Bye, Bye Facebook!

Okay, that's an inflammatory heading to this post. I'm not actually leaving Facebook.

But I'm VERY tempted to do so!

I've been pretty ticked off at Facebook lately, mostly over three things:

1) During its last update, without my permission, Facebook reset many of my privacy settings. My photos had all changed from being viewable by "Just Friends" to "Friends of Friends." That might not seem like such a big change, but that means that total strangers could be looking at my photos of my children, who are sometimes named in the captions.

2) A few days ago I got a notification that someone had suggested a link for me. When I clicked on the link, I was taken to a bad site, one that I KNOW that person would never have sent me. I was the victim of, for lack of a better title, an Internet Evil Doer! I quickly closed the web page, though, and that computer does not seem to be having any adverse effects.

3) A different computer (my main home computer), though, recently got some spyware on it. My wife and children promised me that they'd been to no bad sites. When I asked them if they'd ever opened messages from people on Facebook, maybe suggestions to watch a video or to join a group or something like that, and then had something weird happen on the computer, they shook their heads vigorously and said, "Oh yeah! All the time!"

And that was it in my mind. I was going to get off of Facebook entirely. If the site can't tighten its security enough to keep bad guys out AND it's going to change my privacy settings every now and then without telling me, I'd be a fool to stay on the site! That's what I said at the time.

Call me a fool.

I decided that--when all is said and done--I ENJOY Facebook too much to get rid of it. But I DID make the following changes:
1) I went into my privacy settings and set everything back to "Just Friends."
2) I deleted the names of my children in every place that I could find them on my Facebook page (Photo tags, photo comments, notes imported from my blog).
3) Speaking of photo tags, I removed the tags from EVERY photo in my photo albums, with the exceptions of the tags of myself. If my family and friends tag THEMSELVES in my photo albums that's fine with me--I'll leave the tags alone. But I'm through tagging other people. If Facebook resets my privacy settings, I don't want those people's pictures and names being put together by strangers because of me.
4) I removed almost every bit of personal information about me on the "Info" tab of my profile. I used to have a list of a 1,000 things I was interested in, a bunch of long quotations, my entire work history and my entire educational history. No more. I have the high school I graduated from and my year so that classmates can find me, where I work now, and that's it. If someone does get into my personal information, there's not going to be much there for them to get.

So I'm going to continue using Facebook, but I'm going to be very careful about how I use it. I'm starting to have REAL doubts about this site.