Senators Clinton & Obama, how would you regulate the harvesting and retention of personal information by social networking sites?
There seems to be a lot of interest in certain issues revolving around facebook and myspace. Some of them strike me as naive, such as the claims that anyone can see all your data, since you can limit people who can see your profile to just your friends. That, and you have choice over what goes up. The only exception is when you’re tagged or receive a wall-post — there’s a delay between when that happens and when you might get around to untagging yourself or deleting the post.
The more substantial issue is that it’s very hard to delete your facebook profile and nearly impossible to do permanently. On the group, “How to permanently delete your facebook account”, they recommend first deleting everything and then contacting facebook and requesting account removal. Of course, you can deactivate your account, but this is apparently not a preferred option. It’s not clear to me from any of this whether deactivation is dispreferred because (a) while no one can still see your data, it still exists on facebook, which is unsettling, or (b) deactivation doesn’t work as one would think, and some data are still viewable to other users.
I don’t see why no one has explored what is to me the obvious way of getting your account deleted: posting a lot of pornographic or hateful material. I’ve never encountered any on facebook, and so I assume that watchdogs exist, perhaps based on user complaints. I guess not everyone would want their account associated with hardcore pornography and racist treatises, however briefly, but it would no doubt be fun.
