Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook

Facebook privacy policies keep going down the drain. That's enough reason for many to abandon it. Here you will find nine more:

After some reflection, I've decided to delete my account on Facebook. I'd like to encourage you to do the same. This is part altruism and part selfish. The altruism part is that I think Facebook, as a company, is unethical. The selfish part is that I'd like my own social network to migrate away from Facebook so that I'm not missing anything. In any event, here's my "Top Ten" reasons for why you should join me and many others and delete your account.

10. Facebook's Terms Of Service are completely one-sided

Let's start with the basics. Facebook's Terms Of Service state that not only do they own your data (section 2.1), but if you don't keep it up to date and accurate (section 4.6), they can terminate your account (section 14). You could argue that the terms are just protecting Facebook's interests, and are not in practice enforced, but in the context of their other activities, this defense is pretty weak. As you'll see, there's no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt. Essentially, they see their customers as unpaid employees for crowd-sourcing ad-targeting data.
9. Facebook's CEO has a documented history of unethical behavior

From the very beginning of Facebook's existence, there are questions about Zuckerberg's ethics. According to BusinessInsider.com, he used Facebook user data to guess email passwords and read personal email in order to discredit his rivals. These allegations, albeit unproven and somewhat dated, nonetheless raise troubling questions about the ethics of the CEO of the world's largest social network. They're particularly compelling given that Facebook chose to fork over $65M to settle a related lawsuit alleging that Zuckerberg had actually stolen the idea for Facebook.
8. Facebook has flat out declared war on privacy



Founder and CEO of Facebook, in defense of Facebook's privacy changes last January: "People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time." More recently, in introducing the Open Graph API: "... the default is now social." Essentially, this means Facebook not only wants to know everything about you, and own that data, but to make it available to everybody. Which would not, by itself, necessarily be unethical, except that ...
7. Facebook is pulling a classic bait-and-switch

At the same time that they're telling developers how to access your data with new APIs, they are relatively quiet about explaining the implications of that to members. What this amounts to is a bait-and-switch. Facebook gets you to share information that you might not otherwise share, and then they make it publicly available. Since they are in the business of monetizing information about you for advertising purposes, this amounts to tricking their users into giving advertisers information about themselves. This is why Facebook is so much worse than Twitter in this regard: Twitter has made only the simplest (and thus, more credible) privacy claims and their customers know up front that all their tweets are public. It's also why the FTC is getting involved, and people are suing them (and winning).

Check out this excellent timeline from the EFF documenting the changes to Facebook's privacy policy.
6. Facebook is a bully

When Pete Warden demonstrated just how this bait-and-switch works (by crawling all the data that Facebook's privacy settings changes had inadvertently made public) they sued him. Keep in mind, this happened just before they announced the Open Graph API and stated that the "default is now social." So why sue an independent software developer and fledgling entrepreneur for making data publicly available when you're actually already planning to do that yourself? Their real agenda is pretty clear: they don't want their membership to know how much data is really available. It's one thing to talk to developers about how great all this sharing is going to be; quite another to actually see what that means in the form of files anyone can download and load into MatLab.
5. Even your private data is shared with applications

At this point, all your data is shared with applications that you install. Which means now you're not only trusting Facebook, but the application developers, too, many of whom are too small to worry much about keeping your data secure. And some of whom might be even more ethically challenged than Facebook. In practice, what this means is that all your data - all of it - must be effectively considered public, unless you simply never use any Facebook applications at all. Coupled with the OpenGraph API, you are no longer trusting Facebook, but the Facebook ecosystem.
4. Facebook is not technically competent enough to be trusted

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.
3. Facebook makes it incredibly difficult to truly delete your account

