You may remembering my post FaceBook is pure evil that I deactivated my Facebook account. Now when one deactivates their account you would tend to think that all your information would be deleted. Not so with FaceBook.

All your messages, the stuff on your fun wall, super, wall your photos etc. are still there available to other FaceBook users. FaceBook maintains this is so you can seamlessly reactivate your account when you decided to go back to FaceBook. Lately this little feature of FaceBook has been prevalent in the news. Many newscasters referring to it like the song Hotel California “You can check out, but you can never leave.”.

 So what can you do to get out? Well if you are like me and have already deactivated your account you have to reactivate it. Go in and line by line delete all the information in your profile. Delete all the applications that you may have signed up for such as Fun Wall and Super Wall. Delete all your inbox and sent messages, delete all the photos you may have uploaded. Once you have done all that deleting once again deactivate your account.

 But your presence is still not completely gone. Facebook maintains back ups of this information on its servers. In order to have this removed you must e-mail FaceBook. From what I have read this is no easy process, and some people have even resorted to legal action in order to get themselves removed. Do you need more proof that FaceBook is evil?

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 Just about everyone on the web has heard of Face Book. Heck I thought it was a great idea when I first signed up. I mean I have moved around a lot and I thought it would be cool to catch up with long lost friends and such. But you know, I never felt quite right using Face Book. I mean I’d like to think that I have been around when it comes to the internet. When using Face Book I just never had that “warm fuzzy feeling” (this is how we describe things in bomb disposal when things are going right – if you don’t have it something is about to go wrong).

 You see I just couldn’t figure out how Mark Zuckerberg and his investors from Face Book were making any money. Sure they had advertising on the site but who clicks those anyways? (Judging by my AdSense stats not many) However Face Book kept getting bigger and bigger and here I was getting more and more Zombie, Werewolf, Vampire, and who knows what else requests. It seemed odd to me that all these Face Book applications required access to your profile and such. Then it dawned on me – data mining. Face Book was one vast Data Mine!

 What is data mining you ask? Well briefly it is extracting useful information from a large amount of information. Basically Face Book knows your age, your geographic location, your relationship status, your education, your profession, your mood (if you choose to update it) and a bunch more. Not only do they know this about you but they also know this about all your friends as well. This is valuable stuff if used in the right context. I mean this is marketers gold! Don’t kid yourself that they are not selling it either. Don’t believe me? Check out these videos.

 I don’t know about you but having my information sold like that just makes me feel dirty. As of January 6 2007 I have deactivated my face Book account. When Face Book asked me why (a nice courtesy to keep you in their evil clutches). I wrote a them a nice note about how data mining ranks up there with spammers.

 As always I want to hear what you think, good or bad.

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