Please note this is taken from my latest status update on my Facebook account.

Vincent Lee: Finally cleared my wall on my profile. Had to go one by one deleting each entry. Will delete my account within the next 24 hours.

Tunan Pan: why are you deleting your account? And why did you have to clear all the posts if you are gonna delete it? :S

Vincent Lee: I just don’t like the way Facebook has been operating over the past few months and has been getting accumulatively worse with the way its handled personal data. Such as tracking every single click and keystroke while we are on this site. As well as the occasional security leaks of private chat conversations being made public. And by staying on here, I feel like I’m passively endorsing them.

Here are some webpages that explain it fully:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/15/delete-facebook-account-q_n_576956.html
http://gizmodo.com/5534736/more-reasons-why-you-should-still-quit-facebook
http://facebookprotest.com/

However saying that, I am a geek and feel it’s important for me to have a presence here which is why I’m only going to have a page (originally known as fan page) to only post status updates. And show other contact details (MSN, Skype etc.)
Link: http://facebook.com/officialvincentlee

And no, I didn’t have to clear all my posts on my wall but felt natural to do so (not leaving a trace of info - even though they probably have it backed up in their cache haha) just like removing my profile details and photos.

Tunan Pan: ahh I see, I thought it might have something to do with that, another friend of mine was talking about the whole privacy thing too. It’s good that you’re doing this :]

Vincent Lee: Yeah thanks. It might seem a bit contradictory with deleting my Facebook page but keeping a fan page however it changes the way I used Facebook so that everything I post I know is fully public (I think of it as my twitter feed but in a location with friends).

I feel as though most people on Facebook are blatantly unaware of these privacy concerns and don’t even touch the the privacy settings for their account. The default settings makes most of your profile information public which is something most people didn’t sign up for when we joined Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg (who is only 26) has been quoted saying he “doesn’t believe in privacy“ to support Facebook’s business model where their money comes from advertisers advertising to certain demographics (which is why information has been defaulted to public).

Apart from the “blatant unawareness” of Facebook users, the only thing from stopping us from moving on is that we have no alternative at the moment. Which is why so much support has been put behind Diaspora (a software to be built by NYU students to be an alternative to Facebook where users can fully control the information they share. http://joindiaspora.com/) with over $100,000 raised to help launch it. However it’ll be a few months before we see what this powerful vision can produce.