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."