I've been putting it off for a while now, but I axed my Facebook profile.

Why would I do that? Several reasons:

  • Mindless consumption. I'm trying to steer my life more towards actual productivity. I (mostly) used Facebook to aggregate Reddit to my friends, which makes you feel like you're creating something while putting forth no actual effort. And of course I was guilty of the mindless scrolling that we all do.
  • Annoyance. Notifications on my phone from folks who want me to play Candy Crush? No thanks.
  • Privacy.

That last one is the biggest. I've always been worried about my privacy on Facebook. I did give it all my personal information, after all.

But what put me over the edge was a task I was assigned at my most recent internship, which is at an ad agency. At this company we maintain landing pages for several of our clients, and we funnel those leads into our databases and then we send them to the client. Sometimes, though, the client's lead tracking service kicks it back because of malformed data.

The task I was given was to fix the (four or five) malformed entries in our database. The tool I used: you guessed it, Facebook. Within five minutes, I not only had what I was looking for, I knew what all of these people looked like. Even the most secured profiles still displayed their profile picture to me. Free, publicly available information, all of it.

At that point I began to feel a little insecure about what information I had on there which was available to some random intern - after all, I hadn't gone to any great lengths to secure my profile.

So that was that.

Some problems I foresee:

  • Not already knowing what my friends have been up to when I see them next. I might actually have to talk to them.
  • Not having an automatically updated list of contact information for my friends. This functionality I'll actually miss; but if there were a similar service that provided this functionality without seeming so invasive, this concern goes away.
  • A handy instant messenger service which all my friends are on. I'll just text them.

I don't think I'll look back.