Why I quit Facebook and we are sharing much more than you think

Facebook was a great tool. Sadly, it no longer is and it will not be anymore.

Among my peers, I was the first person to create a Facebook profile back in 2007 when social media just gained ground. I was able to use Facebook to connect with some of my long lost peers - friends, relatives, classmates. The power of Facebook at that time was to find those whom you lost contact. It was a great tool, and because of it I was able to organize many re-unions and gatherings. I used it daily, hourly, frequently.

Would you like to participate in psychological experiments without your consent?

Slowly, though, Facebook changes its purpose to me. People started sharing enormous amount of pictures - monthly baby pictures, exotic vacation spots, expensive stuff they purchased, celebs they met. It becomes a giant garbage bin with information I have no interest in or even knowing about. And then there is the News feed (here is the recent controversial psychological experiment using news feed). I got bombarded with tons of advertisements from pages I 'liked', links I have clicked on (even outside Facebook). Also, when you have Facebook installed on your phone, you constantly want to check even if you have no new messages. You have the tendency to reply a short message here and there. This keeps an endless vicious loop of checking, waiting and replying. Although each time you reply a message it only takes a few seconds, every second adds up and soon I found myself wasting hours every day on Facebook 'activities'. The messaging feature, of course, eventually led to the prominent rise of WhatsApp and Facebook's purchase of the startup since they are such a match made in heaven.

Do you trust a hacker to safeguard your personal data?

The tipping point for me is the privacy issue of Facebook, which I won't get into detail as most of you are well familiar with how your pictures (or pictures containing you) are shared on the public web without your consent. As a technology professional working with organizations handling vast amount of highly sensitive and private data, I know how important it is to safeguard customer's data. I have nothing against Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook. In fact I admire him and his wife's philanthropic endeavor of donating millions of dollars to charity to fix schools in California and New Jersey in the U.S. This is such a noble thing for a couple to do even when they are already millionaires. However, you should realize that Mark is by heart 100% hacker himself all the way back in his Harvard days, and I have no desire to hand my personal data to a hacker so he can employ a team of hackers to sell them to advertisers. Just because Facebook obtain your personal information and social network profile doesn't mean they can use these data and take advantage of all those private information. Just locking up your profile and set everything to private is not enough to shield yourself from personal data being mined by Facebook.

It’s really important that people understand that there are computational techniques that will reveal all kinds of information about you that you’re not aware that you’re sharing - Jennifer Golbeck

Recently two TED talk lecturers, computer scientist Jennifer Golbeck and privacy economist Alessandro Acquisti, reveal the fact that we are sharing much more online than you think (videos of their talks can be found by following the link). Those information you already shared might one day be used against you, with or without your consent, and either legally or illegally. When you share information online, you are basically giving up rights to those data. Every site use our data to a certain extent, but Facebook does it much more secretively and aggressively than other social networking sites. Facebook treats users as products and not customers. Their customers are marketers and advertisers trying to sell us their products or services!

Since then I deleted my Facebook profile completely and permanently.

For the record, I love social media and I use LinkedIn, Twitter and Wordpress frequently to share with my followers many useful, insightful and meaningful articles and thoughts. I believe the internet is a powerful tool capable of making us more informed and making us more innovative. With the right tools we can empower ourselves. It is about time for you and your loved ones to re-evaluate your time spent on the most popular social network.

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Chris Chan is currently a Project Manager/Client Adviser for Inova Software in New York City. You can follow me on Twitter @ChrisChanAtWork .

My other articles:-

• An Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg (response to this article)
• An Unusual Life Lesson
• From Wine Tasting to Leadership Traits

Image courtesy of The Keep Calm-O-Matic