Suicide Solution – Goodbye To Facebook

SeppukuOn Christmas Eve 2011, I intend to commit suicide, as a Samurai would to regain his honour – or in reality, commit virtual seppuku. I’ve pretty much had it with the festering, turgid, data-mining advertising feed, AKA Facebook. Following an enlightening BBC programme it seems that like Google, Facebook’s sole raison d’être is to generate advertising income by sucking in keywords from users’ posts and ‘likes’ to match them up with targeted advertising. This of course, in the eyes of prepossessed stock-brokers, is a fantastic opportunity to make an overnight buck; or at least, a share of the reputed 100 billion of those virtual bucks, should it float…

It’s not that I’ve only just started to see the advertising; like everyone else, I flatly ignore it. But there is I fear, a more sinister undercurrent in the stream that floats the Facebook boat. Historically, Facebook has a poor record on privacy, choosing to bolt the stable door after the horses have hot-hoofed it over the hills and far away. Their (lack of) actions lead me to believe they have a policy of testing in a live environment to see how far they can push their envelope. The disturbing thing is, for every word I type and every ‘like’ I click, an advertising profile is being built around information extracted from my keyboard and mouse. It’s similar to actively granting key-logging software to be installed on your computer to record your every move. Not unlike Google really.

How many of you have Gmail accounts and don’t sign out your Google account after you’ve checked your email? It’s the same deal. If you’re signed into your Google account and continue to surf the web, they will, unless you specifically opt out of data collection, continue to monitor your web activity so they can tailor their advertiser’s products to the profile they build around your browsing habits. Dig deep enough and you can opt out; but you can’t with Facebook. Both companies have seemingly bottomless pits of digital storage where historical personal information can be stored infinitely and called upon to refine the ad-targeting process.

So this is where I get off the ride. It’s my opt-out from making too much information available to organisations who want to dehumanise people into click-through conversion-rate graphs. This is not some paranoia trip kicking in folks, this real. I see it in action on the work I’ve done using Google Ad-Words. Those services thrive on the science of perfectly targeted advertising, and it is a science that relies on data; data collected from you and me, while we mind our own business.

Whilst there’s not much (if anything) I can do about what data has already been collected and stored, at least I have the option of no longer actively participating. I’ll still keep a social-networking presence (for now) under my Twitter account – @thedrumdoctoruk – until of course the irritating ads start pumping my way – and Twitter could certainly use the revenue after their 2010 revenue deficit. I’ll also be contactable via this BLOG site – which doesn’t host any advertising…

So, until we meet in the next life, my Katana awaits…

Seems like Facebook don't like websites who actively encourage taking their advertising revenue away...

Seems like Facebook don’t like websites who actively encourage taking their advertising revenue away…

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