I sent a message to a couple of hundred Facebook friends Friday letting them know I’ve deleted my account.

I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading about privacy issues lately. I’ve read dozens of articles similar to the one excerpted below,

Personal information can be cross-referenced and sold to third parties such as insurance companies, he said, which may make value-based decisions about consumers’ lifestyles and insurability. “You are seeing banks starting to look at social data,” he added, potentially looking at the credit rating of friends in someone’s circle. “It gets pretty scary for the end consumer when they are not aware of what is going on.”

Not only that, but I’ve encountered FB’s intrusive creepiness too many times. I got tired of having to update/change my privacy settings every two weeks based on their latest “auto-opt-in” feature that threatened to circumvent the data I’d restricted to a close circle of friends. In short, I got tired of being a commodity to be sold to marketers. It became easier to just scrap the whole thing.

"Joe failed to read the 'we can confiscate your furniture at any time' clause in the most recent update to the terms of service."

I’m not that great at keeping in touch with long lost friends though. This means I’ll have to work harder to connect with friends in old-school ways: like telephone and email. I’m hoping as a byproduct my interactions with those friends I do connect with will be richer and more intimate.

I’ll let you know how it all works out.

Cartoon by Hubspot, licensed under Creative Commons.