Last night I finally got around to deleting my Facebook account (really deleted it, not Facebook’s sneaky soft delete). This isn’t a manifesto about all the things wrong with Facebook or a big-think piece on privacy. It just comes down to this:
For years, I refused to get an EZ-Pass that would let me go through toll booths without having to wait in line to pay with cash. I commute on the highway a lot and the EZ Pass would save me a ton of time and effort (I live in a place that gets tons of tourist traffic in the summer, and the toll lanes can get backed up for 10 minutes or more). But I didn’t want to have “someone” be able to track my comings and goings–that’s how they always catch the bad guys in Law & Order. Well, I finally broke down because I figured there’s not THAT much data on the transponder, it’s extremely limited about what it can say about my activities, and it’s hard information to get to.
Cut to Facebook. I don’t use Facebook that much, but it still has FAR more information about me than an EZ Pass transponder, that information is more personal, it’s now much more widely distributed, and frankly I don’t trust Facebook even when they don’t mean to screw up. Plus I’m stuck reading tons of boring crap in my News Feed. Like Betty White said on SNL the other night, “back in my day seeing pictures of people’s vacations was considered a punishment.”
Both EZ Pass and Facebook offer some benefit at the cost of privacy and anonymity. The hangups about EZ Pass are trivial compared to Facebook and the benefits are real. So while I’m keeping my transponder, I’m ditching Facebook.
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