For a bit, you could see my name on Google News in the Sci/Tech section with a link to the article.

New Yorker Barry Hoggard draws a line in the sand when it comes to online privacy. In May he said farewell to 1251 Facebook friends by deleting his account of four years to protest what he calls the social network's eroding privacy policies.

"I'm sick of keeping track of my Facebook privacy settings and what boxes I have to check to protect myself," says Hoggard, a computer programmer. "I don't have a lot of illusions about online privacy, but Facebook has gone too far," he says of Facebook's recent privacy policy changes.

I wanted to be described as programmer/entrepreneur. I need a PR team. I'm hoping more articles appear, as I was also interviewed by a Washington Post reporter after writing about canceling my Facebook account on May 7. It has now been two weeks, so I assume my profile is safely gone.

Delete Billboard for the 2009 New York Street Advertising Takeover by Ji Lee, image via his website

I don't have a lot of illusions about privacy when using social media such as Flickr or Twitter, but there is a difference when a company like Facebook behaves in a really sleazy fashion.

I work on websites every day, including my own such as the art calendar ArtCat. I did not start out with one privacy policy for the calendar, and then gradually claim the right to use more and more information submitted to us. For example, I could offer a list of contemporary art galleries for sale to advertisers or artists looking for representation, but that would be wrong because it's not what the galleries expected when they gave information to us. However, given the changes in Facebook's privacy policy since 2005, they would consider this perfectly reasonable behavior.

In addition, with recent changes to their development platform, Facebook applications have more and more access to your private data, including applications you have not chosen to install, but your friends have. Want to share information only with friends? You're sharing it with applications that your friends use.

And how about those neat new sharing tools introduced by Facebook? Until they corrected a bug, visiting sites that are using Open Graph allowed them to install an application to your profile without asking you. Given their privacy track record, including the recent exposure of private chats, I wouldn't trust them to fix those holes quickly. "Instant personalization" indeed.

Related:

• The Rumpus: Conversations About the Internet #5: Anonymous Facebook Employee
• rocket.ly: Why You Should Still Quit Facebook
• ReadWriteWeb: How to Delete Facebook Applications
• Electronic Frontier Foundation: Six Things You Need to Know About Facebook Connections
• groovyPost: How to Permanently Delete your Facebook Account