Society - Written Friday, May 7, 2010 by Jeff DeChambeau - 6 Comments

A rough week for Facebook (and the privacy of facebook users)

Early last week a blog post titled Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook starting making the rounds. The article has been followed by a dogpile of evidence supporting any decision to quit the site. The EFF published a quick piece showing the erosion of facebook privacy since 2005. A bug was discovered that let you spy on the real-time conversations of any of your friends. And, the nail in the coffin for my account, another bug was discovered that facebook was allowing third party sites automatic access to user data, without the approval of users. Just today I came across a great interactive graph that shows just how bad, coding errors notwithstanding, the privacy situation on facebook has become.

(Click for the full/interactive chart, it should make far more sense than the clip above)

I conducted a highly informal and unscientific poll of the nGenera Insight staff here in the Toronto office. Fully 3/4 of our facebook-using colleagues have stripped their profile of information because of these privacy policy changes and tech blunders, and in some cases have chosen to walk away from the site entirely.

With each iterative change it seems like facebook inches closer to a user pain-point that drives users away from the site for good. What do you expect it would take you to walk away from the site?