The beginning of Facebook's long slow decline?

Nothing lasts forever. Facebook's rapid growth has been accompanied by steadily eroding privacy, with particularly nasty changes in December and again just last month. And who knows what will happen in the future.

The Facebook Zeitgeist for May 2010

Why do most people go to Facebook? To share with friends and family, and to play games. OK, maybe not so much the games as time marches on:

And, well, as Danny Sullivan observes, maybe not so much sharing either as people realize how little Facebook respects their ability to make choices and exert control over the online aspects of their lives:

Don't have a Facebook account yet? It's never too late to join in the fun.

Want to help accelerate the trends? There are always the nuclear options.

Facebook: The Nuclear Options

Have you had it with Facebook's shenanigans? There are a few options short of quitting your browser and turning off your computer forever.


1. Log out of Facebook

Facebook recently made it harder to logout, moving the Logout link from an easy and obvious place on the main page, into the Account menu in the upper right:

Why? Maybe it was to give you and your friends the ultimate user experience (so, about that bridge I was talking to you about...). Maybe it was to maximize off-site interactions with Facebook Platform. Who knows, maybe removing it altogether isn't so far-fetched after all.

2. Block Facebook Cookies

Both Firefox and Chrome standard configurations allow you to block cookies on a site by site basis. In Safari, the best you can do without an add-on is to disable 3rd-party cookies and clear cookies when you quit (and quit often).

In Firefox Preferences > Privacy tab, click on the "Exceptions..." button for cookies:

Similarly, in Chrome Preferences, go to "Under the Hood" > Privacy "Content Settings..." > Cookies tab:

From there, "Exceptions"will allow you to block all cookies for any specified site(s):

You can still view public pages on Facebook without cookies, but it keeps Facebook from being able to follow you around (assuming it isn't doing more nefarious tracking by browser fingerprinting or other such methods). But if you want to still be able to log in from time to time, you could isolate your Facebook usage to a special browser and use a different browser with Facebook cookies blocked for all of your other surfing.

3. Block Facebook in your hosts file

This one is a little more technical and I won't get into all the details in this post, but the added advantage is blocking Facebook across all ports and applications on your (real or virtual) machine. Simply add a few lines to your hosts file:

127.0.0.1       www.facebook.com
127.0.0.1       facebook.com

Since the hosts file uses servers and not domains, unfortunately you'll need to block each Facebook subdomain in a separate line. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to identify all such subdomains.

4. Block Facebook at the DNS level

To accomplish roughly the same thing for all of your machines at once, you can block Facebook at the level of your DNS server (or with a proxy server). One free and easy DNS service is OpenDNS, which, after a simple sign-up (and an app to sync your IP address if you have dynamic IP), allows you to blacklist up to 25 whole domains (you don't have to worry about individual servers or subdomains if you don't want to).

5. Temporarily Deactivate Your Account

This one is a fairly obvious alternative, though a bit buried in the menus:

Then, you just have to keep your nerve to make it through the guilt trip gauntlet:

Did you make it through? Great! Now you've bought yourself some time to reflect on life, the universe, and everything.

6. Permanently Delete Your Account

When all else fails (though you may still want to do some blocking of cookies, servers, or domains), there's always the most nuclear of nuclear options... Delete My Account:

What's the worst that could happen? You change your mind later, or (miracle of miracles) Facebook cleans up its act, and you start from scratch with a wiser perspective.

"I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."

So You Want to Make a Facebook Account?

[This post is a follow-up to "Google: Good Privacy Starts with Good Account Creation"]


Once upon a time, when Facebook was still a private place for college friends to share, sign-up was easy:

And in those good old days, you could fully exercise your right to privacy, with only two exceptions: your Name and your Networks were always considered public. Now there's a little more to it:

Facebook thrives on real world identities. It used to be more for privacy and security, but now that a half billion people are locked in, these days it seems more like it's for crossing the offline and online streams to create a really meaty digital dossier for marketers (and who knows what other purposes).


About the birthday, and "Why do I need to provide this?":

It's an open secret that some users don't enter their real DOB. While I wouldn't encourage anyone to artificially increase their age to bypass legal compliance issues, I would definitely encourage anyone who does not plan to show their birth date to friends to choose a date that puts them well under 18. Why? You get additional privacy protections not available to the general public.


Choose your name wisely too. Facebook really wants your real name and actively weeds out accounts using pseudonyms (with the expected collateral damage), but a lucky few people do manage to fly under the radar. There are no easy second chances. If you try to change your name later, it takes manual intervention from a Facebook employee:

That's it? Well, no. Once you confirm your registration, you'll be guided through additional personal information gathering, much of which you can skip, but certain things are required. Ultimately, choose carefully when you add information to any field that becomes what Facebook calls "Publicly Available Information " (PAI):

• Name
• Profile Picture
• Gender
• Current City
• Networks
• Friend List
• Pages

Also remember that Pages now includes "Connections" created by information entered in certain parts of users' profiles, "including your current city, hometown, education and work, and likes and interests".


What does it mean for your personal information to be PAI? It means that even if you do manage for it not to show in your profile or in Facebook search or in public search, it may still be accessed by Facebook-enabled applications and websites. There's a clue in all of that about where Facebook's priorities are.


Now we're done, right? Well, actually before you fill out your profile you should review your privacy settings, so nothing slips out before you get your setings the way you want.

Be sure to visit all of the sections that affect your privacy. The layout is subject to change, but the basics should be accessible from here:

http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy

It can take quite a while to wade through all of the settings, there are many screens, many menus, and many clicks, and odds are you won't have full confidence in what's really going to happen with certain settings, so unfortunately you have to take your best shot and hope it works like you think.

Like with the PAI discussed above, there are certain choices that are just not available any longer. For example, you used to be able to block any new friend requests, but now the best you can do is limit it to Friends of Friends:

Similarly, there's no longer any way to opt out of Facebook messages (Facebook likes to keep your interactions all in the family):

Congratulations! You now have a working Facebook account. Only the basics have been covered here. Be sure to review the Terms and explore the Privacy Resources, including the actual Privacy Policy (which changes regularly). After all, this is presumably your real world identity and reputation Facebook now has significant control over. With so much more at stake, understanding how it all works –not a trivial task– is critical.

UPDATE 26 April 2010: Inside Facebook reports:

"Some new users signing up for Facebook are starting to see Pages integrated into the process, including the number of other people who like each Page... One note is that all of these Pages appear to be public by default, something new users may not realize as the fact isn’t disclosed within the sign-up process."

Yet another auto-opt-in gotcha for unsuspecting new users who may not want to publicize that kind of activity but don't yet have the knowledge to effectively manage the settings or even understand the implications.

Related Posts:
Facebook: the Nuclear Options
Google: Good Privacy Starts with Good Account Creation