Yesterday marked one month since I closed my Facebook account. Lo and behold, I live to tell the tale.

I won’t repeat all the details from my farewell post on Facebook about why I left. But it was a combination of

• how the “Like” button was affecting me in a negative way spiritually
• the increasingly creepy and intrusive data tracking (along with their ownership of my content)
• the degree to which an increasing focus on politics was causing me to like people less

Just before deleting my account, I did use their capability of downloading an archive of all the content I had ever posted. Within a few minutes I got notified that it was ready to download, so I saved it locally among my documents for posterity.

Facebook really doesn’t want folks to leave. And when I say really, I mean REALLY. When I went to delete my account, I was asked three times whether this was something I really wanted to do. Then after the final confirmation, they displayed a message (followed up by an email with the same message) informing me that I had now started a 30-day clock, and that any time during the next 30 days all I had to do was log in with my regular user name and password, and my account would magically be restored.

What was interesting, and kind of troubling, was the wording in that message. It stated that after 30 days, Facebook would “begin the process of deleting your data”.

Wait – you just collected everything I ever posted within 5 minutes. What do you mean you’ll begin to delete my data? Just delete it. All of it. Immediately.

It makes me think that Facebook might actually hold onto the bulk of that data for much longer than they would have users believe. My guess is that Facebook would consider the possession of that much data, about that many people, far too valuable to just toss in the bit bucket. And from my perspective, that’s all the more reason to shut off the spigot I was feeding them.

I’ll confess that I do miss seeing some of the life updates from my friends. But overall, I’m glad I made the decision. It’s been good for me spiritually.

And from a data tracking perspective, my decision keeps being confirmed on a regular basis. In addition to the news earlier this fall that Facebook was seeking an agreement with the major banks to track users’ financial information and spending habits, there was the news a week or so ago that Facebook had filed a series of patents that would enable them to predict the future location of its users, based on the user’s current location, their past location habits, and the current and past location information of their friends. That’s just creepiness on steroids. And just this week there was more news of Facebook sharing user data with a wide variety of companies and industries, even allowing some of them to read, write, and delete users’ private messages.

For any Facebook user who’s feeling increasingly uncomfortable about such things – there is life on the other side. 😉 The trick is to make up for that lost virtual interaction by engaging in more face to face interaction, and that’s something I’ve started to work on, and plan to continue working on in the new year.