My recent foray into the world of “social networking” a la Facebook has been rather disappointing. I’m not so much talking about the really, really lousy user interface that buries important things so deep that you just can’t get to them except by dumb luck; or the fact that their privacy settings are rather dismall; or even the fact that despite the privacy settings, the most ridiculous things keep jumping out at you (quizzes requiring your cellphone number, growing things, fishy things, flairy things).

No, what is so thoroughly wrong with Facebook is that they steal the rights to your content. Fovever. It came to light just the other day that Facebook updated its policies claiming the rights to anything and everything you put there and retain those rights to anything and everything even if you delete your account. By the way, you can’t actually delete your account, you can only “deactivate” it.

The intrusiveness of the whole setup disturbed me from the get-go, but I thought it would be a fun, easy way to make contact with my kids, some far-off family members and old friends, and it did do that–easily. But the amount of information made available by saying “hi” to my kid made me feel exposed, and well, I don’t like being stared at.

So, adding my natural paranoia to the very real infringement of my intellectual property rights (my words and art), I’ve deleted my personal photos and photos of my artwork from Facebook (dunno if they retain them in an archive), broken the connection to this LiveJournal and will probably be far less active. I’ll leave the account open for now as I do like “seeing” my friends and family, but that may change if the climate over there concerning privacy and copyright aren’t worked out in a more reasonable and fair way.

Or maybe I’m just too old for such silliness.