'Quit Facebook' number rises to around 27,000, Indian users unperturbed

The ‘Quit Facebook Day’ campaign saw the number of users who have committed to quit the social networking site rise from 24,500 to 27,000. The site went online on May 12 to protest Facebook’s “lack of privacy and openness”.

The numbers may increase by the close of the day but will still comprise a miniscule population (0.005 per cent) of the over 450 million global users of social networking site, Facebook.

In India, though, hardly any of the 16.8 million Facebook users appear to be perturbed over the development, with most of them either unaware, or not particularly disturbed over the lack of privacy issue.

QuitFacebookday.com claims: “Facebook gives you choices about how to manage your data, but they aren’t fair choices, and while the onus is on the individual to manage these choices, Facebook makes it damn difficult for the average user to understand or manage this. We also don’t think Facebook has much respect for you or your data, especially in the context of the future.”

Websites like www.quitfacebookday.com, where users have indicated their intent to delete Facebook accounts, claim users could consider alternatives such as Twitter, Flickr, Orkut, and the yet-to-be-released Diaspora project for social networking.

Facebook’s overly-complicated privacy controls – for instance privacy policy has 50 different settings, 170 different options – have come under fire from its 450 million global users. Last month, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced some more policy changes including an ‘instant personalisation’ feature which can give third-party websites access to Facebook data when people visit it.