My plan was to post fairly frequently to this blog. I hoped that I’d get into a sort of pattern of behavior and continue. Unfortunately, right now I’m in the middle of a move to another city. Not only is it fairly stressful (quite a few issues came up in the middle of things and the bills are piling up faster than I thought they would), I’m trying to save some money and so I won’t have an internet connection at the new place for at least a couple months.

I’ll try to keep up with things by writing at the coffee-shop on my laptop, but I don’t know if I’ll have the time. Posts will probably be really sporadic here.

Hang in there, I’ll be back at some point.

Today I had to perform a lot of voodoo to delete my Facebook account. They allow you to deactivate it, but they keep your personal information. If you contact them to delete it, they’ll try to make you jump through a bunch of hoops.

The steps to deleting your Facebook account, in some definition of the term delete, are:

1. Remove all the email addresses and networks associated with your account, except for your primary email address (the one we’re looking to liberate here). Deactivate your profile on the settings page.
2. create a fake email address on Yahoo (Facebook is pretty good at detecting fake email addresses; they block BugMeNot, mailinator, and every other free-for-spam email service I could find as Google results)
3. sign up for Facebook with new temporary account
4. Add your ‘primary email address’ from your real account to this fake account. The email verification will ask if you want to delete the data in the other
5. remove the ‘primary email address’ from real account on your fake account. Deactivate the fake account. Since it was empty, you can also ask them to delete this account in your reasons for leaving.

As Cory Doctorow writes, “We should treat personal electronic data with the same care and respect as weapons-grade plutonium - it is dangerous, long-lasting and once it has leaked there’s no getting it back.”

I say, as consumers and individuals, that we take back what is ours, our personal information. That we insist services delete our user data when we leave, and all the data accumulated from surveilling our every move on their site when we want it deleted. And that we stop being so passive about how and when we allow advertisers and spammers get our attention. Oh, and net neutrality would be nice, too.

Addendum, my comments addressed to Facebook when I deactivated my account:

Please let us know why you are deactivating.
* I don’t feel safe on the site.
* Facebook is resulting in social drama for me.
* I don’t understand how to use the site.
* I need to fix something in my account.
* I receive too many emails from Facebook.
* I spend too much time using Facebook.
* I don’t find Facebook useful.
* Other:

A combination of the above really. But to truly understand it, you’d have to know me. Actually, isn’t that what Facebook is about, you get to know me to throw some targeted ads at me? Haha. Listen, I don’t want the notifications. I don’t want the apps. I don’t want the Google ads thrown at me anymore. I’m quitting because there is no reason for Facebook to exist, because you suck up a cognitive surplus worse than all the sitcoms and soap operas on television.

Don’t contact me. Don’t try to make me happy. Just leave me alone.

Why a baywords blog? I mean, I have a Wordpress.com blog, which is essentially the same thing. I have a tumblr account. I have a soup (which is like a tumblog but much, much cooler). Continuing on, I have a Google Reader shared items feed, a delicious account, a twitter account, a Pownce account, etc. ad nauseum, on and on, until the web 2.0 part of my brain pops an aneurism.

Again, why?

Quoting the Baywords announcement:

Many blogs are being shut down for uncomfortable thoughts and ideas. We will not do that. Our goal is to protect freedom of speech and your thoughts. As long as you don’t break any Swedish laws in your blog, we will defend it.

Because TPB and Baywords will give me some notion of respect on the web. Too few services are respecting their users. Too few places take freedom of speech seriously.

I choose Baywords because I can post what I want here.

This is extremely important. I do not have to fear takedown notices, oppression, or persecution. And you might not think I need such protection. After all, I live in a country that claims to have freedom of speech, right? Well, it may never come to be explicitly taken away, but the actions of the government are, at some times, alarming. I’d rather not be censored because “Everything changed after 9/11.” I’d rather not be told what I can and cannot think politically, and I don’t want to be treated as guilty-until-prove-innocent by a terrorism-crazed society and its government.

But I don’t want to set my hopes too high for this blog, or my purpose too narrow; I’ve fallen into that trap before. Take the failure of my Wordpress.com blog: I tell myself that “this is a blog for programming, and discussing my programming projects” and I never posted there again. Instead, I’ll leave the purpose of this blog unstated, and write posts on whatever I want, without any sort of self-censoring.

This isn’t a manifesto. It’s not meant to be. But maybe, someday, if our liberties and freedoms are being threatened, we’ll all rise to the occasion and Baywords will be there.

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