I was a late and reluctant convert to the network. I buckled to peer pressure because it had become the only way some of my relatives wanted to communicate. I had reached the point where the social benefits of membership outweighed the privacy risks.

I won’t pretend I didn’t like using Facebook. Once I’d removed all the adverts and games, set access limits on the things I published and figured out how to read content without using the website, it became a genuinely useful tool. The events-management feature was a particular highlight.

Since I joined Facebook the company has been relentless in pursuit of it’s business plan: to extract and sell as much personal information about it’s users as possible. Consequently the privacy risks of usage became more severe over time. Facebook made a series of unilateral changes that affected user privacy adversely. It made public information I uploaded on the understanding that it would only be shared with my friends. From that point on the only way to protect this information was to lie. (For the record: my birthday isn’t really 1 January and I’m not really 108 years old.) The system has been trying to persuade me to tell it my mobile phone number lately, first by pointing out me how useful it’d be to hapless friends who’d lost their mobiles, and second by claiming it would improve the security of my account. I think Bruce Schneier described it best when he said, “Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re Facebook’s customer, you’re not – you’re the product. It’s customers are the advertisers.”

The third-party applications through which much of the entertainment value of Facebook is derived proved untrustworthy, even without the accidental security-holes in the platform, so I stopped using them. Later, Facebook started dismantling the boundaries between itself and other websites by sharing profile information with it’s “carefully selected partners”, and subsequently with anyone who cared to put a Facebook “like” button on their website. It became necessary to log into Facebook only in Firefox’s “private browsing” mode to prevent information from leaking out to other websites without consent.

Facebook also made a controversial rights-grab by changing it’s terms and conditions to grant itself a copyright license-in-perpetuity to do what it likes with the content people published to it. My reaction was to stop sharing most of my photos, videos and blog posts on Facebook, which limited the value of my account to the people with whom I wanted to share those things.

Other changes were prompted by competitor social-networks. Facebook reacted to the explosion in popularity of it’s rival Twitter by changing it’s look to focus on status updates. At this point my use of Facebook became limited to the events system and as Twitter for people without a Twitter account.

In summary, as the Facebook kool-aid became more poisonous over time, I compensated by drinking less of it. A few months ago I realised I was logging in so infrequently that I was missing out on even those things in which I was genuinely interested: the birth of an acquaintance’s first child, an invitation to a party, and so on. I had to ask myself whether there was any point continuing.

The trouble is, Facebook is now integral to the lives of the people in my social circle, particularly since it reached critical mass: the point at which so many of my friends use the system that it’s become a chore for them to keep in touch in any other way. Some people I know don’t just limit their social interaction to Facebook – they also assume I’ve been following their posts and behave as if that assumption is sound. Suddenly it’s my fault if I don’t understand what they’re talking about. I’m making a social faux-pas by not reading what they have to say.

I’ve realised my relationship with Facebook has become an abusive one and it’s time to end it. This feeling was confirmed the moment I hit the deactivate button when my partner noted she’d probably have to field a stream of questions from her friends about why she’s no longer listed as “in a relationship” with me on *her* profile (my one concession to publishing private information about my life). I’m sure I would not have signed up to the network in the first place if I’d realised that my subsequent withdrawal could have an adverse impact on anyone other than myself.

I expect I’ll miss out on some photos I wish I’d seen, I’ll fail to realise that important events in my friends’ lives have happened, I’ll miss out on social events and my awareness of happenings in my extended circle of family and friends will diminish. Therefore I’m making my new year resolution to put more effort into maintaining my relationships in person. I’m betting I can enjoy just as rich a social life with fewer deeper relationships than I can with hundreds of shallow ones maintained through continuous partial attention.

This previously-boiling frog figures he’ll thank himself later for hopping out of the pan before it got too hot to survive.

If you want to get or stay in touch with me, or if you want to see my photos, videos and status updates, check out my ‘contact me’ page.

Social networking is a novel area. I work with academics who are all busy researching the myriad ways in which we might be able to take advantage of these new technologies. Social networking is exciting and new. It’s also full of people and companies with different agendas and beliefs and sometimes those things clash.

