Quit Facebook Day Was a Success Even As it Flopped

Quit Facebook Day may have flopped when it comes to creating a mass exodus of Facebook users, but those who care about privacy owe a debt of gratitude to the failed movement.

By Tom Spring
Tue, June 01, 2010

PC World — Quit Facebook Day may have flopped when it comes to creating a mass exodus of Facebook users, but those who care about privacy owe a debt of gratitude to the failed movement.

Facebook Privacy Fixes: Your Guide to the Newest Changes
Facebook Bible: Everything You Need to Know About Facebook

If you're still using Facebook after pledging to quit, you're in good company. According to the organizers of Quit Facebook Day, only 31,000 angry Facebook users, out of an estimated 450 million, actually followed through with their pledge to delete their account on Monday (Quit Facebook Day). The day of protest was designed to send Facebook a message that its users were fed-up with surprise privacy changes.

The attempt to strong-arm Facebook to take privacy more seriously is widely seen as a flop. No, there was no giant sucking sound of people fleeing Facebook over the long holiday weekend. But the small-stakes game of poker with Facebook, crystallized with Quit Facebook Day, likely did push Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg to address publicly its new privacy policies and make changes.

Bad publicity, not corporate kindness, convinced Facebook's founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to hold an impromptu press event last week. It was only then that we heard Zuckerberg attempt to come down off the Facebook mountain and explain its new privacy policies and announce changes in wake of the privacy backlash. I'm certain Zuckerberg never would of held last Wednesday meeting if it weren't for the Quit Facebook Day thousands.

Facebook Users Love to Hate

Facebook doesn't appear to listen to anything more than angry mobs.

Remember, back in February of 2009 when Facebook changed its privacy policies giving the site ownership of users' "name, likeness, and image" to use in promotions or external advertising? Once word broke of the changes, users formed a protest group of 38,000 strong. It didn't take long for Facebook to do an about-face, reverting to its old terms and agreeing to allow users vote on privacy policy changes.

Remember the Facebook Beacon debacle? Back in 2007, Facebook introduced Beacon, which was part of the company's ad platform. Beacons tracked Facebook users as they went to some external sites, like Blockbuster (BBI) and Fandango, and reported some of their actions back to their Facebook friends network. Angry Facebook users grabbed their virtual pitchforks and torches and blasted the company for what they called a privacy breech. It was only then that Zuckerberg publicly apologized for missteps in the design and deployment of Beacon.

1 2 next page »

Originally published on www.pcworld.com. Click here to read the original story.

You are here: Technology Topics » Web 2.0 » Blog

Most Recent Web 2.0 Stories

White Papers »

Why Business Ethernet Services?

Everybody's heard the cliché, "the network is your business." But that's not going to help you choose the best wide area networking service to meet your diverse needs

Has Your Server Infrastructure Kept Pace with End User Demands?

Learn how your answer to this question compares to your peers by taking this quick poll. See how your peers are dealing with the challenge of ensuring a highly capable server infrastructure as technological shifts impact the application server platform.

Enterprise Strategy Group: The Case for a New Data-centric DLP White Paper

With increasing data growth, comes increased need for data security. The existing DLP model, with a focus on compliance/enforcement is not sufficient as the data discovery and classification capabilities are not granular enough. Read this paper to find how you can efficiently and accurately manage your risk by rapidly inventorying and classifying your data and then developing remediation workflows that support business needs.

Data Loss by the Numbers

This paper breaks down attack sources into four categories: external, malicious insiders, accidental insiders, and unknown.

Data Loss Prevention Solution for Managing E-Discovery

The rapid growth of data and technology is creating challenges for organizations as this digital data is considered to be business communications and must be preserved according the same industry-specific regulations governing the retention and discovery of emails and more traditional forms of electronic communications. This paper examines the role that Data Loss Prevention ("DLP") technology can play in helping organizations address the challenges of locating information in response to electronic discovery.

Best Practices in Data Protection - Executive Summary

This research, conducted by the Ponemon Institute, focuses on issues relating to the use of data protection solutions such as endpoint encryption and data loss prevention within the workplace.

Webcasts »

Fraser Milner Casgrain: A Success Story in Search-Powered Content Delivery

Too much information can be just as limiting as too little information if users can't get what they want when they want it. Find out how the IT leaders at one of Canada's leading law firms, Fraser Milner Casgrain LLP, implemented Recommind's next-generation content delivery and search platform within their SharePoint portal to enable timely and effortless access to the information users need.

Virtualization Success is a Team Effort

As greater numbers of datacenter servers transition from the physical to the virtual world, the components of virtualization success come to the fore. What scores of organizations have discovered is that success is derived from an optimal pairing of the right software platform with the right hardware platform.

Customer Spotlight: How IPC The Hospitalist Company Implemented Oracle on VMware

Have you been looking to hear about customer's experiences with the new VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager product? View this webcast to learn about VMware customer, Navicure, and their experiences testing and evaluating the recovery manager, their progress in implementing it in their environment and their advice other customers considering using vCenter.

Quantifying the Business Value of VMware View - Webcast

Many enterprises have discovered that the use of virtualization to support desktop workloads creates a range of significant benefits. These benefits include price efficiencies, improved IT management and greater agility and choice for end users.

This VMware sponsored webcast with IDC will provide both quantitative measurement of the business value -- defined as the expected ROI -- and qualitative analysis associated with the use of VMware View™. IDC will also provide an analysis of the View Composer and ThinApp™ features of VMware View, including the business value of these solutions and an overview of how they work.

Attend this webcast to learn about:
- Challenges and barriers that might impede the adoption of desktop virtualization
- Navigating roadblocks to facilitate a strategic implementation
- Optimizing qualitative and quantitative benefits to IT and your business

Deliver Private Cloud Database as a Service with VMware vFabric Data Director

VMware recently announced VMware vFabric™ Data Director, a new database deployment and operations platform that enables enterprise IT organizations to offer database as a private cloud service. Built on top of VMware vSphere 5, vFabric Data Director enables IT organizations to ontrol database sprawl through automation and consistent policy enforcement and accelerate application development cycles with self-service database management. Attend this webcast to learn how vFabric Data Director can help you build database-as-a-service in your datacenter.

Reliable Disaster Protection with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager

A simple, cost-effective disaster-recovery solution for virtual environments is high on the agenda for IT organizations as they virtualize more business-critical applications with VMware. VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager-the market-leading disaster-recovery product-ensures the simplest and most reliable disaster protection for all virtualized applications. VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager provides centralized management of recovery plans, enables nondisruptive testing and automates site-failover processes.

Newsletter Sign-Up »

Receive the latest news test, reviews and trends on your favorite technology topics

Choose a newsletter