Robert Garcia

Introduction

The purpose of this blog and project is to give a first-hand account of our research project regarding Facebook's privacy policy and the use of Facebook in a college student's life. We broke our group of seven into three groups. Two of us kept their Facebook profiles as the control group, three people deactivated their profiles, and two people deleted their fake Facebook accounts that they had used for various online activities. This topic came about in class when the question was posed "What happens to our Facebook accounts when they are deleted?" A group of us decided to test this theory and thus the project was born! We were all to keep logs of our personal thoughts and feelings about our experiences throughout this experiment, as well as try to find ourselves once everything was deleted or deactivated.

Annotated Bibliography

You can find my Annotated Bibliography by clicking on the "Bibliography" tab on the right hand side, and scrolling down to my name.

Data, Methods, Ethics

As we group we all decided the best way to gather our data was to report our own experiences. Considering that we all had a very hard time finding anything that was relative to this study, we saw this as our best avenue of research, it also made it easy on us as well. Everyone in the group was to log about their feelings or activities throughout the experiment. Below you will find my logs:

3/6/12: Today was day one of deactivating my Facebook account. I found it actually challenging to find the deactivation link. I found it extremely annoying that Facebook made me complete a CAPTCHA in order to deactivate. I also found it annoying that after all of that Facebook wanted me to give them a reason as to why I was deactivating. It was rather silly that on the last page it told me that my friends would miss me, then proceeded to show me the profiles of a few friends and an ex-girlfriend. Overall, I feel kind of relieved.

3/7/12: Day two, not so much relieved. I find myself constantly hitting the f key on my keyboard when I open an browser. At first this made me laugh, but it also gave me the realization that this action alone is kind of creepy.

3/8/12: Still doing the f key trick but not as much. I have found that oddly enough Facebook is arguably my most visited site, considering I keep habitually try to go to it.

3/9/12: Today I can honestly say I miss updating my status. It may just be me, but ever since I deactivated I have found so many things I wish to update and post about.

3/10/12: Today was the last straw. I go to listen to Spotify my music player and it will not let me play anything because my account must be synced with my Facebook account. At this point I was learning to live without Facebook, but now I can't wait to reactivate it in order to listen to music.

3/11/12: Things have calmed down for me. The text messages asking why did I deleted my Facebook have subsided and I am feeling okay about not having one. Today I even thought about not turning it back on.

3/12/12: I really missed Spotify today. I was doing some studying and outlining for a paper when I really wanted to hear a song I did not own. Tomorrow will be great when I reactivate my Facebook account. I feel almost bad for saying this, but I may miss my access to music over my access to Facebook and what my friends are doing.

3/13/12: Last day I am logging my activities. I seriously thought about not turning it back on, but the lack of hearing almost any song I want ended up making me reactivate it. It appears I haven't missed too much but I know I will be acting different going forward with Facebook.

Here are some Screen Shots of my Deactivation Process:

 

Analysis

               I have learned quite a bit from this project. I learned that because of the internet and social media sites such as Facebook, that our society has now become dependent on them to some extent. I say this with using myself as well as my group mates as examples. The five of us that deactivated or deleted all felt relieved and at the same time kind of anxious. Like many of my group mates I had this odd feeling that something was missing at first. That something in my world was not quite right. It was almost scary how much power a social media site can have on someone. But as the days wore on I found it became easier and easier to live without my Facebook as you can see through my logs.

               As I stated in the introduction, all of us that either deactivated or deleted needed to try and find ourselves by using Google and other sites. After searching we all had to conclude that Facebook must follow through with their privacy policies because we could not find traces of ourselves as hard as we tried.  For the members that deactivated, it was pretty simple, we searched and found nothing of ourselves and we had even been untagged in photos. The people that deactivated only had woes about how difficult it was. There were too many hoops one needed to go through in order to just deactivate their Facebook. As I mentioned above in my logs you needed to first find the link, then enter a CAPTCHA, then give a reason for you leaving, and finally the last shot chance that your "friends" will miss you.

               For the people who deleted their Facebooks they too had to jump through many hoops. They first needed to deactivate their account and so went through all of the steps that my group had to go through. In order to delete however, they had to Google "how to delete my Facebook" which then gave them a link to follow in order to delete it. Facebook goes on to say that in fourteen days it will have been completely deleted. This raised many red flags for us and questions such as why will it take fourteen days? We all came to the assumption that Facebook must be doing something with your data such as backing it up for storage. This assumption was fed even more evidence when after the fourteen days the deleted group logged back on only to find that Facebook had stretched the deadline of permanent deletion out an extra seven days. Although no evidence was ever found that Facebook was doing anything of this nature, it still was suspicious activity we were unable to investigate. 

               The last issue we ran into one of our group members stumbled upon by accident. He found that there were many rumors swirling around that in the iPhone application for Facebook, when you agree to their terms, you are actually giving them permission to read through your text messages for "research purposes." Again we kept searching but found no evidence suggesting that Facebook was doing anything of this nature, but it was suspicious that so many rumors were flying around about it. In the end our project was a success and we proved that even though Facebook is doing what they claim to be, there still are grey areas when it comes to the extent of their privacy terms such as the deletion delay timeline.