Why you SHOULDN'T board the Facebook bandwagon

I would highly recommend reading the original article on Gizmodo before reading mine, as there is plenty that needs reading and I do not want most of my post to be in quotes. (This is a good thing. It means their article is not full of fluff you don't need to read.)

10. Facebook's Terms Of Service are completely one-sided

 It should be a well known fact by now that Facebook is about as private as high school. That is to say, it's not very private. There is no predictability like in any normal respectable business. The use of gray areas where it's up to Facebook's complete discretion how problems are handled proves this. Basically, their terms of service allow them to screw you over at any time for any reason.

9. Facebook's CEO has a documented history of unethical behavior

 I honestly don't find this a very solid reason. As far as my limited research concludes, this is simply a rumor supported only by Facebook's willingness pay people off rather than fight to prove them wrong. But don't let one out of many reasons discourage you from staying out of this lame-fest.

8. Facebook has flat out declared war on privacy

 Building on my previous discussion about privacy. Facebook wants it less private. Yeah, that's right. They're against the average user.

7. Facebook is pulling a classic bait-and-switch

Yeah, their practices aren't always the most trustworthy. Meaning, one day you might wake up to find they have screwed you over. We shouldn't need a lawyer to feel safe using a website, Facebook.

6. Facebook is a bully

 Y'know there was once a guy that tried to raise awareness of the bait-and-switch practices? Yeah... he got sued. Internet censorship being enforced. I'm sure everyone wants to deal with that. The proceeding sentence was blunt, obvious sarcasm.

5. Even your private data is shared with applications

 Yeah... Apps essentially have the ability to take any data they want, and the only way to protect yourself is not to install them.

4. Facebook is not technically competent enough to be trusted

 I honestly think the original article leaves me without anything to say, so I'll just quote it here.

Even if we weren't talking about ethical issues here, I can't trust Facebook's technical competence to make sure my data isn't hijacked. For example, their recent introduction of their "Like" button makes it rather easy for spammers to gain access to my feed and spam my social network. Or how about this gem for harvesting profile data? These are just the latest of a series of Keystone Kops mistakes, such as accidentally making users' profiles completely public, or the cross-site scripting hole that took them over two weeks to fix. They either don't care too much about your privacy or don't really have very good engineers, or perhaps both.

3. Facebook makes it incredibly difficult to truly delete your account

 Yeah... This is hilariously horrible. This has got to be the most painful, ridiculously time consuming and painfully prone to error way to delete a social networking account I have ever heard of. This would make me rage, even if I did it exactly right. If anything this is incentive not to 'quit' Facebook, but to just get up and LEAVE!  Let the profile rot, rather than go through that.

2. Facebook doesn't (really) support the Open Web

See: Facebook is not private, Facebook is not safe, Facebook only cares about itself.

1. The Facebook application itself sucks

 Judging by the fact some people actually need to be told, I'm assuming telling them this isn't going to sway them much. If you were to ask me, Omegle is more of a "Social Network" than Facebook. Who uses Facebook to be social?! If you're one of those people who doesn't add someone they don't know, you are one of the stereotypes of the anti-social network, Facebook.