It's one thing to make data public or even mislead users about doing so; but where I really draw the line is that, once you decide you've had enough, it's pretty tricky to really delete your account. They make no promises about deleting your data and every application you've used may keep it as well. On top of that, account deletion is incredibly (and intentionally) confusing. When you go to your account settings, you're given an option to deactivate your account, which turns out not to be the same thing as deleting it. Deactivating means you can still be tagged in photos and be spammed by Facebook (you actually have to opt out of getting emails as part of the deactivation, an incredibly easy detail to overlook, since you think you're deleting your account). Finally, the moment you log back in, you're back like nothing ever happened! In fact, it's really not much different from not logging in for awhile. To actually delete your account, you have to find a link buried in the on-line help (by "buried" I mean it takes five clicks to get there). Or you can just click here. Basically, Facebook is trying to trick their users into allowing them to keep their data even after they've "deleted" their account.
2. Facebook doesn't (really) support the Open Web

The so-called Open Graph API is named so as to disguise its fundamentally closed nature. It's bad enough that the idea here is that we all pitch in and make it easier than ever to help Facebook collect more data about you. It's bad enough that most consumers will have no idea that this data is basically public. It's bad enough that they claim to own this data and are aiming to be the one source for accessing it. But then they are disingenuous enough to call it "open," when, in fact, it is completely proprietary to Facebook. You can't use this feature unless you're on Facebook. A truly open implementation would work with whichever social network we prefer, and it would look something like OpenLike. Similarly, they implement just enough of OpenID to claim they support it, while aggressively promoting a proprietary alternative, Facebook Connect.
1. The Facebook application itself sucks

Between the farms and the mafia wars and the "top news" (which always guesses wrong - is that configurable somehow?) and the myriad privacy settings and the annoying ads (with all that data about me, the best they can apparently do is promote dating sites, because, uh, I'm single) and the thousands upon thousands of crappy applications, Facebook is almost completely useless to me at this point. Yes, I could probably customize it better, but the navigation is ridiculous, so I don't bother. (And, yet, somehow, I can't even change colors or apply themes or do anything to make my page look personalized.) Let's not even get into how slowly your feed page loads. Basically, at this point, Facebook is more annoying than anything else.

Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook

Facebook is clearly determined to add every feature of every competing social network in an attempt to take over the Web (this is a never-ending quest that goes back to AOL and those damn CDs that were practically falling out of the sky). While Twitter isn't the most usable thing in the world, at least they've tried to stay focused and aren't trying to be everything to everyone.

I often hear people talking about Facebook as though they were some sort of monopoly or public trust. Well, they aren't. They owe us nothing. They can do whatever they want, within the bounds of the laws. (And keep in mind, even those criteria are pretty murky when it comes to social networking.) But that doesn't mean we have to actually put up with them. Furthermore, their long-term success is by no means guaranteed - have we all forgotten MySpace? Oh, right, we have. Regardless of the hype, the fact remains that Sergei Brin or Bill Gates or Warren Buffett could personally acquire a majority stake in Facebook without even straining their bank account. And Facebook's revenue remains more or less a rounding error for more established tech companies.

While social networking is a fun new application category enjoying remarkable growth, Facebook isn't the only game in town. I don't like their application nor how they do business and so I've made my choice to use other providers. And so can you.

Dan Yoder is a serial entrepreneur and the VP of Engineering at Border Stylo, a Hollywood-based social media startup. He can be reached on Twitter as @dyoder.

Disclosure by Dan Yoder: I'm the VP of Engineering for a Hollywood-based social media startup, BorderStylo. The opinions expressed here are purely my own and are not in any way endorsed by my employer. While I do not see our applications as directly competitive to Facebook, nor have I presented them as such, it would be disingenuous not to mention this.

Thanks to David Harthcock for creating the great "Ban Facebook" graphic.

The author of this post can be contacted at tips@gizmodo.com
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The Secret to Finding a Job Now - Five reasons to use a staffing firm

What if I told you that I knew how you could find a job without having to dig through hundreds of job postings, wait for weeks to hear back from an employer, negotiate your salary or blindly walk into an interview ... and you could do it all for free?


I bet you'd say, "Where do I sign up?" I would answer, "With a recruiter."

Headhunters, recruiters, staffing agents -- call them what you will -- are here for one reason and one reason only: To help you and employers find a match in long-term employment.

