Confessions of an ex-Facebook user

Yeah, I'm one of em.

Like the Microsoft commercial, I can say that quitting Facebook was my idea. Before all the hubub that has come up over the past month or so.

I mean, even Congress is investigating Facebook. I am pretty happy about that too, I mean, they can only do so much, and I'm glad that they are picking their battles, what with the "exploding" budget deficit, the immigration crisis, and Bill O'Reilly not being able to get a taxi in New York, I mean, I'm glad that they are prioritizing.

I got into this thing because a lot of the family was in there, and if one wanted to keep up with things, well, we no longer talked on the phone, the more social among us text-messaged now and again, but if you wanted to know anything, it was online. (At one recent informal gathering, one of my relatives conducted all out cyber-warfare with another, via Facebook, and I felt a little bit sad, not being near a laptop or smartphone, so I would be acutely aware of which one was the biggest bitch...). Even now, I am tempted to log in with somebody else's ID just to see if there has been a killing or perhaps the unearthing of some embarrassing photo's.

But I digress.

When I started the account, I took close to an hour one day and went through every available setting and made almost every facet of my page private, viewable by my designated 'friends' only. Within days, the operator changed the rules and all that went out the window. I took a little time, read upon the changes, judged them to be acceptable, changed my settings yet again, and called it good.

Yeah, right.

They did it again.

Now, I am not a person who puts a lot of real personal stuff online, so I did not feel that i was in a lot of danger, but they made everything that I had public, allowed every friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend-of-another-friend-who-once-chatted-with-somebody eligible to look at my page. Many did. It seemed that overnight, I got a lot of 'targeted' emails.

Frankly, I felt like I had been screwed.

Those of you who know me and my little peculiarities know (or suspect) that I might have taken a few covert steps to minimize the crap. I did, and I did.

What chaps me is that the provider has absolutely no regard for its clientele, and seems to be willing to tell any lie, change any rule at any time, to get its way. I don't mind them making money, I don't like, but don't mind the ads, (the system is, after all, free of monetary cost to me), but I do dislike being lied to.

I went through the system one more time, and deleted everything that I could, turned off every option and subsystem, then meticulously followed the instructions to delete my account. Even then, they presented the caveat that the account will still be there, any attempt to access it will automatically renew it. Right now, I wonder if it has to be me that try's to access it? What if somebody searches for me?

I don't know, but this seemingly innocuous site is one more step towards something we don't want to think about.