By now, the fourth wave of Facebook’s privacy issues has surely come to your attention. It should come as no surprise to those who have been following Facebook closely since the very beginning.  Facebook has never been one to care about privacy, not because it’s Facebook, but because it exists on a platform that doesn’t have privacy as its concern. The internet was created by the US  government and has tracking devices built into its architecture.  In short, everything we do on the internet can be traced back to us. That’s just the nature of this beast.

So if you decide to quit Facebook in a fit of pure principal on May 31st, know that it’s beyond your world. Quitting Facebook won’t stop other social networking or internet utility sites from springing up and finding new ways to expose and share your information without your express permission.  Quitting Facebook aligns you with an elite class of technophiles who can afford to quit and shows you are not the demographic Facebook is appealing to anyway.

I could go on into a history of Facebook’s disregard of our imagined privacy, but I think this conversation needs to happen on a larger level.  It needs to include the entire scope of the internet’s architecture from ISPs to web browsers to mobile devices and back.  It’s a conversation that needs to include education as access to the net increases and saturates our way of life.

Once more and more people are better educated on how the internet works at a very basic level, they can then begin to demand things of services like social media and ISPs.  That’s the crux of the matter: people just don’t know and it benefits large companies to keep folks in the dark.

Shutting down your Facebook account not help because there is still a LARGE number of folks using their service. Creating wiser internet users is better.