Unfortunately, recruitment, a $92 billion industry, is virtually untouched by job seekers. Forty percent of job candidates are unable to name a single staffing firm from memory and only 20 percent have used a staffing firm in their most recent job search, according to a recent study by CareerBuilder.com and the Inavero Institute for Service Research.

Instead, job seekers are utilizing other resources in their search for employment. The average candidate uses up to four different sources in his search and only 4 percent of people turn to recruiters as their first method, according to the survey. Eighty percent of job seekers use online job boards as their first resource.

Let's take a look at why job seekers aren't using the efficiencies of staffing firms.

The perception gap

The staffing industry bears a heavy load of misconceptions, the one of the most common being that recruiters cost money. Eight percent of job seekers are under the impression that there will be costs to them if they utilize a staffing firm, according to the survey. Most recruiters are free to candidates, however, and it's very rare that the expense of a recruiter will influence an employer's hiring decision. In fact, Eric Harrington , president of Healthcare Solutions, a California-based staffing firm, says the money lost on a bad hire is about 10 to 20 times more than what a recruiter is paid to fill the position with a great match for the company.

Additionally, 10 percent of job seekers believe staffing agents only fill temporary positions. They feel as though they are only used to "fill a hole" rather than find gainful employment, according to the survey. In reality, it behooves recruiters to find clients long-term employees. Companies are considered clients to recruiters and they get paid by them to locate talent. If a recruiter consistently delivers unreliable, temporary candidates, it's unlikely he will help that client for very long.

A third false impression of the staffing industry is the experience job candidates take away from it. Twenty-five percent of survey respondents indicated that headhunters are unresponsive or don't follow up with them. Other issues they reported included thinking that they were not advocated for and that they were treated as a "warm body" or "product" by the staffing firms.

Though every job seeker's experience with a recruiter is different and varies by the people he or she works with, there are a variety of reasons why job candidates can benefit from using a staffing agent.

Here are seven reasons why you should use a recruiter in your next job search:

1. It's free.

2. Recruiters get to know you and put you in companies where your career can flourish. You can be honest with a headhunter in terms of your likes and dislikes when it comes to an employer. Since a good recruiter should know the ins and outs of a company, he or she uses these details to find a job best suited to you.

3. They can negotiate a higher salary for you. Recruiters have better knowledge of the job market and salary ranges for different positions. Generally, it's to the headhunter's advantage to obtain a higher salary for the candidate, says Kelly Smith , a corporate contract recruiter. Usually, recruiters are paid a fee based on the overall salary that a candidate receives, so they will work to negotiate a realistic salary for both parties.

4. They can get the inside scoop. Headhunters know their clients. They work with them over and over again so they know what the company is truly looking for in an employee, says Lori Marcus , principal for Quad656. They can prepare you for a company's interview style, tell you what types of questions interviewers may ask, inform you of its pet peeves, tell you where and why others have failed to get to the next step and how to get the information from them that you may need to make a decision as to whether it's the best fit for you.

Smith says recruiters can also give the candidate the dirt on a company's corporate culture as well as requirements for the job that may not be written in the job description.

5. You don't have to wait to hear back from someone. Some human resource departments are notorious for not getting back to candidates or for taking weeks to do so, Harrington says. Recruiters have immediate contact with hiring managers so you don't have to wait for anyone to contact you. They get you an answer one way or another.

6. Recruiters can identify opportunities that may not be advertised and that really exist. Recruiters have leads on positions you may never hear about otherwise, says Lindsay Olson , a recruiter and partner with Paradigm Staffing, a staffing firm that specializes in placing public relations and communications professionals. Some companies use headhunters to fill confidential positions that they don't want to post publicly. When you hear of a job through a recruiter, you know there is actually an opening.

7. You can get feedback and guidance from recruiters before interviews. When you meet with a recruiter, you can get specialized pointers before going on interviews, says Jodi Smith , a human resources professional and etiquette consultant. From advice on purchasing a different tie, perfecting a firmer handshake and better eye contact, to specific feedback on how to phrase answers and helping you identify your strengths and weaknesses, candidates can polish their image and be prepared before meeting with a hiring manager.

From: CareerBuilder.com

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