Facebook is pissing its users off again:

Privacy groups are assailing Facebook after the world’s largest social networking website made changes to its privacy settings this week.

The changes allow users to apply more specific privacy settings to the content they post on the site. But many of the default settings mean that, unless users follow a prompt to go in and change their settings, they end up sharing most of their information with everyone on the internet.

“Under the banner of simplification, Facebook has pushed users to downgrade their privacy,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a US advocacy group.

This is no surprise. They’ll do this periodically. Facebook just isn’t terribly interesting unless you can stalk people, and you can’t very well stalk people who aren’t sharing their most personal secrets with strangers.

Maybe the answer is to be found in facebook suppuku:

Facebook makes you despair? Social networking makes you want to end it all? You may be ready for online ritual suicide with the aid of a new website that helps you kill your virtual identity.

“Impress your friends, disconnect yourself,” is the slogan on www.seppukoo.com, a site that aims to subvert Facebook by offering its millions of users a glorious end and a memorial page to match.

“Rather than fall into the hands of their enemies, ancient Japanese samurai preferred to die with honour, voluntarily plunging a sword into the abdomen and moving it left to right in a slicing motion,” the site notes.

This form of ritual suicide was known as “seppuku.”

You basically enter your facebook credentials and it more or less kills your account for you. Groovy.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 11th, 2009 at 4:08 pm and is filed under technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.