It is 100% completely voluntary. Nobody is forcing you to use Facebook. It is not even remotely close to the only communication service. I don't personally use Facebook and have no problem leading an active social and business life. Sure, a large portion of my friends use Facebook, but they also make phone calls, send text messages, email (through multiple different services), LinkedIn, Flickr, etc etc etc.

So how does Facebook have no alternatives?

If you don't like the product, or you don't like the way its run, or you don't like the way it handles your data, or you don't like the color of the log in button, then its simple. Don't use it.

As the original poster said, it is a private organization, and therefore you have a choice. This isn't social security, this isn't taxes. I can (and don't) use Facebook, but much to my dismay, I still pay my outrageous taxes.

This weeks' Monopoly is last weeks' MySpace when users choose to go elsewhere.

Perhaps true in the US but not so in Europe. My 16-year old cousin in Denmark (the worlds most FB connected country in the world, 3M users out of 5M population) told me that it's basically impossible to have a social life without being on Facebook (at her age).

Facebook also caters very much to US culture. E.g. In middle school and high school you move between different classrooms so you make lots of different friends that way. In Denmark you sit with the same 20-30 kids every day for 10 years. It's a very different type of social conditioning.

So - if you're the outlier in the class who isn't connected and the party invites go out on FB, guess what? You have volunteered to get ostracized.

I see where your cousin is coming from by thinking that if she isn't on Facebook, she's ostracized, however people tell me the same thing when trying to get me to sign up.

Thankfully, since I never actively used any social networks as a kid, they never became a crutch for me, and any time there's a party worth going to, I'll know about it either through text, a call, or (what most kids seem to avoid these days) face to face social interactions with my friends.

You realize that in no way does this make Facebook registration non-voluntary.

Of course, signing up for Facebook is completely voluntary in a legal sense. No-one can strong-arm you into creating an account.

My point is that social pressure can often make people do things that they don't really want to do. And sadly, many people do not have the courage to stand up to their peers and tell them no.

It's more common in US culture to do that, and largely encouraged by US societal norms, but that isn't always the case in other cultures. This is based on my experience growing up outside of the US (and also spending time in high school and college in the US).

You are not using it? This is maybe the reason why you don't understand this.

For most people like me it is a tool to communicate to over 150 people and they expect me to have it. With most of them i can't communicate with mail any more.

Facebook himself says it's Messaging is replacing Mail for young people, now they have to act responsible about it.

It is like a telephone number you give to all your friends and someone says "Hey when you don't like something about it, just don't use it". You are invested in these things, it is not that easy.

>You are invested in these things, it is not that easy.

By analogy with predatory lending, i'd name it predatory social network lock-in. Hook 'em while they're young, while they don't know any better and while they not able to analyze consequences, ie. while they not able to make an informed decision.

> You are not using it? This is maybe the reason why you don't understand this.

Is this not word for word what a drug addict says to somebody who's clean?

I've used social networks and found all they did was replace real life social interaction with fake, scrubbed online interactions. I was never one of those "DELETE YOUR FACEBOOK PROFILE AND RUN" fad followers, I just found that I was able to get by and communicate just fine without it.

>Nobody is forcing you to use Facebook.

True, but that doesn't help the people who don't use Facebook but who still have data about them collected.

I remember a while back when there was some commotion about Google not necessarily deleting your emails even when you delete them off Gmail. What they did was they kept your email for an amount of time for ad purposes.

Just did some research while writing this post and it seems that Google changed their ToC for Gmail from deleting emails within 60 days of being deleted by the user to "make reasonable efforts to remove deleted information from our systems as quickly as is practical".

Read James Fallows "Hacked" article in The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/hacked/8...

Though the hacker who attacked his wife's account deleted all mail, Google were able to restore the messages -- first the current year's mails, and eventually the full history of the account.

This implies that, though deleted, the data persisted on Google's systems. This is actually a really good system design (most data destruction is accidental deletion by a user, not hacking, and a robust recovery system is a feature). It does raise certain troubling questions, and it would behoove Google (and any other SAAS service provider) to establish a clear policy as to what the grace period during which deleted data may be recovered is.

I've had my own experience where, shall we say, legal obligations made it expedient to remove certain content from our systems. Use of a CDN and extensive caching means that there's no longer a single point of existence for any given piece of data, and explicitly flushing large volumes of content from our systems was, if not horrendously complex at least non-trivial.

Completely off topic, but did you just link me to halfway though a you-tube video? That's Fantastic, ya lean somethin new every day.