11 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 31.7 ms ] thread
Facebook is a website, not a state or any other sort of political entity. Why people seem to feel that they have "rights" when it comes to facebook is beyond me. I wonder if those complaining are the same people that keep yelling about bailout money and saying that "the market should correct itself"?

Funny how market correcting forces don't seem so pleasant when you're caught in the middle of one of those corrections...

You're comparing apples to oranges.

Facebook is a website that hosts your personal info. Whats more, they want to store that info for as long as they want and use it for whatever they want, besides making money.

If facebook was a site that didn't store any info about you, then they can do whatever they want and I'd be willing to bet that nobody would care. But it's not. So yes, we do have rights when it comes to this stuff. Which was explicitly displayed when people began to close their facebook accounts.

They didn't take your personal info. You gave it to them, because you like what they do with it. I'm sorry, but I think you're going to find that you don't actually have "rights" here.
Sweet Lord grant me the strength.

The whole reason why we posted (notice I didn't say give, we didn't give them anything) our info was because of the inherent understanding that they wouldn't do anything stupid with it. Like saving it forever ever even after we want to delete it.

And once again, like I mentioned in my first comment, once this trust was breached, people exercised their right (yes, we do have rights here) to delete their accounts.

Bottom line - if they want to use our info to market ads towards us, fine, the site is expensive to run and I can certainly understand and support their efforts, for as long as I maintain my info there. It's an equal give and take - I use the site and they make money off my info. But once I delete my info, it's only common sense for them to delete it all as well. How is this so hard to understand?

No offense, but that was dumb of you. You will never get that information back. You might as well organize a protest in front of Experian. You had no contract with Facebook requiring them to do anything at all with your information once you left.
You're right. There was no contract. It was based on a silly thing called trust. It was dumb of me to blindly trust them. No argument there. Lesson learned.

I know now that when I launch my startup, my focus will be on maintaining customer trust. The first question I will ask myself when it comes to any changes will be "can I achieve the desired outcome without hurting my userbase?"

Facebook taught me that.

Actually, there was a contract. It's called the terms of service.
'The first question I will ask myself when it comes to any changes will be "can I achieve the desired outcome without hurting my userbase?"'

Judging from their growth rate, it looks like they asked that question and the answer was yes.