Wow, this is exactly the sort of thing I was on about when I left Facebook.

All,

After a lot of thinking about it, I have decided to close my Facebook account. This has not so much about privacy concerns regarding Facebook-ed friends or their friends seeing, for example, who I am friends with, etc., but around the use of data collected by "Facebook business partners" as well as the effects of what other Facebook users do, and what may or may not be attributed to myself or others who are my Facebook friends, as a consequence. The latest example is the "iLike" button, about which you can read here. Taking that as just one example, it is a commonly-held and often rightly-held belief that people who like a certain thing or hold a certain belief will be associated with those who also like that thing or hold that belief. But since with Facebook there are so many people connected to one another who often have never met or who have not seen one another for years, this is not a correct assumption. Yet some person's clicking of the "iLike" button on some web site will create a purported endorsement in the minds (or computers) or marketers or other buyers of Facebook-vended data that you may be in agreement with that product as a valuable thing or the ideas expressed by the article that some Facebook friend of yours has "iLike"d. The days when Facebook and indeed many other social networking sites were just ways to keep in touch with others for the price of having to put up with some pop-up or Google ads now seem to be behind us. Facebook and other social networking sites are now using our personal associations to find ways to stereotype us and gain information that we did not intend for them to gain. It also seems the management of these companies, like that of others, cannot always be trusted to admit when they are not playing by even their own rules. (one example from 2007 is here.)

It is hard for me to close my account since it seems Facebook has almost become a staple of modern life in terms of keeping up with others. However I think we have to all remember that there was life before the Internet and after the Internet, there was life before Facebook. If you want to get in touch with me via the Internet, there's always this blog and email!