Facebook Suicide

It does not surprise me in the least that Facebook is blocking two programs that help people delete their accounts, nor am I surprised that USAToday has a gleeful article talking about people ‘reclaiming their lives’ buy dropping out of social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

- Marco della Cava, Some ditch social networks to reclaim time, privacy

As the social networking train gathers momentum, some riders are getting off.

Their reasons run the gamut from being besieged by online “friends” who aren’t really friends to lingering concerns over where their messages and photos might materialize. If there’s a common theme to their exodus, it’s the nagging sense that a time-sucking habit was taking the “real” out of life.

[…]

That desire to unplug has made an unexpected success out of websites such as Web 2.0 Suicide Machine and Seppukoo (a play on the Japanese word for “suicide”), free sites that automate and turbocharge the otherwise laborious manual process of scrapping your online self.

Lucca, Italy-based Seppukoo helped 20,000 people erase themselves from Facebook after the site launched last fall. Two-month-old Web 2.0 Suicide Machine — where a noose dangles near a ticker tracking the digital mayhem (“181,898 friends have been unfriended, 329,908 tweets removed”) — has been used by 2,600 people. Thousands more are waiting to be accommodated by the site’s small server, says Walter Langelaar, 32, one of three programmers who created the “art project” for Moddr, a media lab in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

“We are not anti-social-networking,” says Langelaar, noting that the program was conceived for a party the lab threw a year ago to encourage face-to-face interaction. “We do, however, feel things are getting so messy in that world that (the sites) just get in the way of people living their lives.”

Facebook is not amused. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company has blocked the servers of both sites and sent cease-and-desist letters stating that they violate Facebook’s statement of rights and responsibilities policies by collecting user login data.

“Facebook provides the ability for (users) to use the site to deactivate their account or delete it completely,” says Facebook spokesman Simon Axten.

Langelaar says Moddr has circumvented the block and counters: “We’re not collecting login information; users bring their (data) to us. We are thinking of hiring our own lawyers.”

Seppukoo, however, is now lifeless. “We have postponed any decisions until after our next Anti Social NotWorking art project comes out in the next weeks” is the cryptic comment from Guy McMusker of Les Liens Invisibles, a consortium of Web-focused artists responsible for the program.

Although Twitter is among the sites that programs such as Seppukoo can scour, the San Francisco-based micro-blogging venture has “no issues with people who want to leave,” says spokesman Seth Garrett. “Our research shows that quite often they come back later.”

Facebook has every incentive to keep people in the service, but at least they have implemented a ‘delete my account’ capability. Once upon a time users had to manually delete every entry before being able to close their account, but now you can leave by simply requesting it.

This story is canted in the snarky, ‘you webheads are missing real life online’ tone that I have come to expect form the Sunday supplements. The ware on flow, again, where what we are doing online is immoral, illegitimate, and immature.