Rubenerd

The more I learn about Facebook, the more I've decided I don't want anything to do with them. Privacy is dead online, but actively recruiting third parties to gather further information on you and other such archaic TOS gems creep me out even more than most sites. It seems while Google is at least tacitly going forward with their Data Liberation Front, Facebook is going backwards.

I've decided to look into deleting my profile and starting fresh by re-adding many of my friends again but none of my personal information short of my name (with something appended to it to make it harder to data mine with), and a vague location. I won't be using applications either because of the terrible privacy implications and because I liked using Facebook Lite so much.

Some of my concerns I need to look into first:

• There’s no such thing as a real, permanent Facebook delete, but it’s a lot better than nothing.
• Given their closed nature I suspect not, but I wonder if there’s a way to export your friends list, say in an OPML file?
• Conversely is there any way to back up my Facebook messages short of transcribing them? Might need to write a little Perl script to download the pages themselves and extract them

Will advise on my progress, stay tuned!