Facebook rules

Despite the sleepless nights I suffer over finding a job after graduation, the thing I wonder most about my future is how I’ll handle Facebook. I abandoned MySpace in high school, deciding that a site full of spam messages from bands was not the social networking I desired. Will we slowly abandon Facebook as we get older?

Will those of us who remain in CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s black hole of time be seen as those guys who hang around high school years after they graduate? Like Matthew McConaughey in “Dazed and Confused,”  we can always return to the site as a resource for young, naive girls.

As recent events have developed in online affairs, it might be the best thing for us to jump ship as soon as possible. Personal information has always been a mixed bag with Facebook: some reduce their profiles to nothing more than a picture and an e-mail address, while others use status updates to openly talk about their babies’ daddies.

No one forces us to risk our privacy by using Facebook. However, Zuckerberg’s recent remarks combined with the changes Facebook has made to his networking juggernaut means I must once again tell you that technology is evil and will eventually turn humanity into meat-sack slaves for the machine overlords.

Facebook’s overhaul this winter hampered users’ control with privacy controls and set the new defaults to a level best described as “Bending Over Naked In A Public Street.” Zuckerberg has attributed the about-face to an attempt to meet the changing social norms.

This idea is best reserved for a start-up Web site. Zuckerberg’s logic is like that of a dictator stating, “Well, we reduced our citizens’ food rations down and a few have stopped eating or tried to start a revolution, but the majority seems to accept this is the new norm. It must be right.”

If you dislike an organization’s new practices, you can always leave. I quit working with a telecom club when it became less about reviewing video games and more about advertising Mountain Dew with “gamer girls.”

But Facebook functions by archiving every piece of data a user has created. This is like a company deciding they need to save all the trash you throw away in case the company needs to consult it years later after you’ve quit. If Facebook intends to go full profit, it needs to honor the Terms of Service we initially agreed to years ago. Let us wipe our data clean from its servers.

As its current system works, we are unable to truly leave the site even if we cancel our accounts. I just want to be able to get out when we can start customizing our profiles with Nickelback songs.