Angry with Facebook's constant tinkering with its privacy settings over the last year-and-a-half, droves of Facebookers are quitting the site for good on May 31. Should you follow suit?

Angry with Facebook's constant tinkering with its privacy settings over the last year-and-a-half, droves of Facebookers are quitting the site for good on May 31. Should you follow suit?

Here's what happened last week. Himanshu got a haircut that not too many people 'liked'. Tara had a painful wisdom tooth extracted, and Jackie missed her morning workout, leaving her instructor furious.

Private? Says who?
These three don't know me, neither do they know that I seem to know an awful lot about them. It's all courtesy Facebook's (FB) increasingly lax and labyrinthine privacy settings. Not everyone is unaware though; users frustrated with the social networking giant's apparent lack of concern for their privacy have signed up on www.quitfacebookday.com to quit Facebook on the last day of this month.

At last count, the number of 'quitters' totalled 2,466. Given FB's 400 million user base, that's the tiniest drop
(assuming they actually do it), but the growing discontent should worry FB CEO Mark Zuckerberg.u00a0

Or so you'd think. Far from addressing legitimate concerns about personal pictures being used on third party sites, the FB team did some lip service: "The privacy and security of our users' information is of paramount importance to us."

And as a token gesture, there's a new feature where you need to register a computer to prevent unauthorised access to your account by identity stealers. Not good enough.

How does it affect you?
Earlier, you could hide your profile picture from select people, not allow friend requests, and block access to all photo albums at one go. Now, you need to remove your profile picture to prevent strangers from seeing it, reject random friend requests from 'friends of friends', and set individual access settings for each album. Time consuming and frustrating. Data on your profile can now be shared with partner sites like Yelp, Microsoft, Pandora and others. They in turn, can use it to target advertising.

Like Peter Rojas, founder of popular technology sites EndGadget and Gizomdo says, "I was spending more time managing my account than actually using (it). Having to constantly monitor the privacy settings was way too complicated. You can never be sure if you actually caught everything."

You can't because even if you set out to secure your FB fortress with an iron will, you'd find it flagging when faced with 50 settings with more than 170 options, and a 5,830 word-long privacy statement that is, tellingly, 1,287 words longer than the US Constitution. So much for simplicity.u00a0

Sick of it all, Vile Parle resident Pranay Parab, an ex-FB user and photographer who used to upload his pictures on to his account, cut the cord last year. "Once the content was up on the site, FB claimed ownership. Even if I updated my status and later decided to remove it, it wasn't deleted from the FB server. That made me paranoid. Privacy is more important than keeping in touch with people online."

Parab is not alone. On May 11, the phrase "how to quit Facebook" generated 16.9 million results in a Google search, while "how do I delete my Facebook account?" resulted in 15.9 million links.

What now?
Admittedly, those who defend FB with the argument that no information you choose to disclose online is completely private anyway, have a point. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't have complete control over who gets to see your drunken bachelor party pictures. Enough reason for Matt Cutts, head of antispam at Google, to deactivate his FB account, followed by hordes of Google engineers.u00a0

If you don't want to do anything as drastic, you've probably got a couple of options to safeguard your privacy.

1. Check your privacy settings often to see if anything new has come up and if you are inadvertently sharing something you don't want to, by virtue of the default setting.
2. Limit the information you share, cleanse your account of people who are aren't friends.
3. Sign up on groups like People Against the new Terms of Service (TOS), who, by sheer strength of numbers (1,48,000 and counting) have (or so they claim) managed to get a response from FB spokesperson Barry Schnitt about reverting to the earlier Terms of Use.
Then put up your feet and go back to tagging friends in your photos. Until the new set of changes in the privacy statement -- or May 31 -- whichever comes along first.

Pranay Parab
Who: Student and photographer
From: Mumbai, India
Quit FB in: December 2009
Why: "I decided privacy was more important than keeping in touch with people online."

Peter Rojas
Who: Founder of Endgadget, Gizmodo
From: New York, USA
Quit FB on: May 6.
Why? "Tired of not having real control over what I'm sharing. I prefer Twitter and gdgt."

Matt Cutts
Who: Google Antispam Chief
From: Berkeley, USA
Quit FB on: April 22, 2010
Why? In a tweet, he announced he was quitting FB but didn't give any reasons. His move came hours after FB introduced an "instant personalisation" feature that automatically feeds your Facebook profile data to third party sites .