Jennee Grace U Rubrico
MY COUNTRY has once been called the social networking capital of the world.
A study released last March and quoted by Yahoo! News reveals that 95 per cent of the people in the Philippines who have access to the Internet are on social networking sites.Mark Zuckerberg, should he choose to do so, can undoubtedly rule the land. The same survey shows that of those who have Internet access, 93.9 per cent have a Facebook account, making the Philippines the market with the highest penetration for the Harvard dropout's online Frankenstein.
This means that as of March, more than nine out of 10 people with Internet access in the Philippines had a Facebook account. It also means that had I been living there, I would have been one of the six people in every 100 who didn't have one.
I had known that there were only a handful of us who have fought the pressure to open a Facebook account. Every member of my family has one, and so does every single one of my friends and colleagues. Over the years, I've gotten hundreds of invitations to join Facebook from friends, family, co-workers, and long-forgotten people I might have met at one time or another.
I just didn't think there were this few of us in the resistance movement. My refusal to join the social networking site is not due to being an anti-social netizen. I created my little nook in cyberspace before it became as pervasive as it is now. I had an email address at Rocketmail before Yahoo! bought it over to kill it and a decade before Gmail was rolled. I was a chatter when usernames were called handles, when BBS (bulletin board systems) still existed, Telnet chat was the rage, and mIRC was just starting. I had an instant messaging account with ICQ on the year it was rolled out, and my handle was an eight-digit number.
I was talking to friends and relatives who were oceans away through the Internet before Skype had come into existence.
I think that my online persona has better social skills than the real me.
At various times, I've owned an account on Friendster, Multiply, Blogger, Livejournal and Shelfari. When Twitter and Tumblr came along, I've opened accounts in those too. I am aware that Facebook has been used as a catalyst for change. And I have, on a number of occasions, wished that I had an account so I could check on family, particularly when calamities strike and telephone lines are down.
But five years after the social network was opened to the world, I have managed to remain a Facebook virgin. I have come to regard this as a lifestyle choice.
Privacy issues make opting out the easy choice. My chief deterrent was Facebook's refusal to expunge personal data of people who create an account and later decide to deactivate it.
Why the company wants to keep the data of ex-users is open to speculation. Facebook has said that while deactivating the account does not erase the users' profile information in the social network's servers, deleting it would erase all information. But to remove all information, users must manually delete content such as wall posts, friends, and groups.
More issues were raised as the social network gained popularity, and they served as my justification for staying out of it. Photo tagging, in particular, is a constant bleep on my radar of paranoia, as it opens users to the inconvenience of being easily identifiable to both strangers and the bad elements.
It's not always easy to resist the advances of Facebook. That everyone is on it is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the bandwagon's call can be quite persistent. On the other, the hype can be a turnoff.
The tide appears to be turning against the social network, though. In a June 13 report, the AFP stated that Facebook's growth is slowing and that the social network has lost users in the US and Canada.
In the US, six million users deactivated their accounts in May, falling from 155.2 million at the start of May to 149.4 million at the end of it. In Canada, meanwhile, users fell 1.52 million to 16.6 million during the month.
Even in the so-called social networking capital of the world, Facebook appears to be losing its shine. A June 6 report by the Philippine Star puts Facebook penetration in the Philippines at 82.49 per cent in May - lower than the 93.9 per cent reported in March. Whether this means that Facebook lost users or that Internet penetration in the country has gone up faster than Facebook subscription has, it doesn't bode well for the social networking site, which depends on eyeballs to generate earnings.
I'm neither happy nor sad that Facebook is losing users - people dearest to me would clobber me if they thought that I was gloating that the connectivity that the social network offers is being threatened. But maybe, the mammoth that it has become could use a little shakeup. And maybe, this loss of users would make Facebook rethink the liberties it has been taking with users' privacy.
The views are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect those of The Brunei Times.
The Brunei Times
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