goodbye, facebook.

after some years of using it, i finally decided to leave facebook. i was never a huge fan of facebook, even though during some times, i used it rather intensely. over time, facebook changed. most of the time, not for good. facebook tried to create a own sub-internet, trying to convince users to only use this sub-net, ignoring the rest of the net. a recent peak was their (again, forced) introduction of email addresses for all their user, replacing user specified email addresses on the users’ profiles by the facebook one. besides that, facebook is spying on their users. a lot, in many regards. facebook is tracking their users while they use the web (using many websites which use the “like” button “correctly”). facebook evaluates all communication done over facebook. facebook is trying to keep track on how we live, offline and online, by keeping track of our position. facebook is trying to obtain information about us by trying to convince our friends to add stuff about us – for example revealing our correct name. and worst of all, facebook is trying to undermine many basic principles of data protection, including european data protection laws.
for me, there is almost no reason left to stay with facebook – except that it allows to keep track of people from all around the world, stay in contact with them; people i met at conferences, at places where i was living, during school, etc.
this is quite important, as it is not very easy to keep track of many people who don’t have a (permanent) blog, website, or email address. which is the case for the vast majority of people. for that reason, i will keep my account – at least for some time, maybe until a better alternative comes around. but i will not feed it with any information. i will only use it as a kind of “business card”, which points to spielwiese, and contains a working email address of mine. i might use it to retrieve contact data of other people, or see what they are doing, in case they still actively use facebook. but i won’t add any more content to facebook. no more posts, no more comments, no more photos, no more “like”s.
and in case you want to contact me, send me an email. or comment in my blog. but please avoid sending me messages via facebook :-)