Comment: Is social networking a waste of time?

Could the party be over for the big social networks such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo? Last month it emerged Facebook had suffered a 5% drop in members since December, according to Nielsen Online, the web analyst.

Potentially more damaging, though, is that the average amount of time users spent tinkering on all three of the big networks has also fallen in the period from last November to January 2008 compared with the three months prior to that. And in the case of Bebo, which was bought last week by AOL for £425m, this drop was by 25%.

Presumably, many people have grown weary of being contacted by complete strangers, invited to join wacky-sounding groups or asked to play silly vampire-bite games where you receive points for the number of strangers you can “infect”.

Facebook: The beginner’s guide

Forced to sign up by repeated friend requests? Hit the virtual ground running with our virtual guide

Multimedia

• Facebook section - full coverage

BACKGROUND

• Careless Facebook users ‘open to identity theft’

• Ten essential Facebook accessories

• Parents are turning into online spies

• Networkers who click with 1,000 ‘friends’

Related Links

• Web users warned about online exposure

• Web inventor: Google could be superceded

More serious, perhaps, is the growing realisation that if you ever find yourself in the news, embarrassing photos posted on social networking sites could soon be spread all over the media. Remember the picture of Italian murder suspect Amanda Knox – Foxy Knoxy – and the machinegun, or the partying sons of Derek Conway, the disgraced Tory MP? But jumping off the good ship Facebook is not as easy as you might think. To find out, I registered as Ian Gear on Facebook and MySpace (which is owned by News Corporation, parent company of The Sunday Times) and then tried to extricate myself permanently from both networks.

On the MySpace site the process was straightforward other than that the correct link takes a few minutes to find. If you to try to delete yourself from Facebook, however, you will find that the default option is actually to “deactivate” your account.

Rather than removing your personal details (and photos) from the system, this option will merely take down your public profile, purportedly so that you can later return to the Facebook fold without having to reupload all your information.

Meanwhile, all your personal details are still stored and potentially accessible. They are certainly out of your hands. This is what happened to Steve Powell, 37, who runs Hoffi barber’s shop in the City of London. “I set up my Facebook page about two years ago to keep in touch with my clients, but mainly because I’m a gossip-monger. People would tell me harmless secrets and I’d post them on my page for fun.”

All was intended to be kept among a close-knit circle. The problem began, says Powell, when he inadvertently let one of the many people who had asked to be his Facebook friend into the circle of trust. “Soon the whole City knew the details of an affair one of my clients was having from jokes that I’d posted – thank God his wife didn’t find out.”

By December Powell had had enough and decided to bale out, but he found it strange that Facebook didn’t offer him the option to delete his account, only to deactivate it. “Knowing that all my gossip is still out there somewhere has been really unnerving ever since. Is there a secret button?” asks Powell.

The situation was exposed by Alan Burlison, a software programmer, when he tried to leave Facebook last November. He was determined to properly delete his profile, only to be told he must manually remove every individual action he had undertaken on the site – a process so arduous it was soon dubbed “Hotel California” by disgruntled former fans, referring to the line in the Eagles song that says you can check out but you can never leave.

“I wrote back to Facebook, saying that their response was unacceptable,” says Burlison on his personal blog. He also complained to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) – the body responsible for upholding the Data Protection Act in the UK – and even Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive. “The e-mail didn’t bounce, so I must have guessed his addresses correctly,” he adds.

Eventually the website expunged Burlison’s details properly, but he had posed the highly pertinent question: if Facebook has the ability to delete accounts so easily, why doesn’t it make it available to users?

Magnus Wallin, a Swedish Facebooker, set up a website campaign called “How to permanently delete your Facebook account”, which has 12,414 members.

In response to this kind of pressure, Facebook has since created a customer service form that users can fill in to request full deletion. Wallin told The Sunday Times that this new form was “a decent first step, but it’s hidden deep in the help pages. The option to delete yourself should be available right next to the ‘deactivate’ button on the website. And why a form? You shouldn’t need to explain yourself”.

He’s right, of course, and I only found this form at all because Wallin provides a link on his Facebook page.

When I tried to delete the fictional Ian Gear’s account by filling in the form, it took several days – and this account had only a few details to remove. Wallin insists that despite a few teething problems the process does now work. “Your complete profile is removed without a trace. The only things that are left are personal messages you’ve sent to other Facebook members if they still have them in their inbox.”

Facebook says it takes seriously its responsibility for holding people’s data and is in compliance with key tenets of European Union law. The reality, though, is that the company is in talks with the ICO over the practicalities of this and there is a strong possibility that by uploading your personal data to Facebook you kiss goodbye to any legal rights to have them deleted later.

As a US-based company it is unclear whether Facebook has to comply with EU or UK data-protection laws, which require all personal data to be destroyed after the purpose they are used for is completed.

Facebook does participate in the privacy programme operated by the US-based Truste, a self-regulated body that deals with oversights arising from such matters, and the Safe Harbor initiative – an exemption that allows multinational firms to transfer data about EU-based employees to the US.

This is not good enough, according to Yaman Akdeniz, director of Cyber-Rights & Cyber-Liberties, a UK-based pressure group, and a law lecturer at Leeds University. “Although the ICO has good intentions, this falls short of legal compliance as Facebook is currently not listed as a data controller within the UK – and as it has 8.5m British users it should be.”

The ICO confirmed it has not received a formal application (a process known as notification) from Facebook to be an authorised data controller, despite verbal assurances from the company that it is in the process of doing so.

The way out

If you visit the account section of Facebook you are offered only the opportunity to “deactivate”. This merely hides your public profile until you next log in. It’s a useful option if you are likely to return. To delete your details permanently you must first unearth the anonymous-looking customer service form that is hidden away at tinyurl.com/2xv52v.

When completing this form tell Facebook in both the subject and the message fields that you wish to have your account deleted. To check if this has been done properly either create a fake Facebook account or ask a friend to search for your details a few days later.