Facebook users are starting to delete their profiles after the site’s latest scandal involving privacy issues.
Photo illustration by Josh Pachio / Cuestonian Staff Photographer

By Taylor Saugstad
Managing Editor of Design & Layout

Over the past few weeks, the #DeleteFacebook movement has run rampant, not just on social media, but across the web.

A recently survey, give after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, stated that 1 out of 10 Americans have deleted their Facebook accounts, according to Techpinions, a technology research group.

This shows that this movement has grown to its highest level since the news broke of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, motivating a small but notable wave of Facebook deletions in protest.

Cambridge Analytica used a personality test which freely took over 87 million Facebook user’s personal and friends’ information.

This showed everyone what Facebook does with its user’s personal data.

It shows that Facebook doesn’t care about your personal data and is willing to do anything with your data to make a buck. Facebook is a company that makes money off its product, the product being its user’s data.

The Facebook user gives as much data as Facebook wants you to give, combining your data with third-party data brokers that then create a personal profile that Facebook can then sell to their advertisers or their third party clients.

If you breakdown how much money Facebook makes every quarter and every year, it would be over $20 per quarter and over $80 per year per Facebook user. That’s a lot of money once you think ago it.

And this shows just how much your personal data is worth, and you using Facebook just gives it all away for free.

This made me think that if Facebook made their service, which most would say is their service we use, a paid service, it would solve the privacy problem. But who’s willing to pay $6-8 per month for the Facebook service.

Actually, Facebook should paid you $6-8 per month by making money off your personal data.

It’s time to take control of your personal information by deleting your Facebook account.

Even through the number of deactivated or deleted Facebook accounts is less than individual accounts being created internationally everyday, deleting your account shows Facebook that people do care about how their personal data is being used.

Although, even after you have deleted your Facebook account, Facebook will create a shadow profile of you by tracking your browser history.

This shadow profile may be anonymous, but if you sign back up for Facebook, they can connect your name to your home or phone’s IP Address.

This is even something that Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, said he didn’t know when testifying in front of Congress a few weeks ago. How could the person in-charge of not even know what his company is doing.

There is a common saying about free products that are created by Silicon Valley startups, that if the product is free, then you are the product.

Facebook’s advertisers are the real consumers.

No one should rejoin Facebook or another social network until there is a secure way of storing your personal data. Basically a virtual safe deposit box that is run by a non-profit organization that would store your personal data, only opening up your data to a third-party when you have decided to share your data with that social network. Or at least until Facebook has a transparent way of showing its users what it does with their personal data.

People, especially Americans are willing to sell their privacy to get a free or discounted service. We’re basically willing to sell our soul to get something for free.

What’s good for Facebook is not good for America.

It’s not technology, it’s the humans who creates the technology that’s a problem.

But only you can make the decision.