[iamdave]

I experienced first hand the drug like quality of Facebook when I made the decision to finally quit..I started asking friends if I had an up to date contact number for them as I was planning to leave the site.

Every single one of them, EVERY one of them made it a mission of sorts to keep me from leaving the site.

"Just unfollow people, spend less time on the site"

Well by spending NO time on the site I AM spending less time on the site so hey we both get what we want right?

One friend went armchair psychologist on me about the affair.

It was an interesting week between emails,phone calls and text messages asking me where I had gone and why. "was it something I posted?"

For my part three months later...I've been reading a lot more and my grades in pre-law are improving, and that's all the feedback I needed to know I was on the right track to removing unnecessary cruft from the life.

[sova]

Yes, it's really bizarre, even the application/website itself has a whole guilt-trip gauntlet when you choose to deactivate your account. Not to mention that you cannot actually ever even _delete_ your data, you can only put your account into a suspended state of stasis.

The only people I know of who have success in their facebookian encounters are:

+ activists + artists (who connect under pseudonyms) + businesspeople (who connect under the umbrella of their company)

[emidln]

Data created on someone else's computer cannot ever be owned by you. Data created by someone else's proprietary software on your locked computer is probably never exclusively yours either.

[sova]

Yes! Software "ownership" is a fascinatingly blurry ground.

Still though, just because I upload a picture to [f], it is no longer information regarding me? Perhaps it is a greater question of associability of information.

Why is not the great battle of the 21st century the right to privacy? Brand valuability and Information Collection are becoming synonymous.