Well, I've just removed my account from FaceBook (for what I could do).

The reason? I've just run into this article by an italian newspaper about the incredibly unfriendly policy about privacy that FaceBook applies (*). Basically, it seems it's quite hard, if possible, to completely remove personal data from it. I find this frankly unbearable and I don't want to support a service with this policy.

But there are really other reasons, and they are even more important. That episode just gave me the required five minutes to think of it (and blog on it during the lunch break). Basically, I didn't explicitly subscribed to FaceBook - I just accepted the invitation by a friend without understanding what was happening - a very subtle viral trick by those social networking sites. Indeed, the following things hold true:

1. The whole thing of social networking is mere bullshit to me (**).What's up with getting to the FaceBook page and see that "Joe just took a photo", "Jane just accepted a beer" and "the other guy is twittering" (other piece of bullshit, BTW)? They are all pieces of useless information. I'm constantly keeping to try the level of information getting into my brain as low as possible, and it's frankly a problem with business mailing lists and contacts (but I can't avoid them). Figure it out whether I can tolerate useless things. Less is more.
   
2. It's not the right way to communicate with my friends. A friend is a real human being, if I want to share something with him/her I just pick the phone or meet at the bar, where we can pat on the shoulder. All this virtualisation stuff of human relationships (Second Life? bullshit too) sounds to me as the mass madness of the XXI century. It's a sort of addiction, like drugs. Frankly, I think that real life is wonderful. I don't need either drugs or social engineering or other artificial stuff to enjoy my life.
   
3. I don't want others to know too many things about me. The public side of myself is related to my profession and to my photo hobby for the part I'd like to share. All the rest is my own business and I'll share it only with people I like, when I like and in the way I like. It's another mass madness of this age: people seem to constantly turn into voyeurs bending in front of a peephole (or being watched behind it). It's not for me. I-want-to-keep-the-control-of-my-own-stuff.

So, if you are one of my friends and just noted that my connections on FaceBook have vanished, don't worry, we're still friends. If you are going to invite me to another social networking stuff, don't do, don't waste your time, I'll reject it.

(*) What drives me crazy is that when the public authority places a new camera down in the square or asks you for more information before an international flight, people raise up and protest against the Big Brother, the CIA, the NSA, and - of course - Mr. Bush or the local equivalent. Yes, freedom is always at stake, you have to constantly fight for it, maybe all those things are not so useful for the security purpose, but at least there's a sound reason behind it, which is not to be killed by a terrorist. In the meantime everybody is happy to give away the size of his pants to a site such as FaceBook without worrying about it. And, after all, only a few people are complaining about the absurd privacy policy of FaceBook. Which, BTW, sounds to be illegal in my country. In Italy there are some strict rules about personal data management and I remember that, when I run for a few years as the person in charge for the database of an association, it was one of my duties to amend and eventually completely remove the personal record upon the owner's request, and I had to do that in a pretty tight deadline...

(**) Yeah, yeah, I know that big money is on that business. Nevetheless, it's not my fault if people like to waste money, and it's neither a new thing indeed (for instance, people have always spent more money and time on things such as cigarettes, watching movies, attending football matches or dancing in a disco rather than buying and reading books).