Why this article is crap.

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

No they aren't. In return for accepting them, you get to use the site. See? Two-sided.

>> 9. Facebook's CEO has a documented history of unethical behavior

Then he proceeds to list one unproven allegation, and one lawsuit settlement. We sometimes settle lawsuits where the negative outcome, although unjust, is likely enough that the settlement is probably cheaper. These points so laughably fail the "documented" standard that I should just stop reading now, but I can't.

>> 8. Facebook has flat out declared war on privacy

They are responding to their users' preferences. If anything, users have declared war on privacy. The site is designed to shared information about yourself. If signing up for that site is not an invitation to privacy invasion, what is? And is it surprising that someone who believes most people want to share information about themselves, as the CEO of Facebook surely must, does not care about privacy as much as the author, who is obviously all about it?

>> 7. Facebook is pulling a classic bait-and-switch

Members, by and large, don't care. It's not Facebook's responsibility to constantly nag people about the privacy implications of setting their privacy settings to "off". It would make the site more difficult and annoying to use, and would likely have immeasurably small impact.

>> 6. Facebook is a bully

Wait, are we complaining about how Facebook fails to protect user privacy, or how Facebook is overzealous in protecting user privacy? It's flat out false that Facebook sued this guy. They did force him to cease and desist by threatening to sue him. Maybe they should update their robots.txt, but that's hardly a reason to stop using them.

>> 5. Even your private data is shared with applications [that you install]

Oh, just like my regular computer. Should I stop using that too? Most Facebook applications rely on some set of private data to make interesting features work. Installing these applications would be a usability nightmare for people who have their privacy shields turned up, which ironically would probably decrease the number of people using those settings. This is because most of Facebook's users, even the ones with privacy settings turned up, only care about privacy when it doesn't get in their way, and when having to choose between privacy and easy functionality, they will take the latter.

>> 4. Facebook is not technically competent enough to be trusted

They are dealing with an enormous attack surface and highly motivated attackers. I think what you mean to say is, "Facebook's engineers cannot perfectly cover all possible vulnerabilities that their business requirements expose them to." They are normally quick with responses and fixes, so that's a problem, but not one that any other company doing this would avoid. But the whole "technically competent" thing is BS. They are obviously technically competent based on the various open source projects they have released and which are seeing wide adoption.

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

If my friends are any indication, many people who delete their accounts eventually want them back. Keeping those people from making a mistake they will later regret is probably a feature.

As far as making no promises about deleting your data, I can say that especially in a NoSQL environment it's very difficult to track down every little piece of data that belongs to a user. Sometimes this data is in formats that are not mutable on an individual-record basis. At my workplace we sometimes aggregate data in SSTables (see the Bigtable paper for details) that, did they contain user data, would not be immediately modifiable for each user that wanted to delete their account.

>> 2. Facebook doesn't (really) support the Open Web

This is not an issue for most normal people. But if it is an issue for you and you want to make a moral statement by closing your Facebook account, by all means, do. Facebook's incentives for maintaining their walled garden to some extent probably outweigh the loss of every user account for every person that even cares an iota about this issue.

>> 1. The Facebook application itself sucks

Seems like a lot of people like it and derive some use out of it. Sorry you don't.

This article is idiotic. Most of the points are flat out false, and the rest are taste issues where the author is out of touch with the zeitgeist.