If you join a social networking site and upload content you’re naive if you think you can retain control over it. However if you’re a company that runs a social networking site and you try, or appear to be trying, to exploit your users you can expect a community backlash. That’s what has happened to Facebook this week.

We must give credit to Facebook for owning up to their mistake, reversing the changes and starting a consultation process over how to clarify their terms. However I note they’ve done this kind of thing before: Beacon was before my time as a user but I still remember it. Or maybe they’re learning from their mistakes and we should cut them some slack. It’s been suggested that trial and error might be the best (only?) way to approach this brave new world.

One could argue simplistically that we should all boycott social networking sites until their terms are perfectly in their users’ favour, their interfaces are open and interoperable, and their data are totally portable. However I don’t believe we’ll ever reach that position – and we certainly won’t if we don’t engage in constructive discussions and try to reach a compromise with which the majority of people are comfortable.

So yes, I use facebook. No, I’m not particularly happy with it. Yes, I am careful what I post there; and yes, I feel I’ve been a little bit lax and had my fingers burned this time. But no, I don’t feel like abandoning social networking as a cause lost to corporate exploitation either. It’s too important for that.

I’m proud of the Facebook community for spotting the issue, bringing it to the attention of the company and applying pressure until they got a result. In this way we slowly discover what the world believes to be acceptable practice for online social networks. The TOS might say that Facebook can do what it likes, but Facebook is nothing without its users, and in the macro sense this incident has shown that the community can have just as much clout as a legal document*.

My guess is that Facebook might now implement a Creative Commons licensing feature similar to that used by Flickr. This would be a Good Thing – there would be more Free and Some-Rights-Reserved content in the world (which Facebook could exploit if it wanted to) and users would get to control the terms under which their content can be used by others.

Whatever happens I think the debate around the social responsibilities of running and using social networks has advanced a step this week.

* In my opinion it’s unlikely that Facebook could have persuaded a court of the legality of a TOS change that retrospectively granted them rights over content submitted under a different agreement. Also, in the UK, such a clause might be caught by the consumer protection laws surrounding unfair contracts. IANAL.

Your old Myspace profile might prove difficult to explain in a job interview, but recent evidence suggests it could actually stop you getting that far. Worse: as your name is almost certainly not unique, a case of mistaken identity could easily cause someone else’s website to have the same effect!

It’s never been easier to upload your private details to the web, so it’s no surprise that the phenomenon of googling is becoming correspondingly widespread. In 2005, 43 percent of people who answered a dating-service survey said they type their date’s name into a search engine before they go out. Previous polls have revealed that 23% of US adults admit to searching online for information about someone with whom they have a work relationship.

To retain their privacy, people have traditionally hidden behind pseudonymous nicknames on the Internet, but this solution is far from ideal and is certainly not reliable. Besides, the rise and rise of blogging and social networking sites is pushing people to use their real details for both business and pleasure online.

So given that a gradual reduction in online privacy seems inevitable, how can you manage the issue of search engine misunderstandings in the Web2.0 age?

This is the problem that a new service called ClaimID has set out to address. Just out of beta and now open for public registration, the site allows you to collate on a profile page links that are either about you, by you, or both. This page is then presented to visitors arriving from search engines, together with your comments and other information about the sites you’ve “claimed”. In this way, you can add commentry and context to your online information, and even to articles about you that were posted by others.

Interestingly, you can also post comments about links that do not relate to you. This helps to distinguish between namesakes and avoid cases of mistaken identity.

ClaimID provides some reassurance that, however much information you have “out there”, you can keep control of how it’s being interpreted. Turning the tables, it also helps to ensure you’re getting the real story when a search for someone in whom you’re interested turns up a hit on the site!

The service already supports emerging standards such as MicroID, hcards and OpenID, and further improvements to these facilities are expected as the site matures. Greater scope for personalisation would be a nice touch though: profile page layouts and formatting are currently fixed. However it can’t be long before customisation options are provided; possibly even the ability to integrate pages into your existing website or blog.

ClaimID fills a clear and growing need for online identity management, and goes some way towards redressing the balance of power between you and the search engines. If you’d like to shake off your net handle and claim back your online identity, you could do worse than starting here.