In fact, many have decided to defect altogether. In a recent study featuring Facebook quitters, it turns out that almost half (48.3%) have done so out of privacy concerns.
A paper by psychologist Stefan Stieger and fellow researchers from the University of Vienna looked into what they call virtual identity suicide, or, opting out of social networking. In a study of just over 300 Facebook quitters, concerns over privacy were far and away the No. 1 reason to flee. A more existential reason was a distant second: a general feeling of dissatisfaction with Facebook (13.5%). Subjects also reported quitting over meaningless conversations and negative interactions with friends (12.6%); and the fear of becoming addicted to Facebook’s many charms (6%).
“The offline (face-to-face) social life of many individuals has been complemented with an online (internet-based) social life, offering possibilities that are hardly feasible in the offline world,” said the researchers, writing in the scholarly journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking. But, they noted, it also has been shown that social networking can facilitate jealousy and suspicion in romantic relationships because of the ease of reaching other potential partners, has (potentially negative) influences on the evaluation of job candidates, and might open up new modes for stalking and harassment.
When it comes to building a profile of the average Facebook quitter, there was little commonality, according to the researchers. Individuals with social networking profiles do have higher risk-taking attitudes and are more likely to share identity information online. Conversely, the more “conscientious” among us are less likely to regard online life as anything other than somewhat distracting and tend to more readily quit Facebook. The study also found that Facebook quitters might have higher internet addiction scores than Facebook users, having quit to break the cycle of, say, excessively checking friends’ profiles and the like.
“Recently, privacy attracted much media interest when the CEO of Facebook postulated that privacy is an outdated social convention,” the researchers wrote. “This led to heated public debates about whether or not privacy is really outdated when it comes to online communication. Although the Facebook quitters of the present sample represented only a very small amount of all Facebook users, many of them seemed to be concerned about privacy to such an extent that it outweighed perceived advantages of Facebook and eventually led them to quit their virtual Facebook identity.”
Of late, applications have been cropping up, such as the Suicide Machine or Seppukoo, which let users automatically commit virtual identity suicide after submitting their social networking account login data. The suicide machine in turn deletes the account or at least deletes all the content (including friends, tweets and pictures), and makes the account inaccessible through password change. Another manifestation of the movement away from social networking was the Quit Facebook Day.