Cogito, Ergo Sumana for 2010 October 19

# (7) 19 Oct 2010, 02:20AM: Outlier: I am not on Facebook. If you see a Sumana Harihareswara there, it's not me. Continuing to abstain from Facebook makes me something like a digital vegan. I wonder how many parties, job opportunities, mildly interesting discussions, and other connections I've missed by abstaining. Probably still worth the tradeoff.

Even though it takes positive effort to eat meat or to join Facebook, when most people around me make that effort, some believe that the fact that I passively and inertially continue as I was requires explaining. (See also: teetotalers.) So, a few of the reasons I'm not on Facebook:

• Mark Zuckerberg has a plan for your life! (Phrasing borrowed from Christianity.) I don't care for it.
• It's clutter I don't need.
• I don't like walled gardens -- users can't easily save a backup of the data they put into Facebook, for example.
• I don't like monocultures, in any ecology.
• The firm deliberately, over and over, changes users' privacy settings to make it harder for people to control who knows what about them. (See also: the importance of the private, as separate from secret.)
• "What makes you think you can control what happens to your personal data?"
• Stuff that I put on my blog or on identi.ca/Twitter, anyone can read. Most of Facebook requires you log in to access it, and I don't want to limit my readership and close the conversation that way.
• I figure if it's a utility then it should be nationalized. I can wait.
• Stubbornness.

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