Quit Facebook Day clearly wasn’t a success. I dislike a lot about Facebook but deactivating my account is too drastic an action and I still don’t feel compelled to do it. I still like to use it as a directory of phone numbers sometimes. I’ve also managed to use it to find a couple of my relatives’ really good friends. So Facebook does have its plus points, but they tend to overshadow deficiencies that deserve an equal amount of attention. Why do people not understand a simple and sensitive subject like their own privacy? I’d actually like us to be more sensitive about other things too, but I’ll give each of those things separate mentions later. For the time being, I’ll limit the discussion to talk only about our privacy, which in the long run unfortunately, isn’t going to win any battle. Our problem is that human tendency guides us to prefer not to weigh the value of what we’re losing; we only see what we are gaining. Boosting our egos and emotional satisfaction by creating this pseudo-friendly bubble interacting with other people online, we’re ready to use any medium.

Free services like Facebook cannot survive just by having users sign in and sign out. They serve ads to users; this generates their money. To serve users ads that they might click, services and advertisers need to know what users want to see. Usually advertisers have limited access in the form of website analytics, they don’t see individual stats. But Facebook isn’t your usual browser bookmark. They send off all our data like gifts to advertisers. How they make us give them permission to do this is what is interesting. They make a change in their privacy policy, we roar and they tone down the language a little to keep us satisfied. This keeps happening and eventually the services get all the data they want from us, because by making those changes slowly their privacy policy reads exactly what they want it to read. We are horrified if a change is sudden, but not if it is gradual.

Those of you smart people who initially tried to resist joining Facebook are probably already aware that your data is being sifted through right this very moment so that advertisers can find out the different patterns and relationships it has with data others have posted online to generate a set of very personal advertisements. Facebook records everything we do logged in. Facebook shares the information it records with advertisers. Even before we can delete the content we wish we hadn’t posted, it has gone into the hands of the wrong people. They use this data to generate ads when our friends(and those two hundred others who aren’t really friends) login. It is a whole new level of personal. It’s funny because they do ask us to confirm that a person is our friend, but they never indicate a single instance of advertisers using our data as if they were our friends.

People don’t realize that the data they put up online represents a large part of them - a part of them that they don’t make so public in the real world. It is data that has somehow seeped out of the comfort zone that they haven’t been able to define as easily online. There’s no end to reiterating all that’s been mentioned here already. And to be clear, I do not want you to quit using the service. My only request is for you to be a little careful with how you treat your own data in web forms and dialog boxes while using services online. Facebook isn’t going to solve its issues overnight, despite all the hopes you may have. It’s easy for them to say sorry when the damage is done. Tomorrow.