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Talk Like a Pirate Day. I meant to have a pirate themed comic today, but too much grog last night kept that from happening. Despite this, you all should celebrate this great day (Pi-rate shirt optional.)
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09/12/07
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It is no secret that I'm not a big fan of Facebook. Despite my general dismay with the direction of Facebook over the last year, I kept my account as it was useful for finding classmates. With the recent removal of the ability to add your courses to your profile (and to search for people by course), I found myself in a position where I no longer had use for Facebook, and decided to delete my profile. Easier said than done. You see, Facebook does not provide an option to delete your profile. Let me repeat that so that its inanity can be fully realized. You CANNOT delete YOUR OWN profile from Facebook. The best that is offered by the ever benevolent Facebook is an option to "deactivate" your account, which will leave all information, photos, etc intact on the Facebook servers. This is great, if you think you may want to come back. It is very bad, however, if you care about control over your personal information. At this point, I did some searching on the internet, and learned that if you wish to delete a Facebook account, they will require you to empty your account (a process that the Facebook interface does not facilitate, as each friend, each wall post, each photo must be removed one by one.) Having done this (thankfully, I'm not very popular, so I only had about 20 wall posts) I deactivated my account and then sent an email to Facebook asking for the deletion of my account. It was an annoying process, but it was over, right? Wrong. Mike Fenwick to privacy@facebook.com So in the end, it took three separate, and in no way ambiguous requests over the course of two days to get my account deleted. Personally, I think this level of service (or lack thereof) is abhorrent. I'd say it's enough to make me want to delete my Facebook account, but the irony is that I already have, and even if I hadn't, I'd have a hell of a time doing so. |