It's Time To Join The Quit FaceBook Brigade

The social networking giant, which rolled out last month a redesigned privacy settings page aimed at allowing users to have more control over how they share personal information, was subjected to a Quit FaceBook day on May 31 for what the organizers of that movement are calling a "lack of respect for your data." That Quit FaceBook Day has resulted in 34,687 FaceBook users deleting their accounts. Bravo to those brave souls!

They are at the forefront of a movement that is likely to pick up steam. Even a novice social networking user can see that FaceBook has constructed a minefield aimed at preventing users from taking control of their privacy settings. FaceBook has constructed a labrythinian maze aimed at preventing users from exercising free choice on what personal information they put into cyberspace can and can not be shared and with whom.

The time has come for FaceBook to give users the right to opt out of any and all public data sharing. In this day and age there simply is no reason that FaceBook's 400 million plus active users should not be able to control what information is shared and not shared about themselves.

FaceBook has become a social networking yellow pages where we should be able to share as much or as little information as we want with whoever we want.

What's troublesome is that FaceBook insists on placing its own fascist-like rules that take the privacy power away from the city's inhabitants and places it in the hands of a dictator (FaceBook CEO Mark Zuckerberg) determined to use that information in whatever means he deems necessary.

What Zuckerberg and FaceBook for all their so called social networking prowess fail to realize is that the internet age is about user choice. And any and all attempts to prevent user's from exercising choice in the cyberspace will fail.

As the folks at Quit FaceBook Day point out there are alternatives to FaceBook including a Ning group or a specialized social site like Akoha.

Besides those alternatives, you can bet that as FaceBook is toying with how it can continue to play with user data in any way it sees fit, that there is a startup that is working on a new social networking site that gives users the privacy power they deserve.

The time has come for FaceBook to put privacy power back in the hands of users. Get with the social networking program FaceBook. It's all about giving users the ability with a single click to opt out and maintain their account and personal information as they see fit.