Ten Good Reasons to Avoid Facebook

With the enormous success of social networking, success which still continues to grow at an alarm rate, many potential downsides have come to light over the past few years. Just a couple of months ago, we pointed out just how unwise it is to share too much information on a social network, like Facebook, because if you’re not careful, it could cost you your job. No joke, it happens often.

Losing a job isn’t the only side-effect from how you handle your social networking profiles, so overall, it’s better to be safe than sorry, as the old proverb goes. Gizmodo has posted an article that takes things at a slightly different view though, one that doesn’t have you think about how you act on a social network, but rather looks at problems with the social network itself. In this particular case, it’s Facebook that’s in the crosshair, and for good reason.

In this article is a list of 10 reasons that Facebook should simply be avoided, and they range from issues with privacy, security, data ownership to even the fact that it doesn’t truly support an “open Web”.

Personally, both the privacy and security issues are a reason for alarm, because as history has proven, Facebook is simply incompetent with both of these areas. On the privacy side, Facebook can’t seem to keep out of the news, as it keeps changing how it handles your private data and makes it harder all the time for you to have true control over your profile. On the security side, a book would have to be written. Just the other day, there was a major flaw that allowed you to view in on a friend’s conversation that they were having with someone else. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg… gaping holes like these are not new.

Another major issue some have with Facebook is that it’s nearly impossible to truly delete your account, should you want to. Whether or not it’s technically difficult or Facebook just doesn’t want you to leave is up for debate, but it’s likely the latter. I do know one thing, though, this article really makes me contemplate closing up my own Facebook account, or at least suspend it until the situation improves. It’s hard to respect a company who values both privacy and security so low on the scale.

Even if we weren’t talking about ethical issues here, I can’t trust Facebook’s technical competence to make sure my data isn’t hijacked. For example, their recent introduction of their “Like” button makes it rather easy for spammers to gain access to my feed and spam my social network. Or how about this gem for harvesting profile data? These are just the latest of a series of Keystone Kops mistakes, such as accidentally making users’ profiles completely public, or the cross-site scripting hole that took them over two weeks to fix. They either don’t care too much about your privacy or don’t really have very good engineers, or perhaps both.