There’s been a lot of recent talk lately about how Facebook has gone over the line concerning privacy. This talk has devolved (or evolved) into a lot of conversation about deleting Facebook accounts. May 31st is even supposed to be an “official” date to delete your Facebook account, if that’s your perogative. Yet, for some reason, Facebook doesn’t seem to be all that much concerned about what’s going on. You’d think with the way that people jump ship on the “in” thing, Facebook should be concerned. I mean, look what happened to Myspace, which is now extremely irrelevant in the face of pretty much everything else out there these days, although Myspace is trying really hard to become relevant again.
What’s probably important to realize is that there’s a simple impetus behind what Facebook is and isn’t doing, and that’s the realization that there’s nothing out there yet people are ready to jump to. There’s no huge “new” thing right now where everyone else is at, causing people to jump ship, so the power brokers within Facebook probably feel they have nothing to fear from any backlash. They’re probably thinking to themselves, “so what? Where are you going to go if you leave us?” And they’re probably right. If you delete your Facebook account, it is pretty difficult to keep in touch with a lot of people you magically found again after all of these years. Sure, you could go to email, but who really is going to keep that up as a communication process? I mean, it took Facebook to get back in touch again because nothing else seemed to do it before.
The fear for Facebook is if something else comes along. But until that does, they probably think they’re safe enough to do anything they want to you and your private information. Granted, some people will leave regardless, but unless they become a wave of lots of people, Facebook doesn’t care. It doesn’t see any of us as “customers”. It sees us as data, and there’s lots more if we disappear. When the masses start impacting their budget, they’ll care, but so far, nothing has really happened to threaten that.