothing like quitting smoking. Those shiny white coffin nails are gonna go with me to the grave :)
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