Locked down in social networks

While joining an online social network may be easy, deleting your (potentially embarrassing) account from it may -never- be possible.

If you sign-up with Facebook, MySpace, Bebo or almost any other flavor of such “networking” services, you better kiss your privacy goodbye.

From the moment you start posting content, remember that everything you post is now owned by another entity and whatever control you have over your “seemingly private data” is merely a permission that’s temporarily “granted” to you.

While social networks might have had lofty ideals, their current obsession with total ownership of all the content floating within their network coupled with twisted deletion procedures go to paint a much murkier picture of their “service” where, among other things, YOUR personal information is a commodity sold and resold forever, however desperate you may be to have that data permanently deleted.

Nowadays, more and more social networking victims are exiting the scene entirely because they’ve just discovered how these outfits operate. When the smoke clears, members trying to delete their account almost always end up losing a mix of (1) time, (2) money and (3) peace of mind.

Savvy web surfers have steered clear of social networks from the moment they took about 30 minutes of their time to read their “privacy policy” along with equally frightening their “terms of use”. In a nutshell, they own anything you do on their network, wether its usage pattern or actual postings… forever!

If you’re looking to exit any of these mostly useless, junk filled, spam circulating social networks, don’t settle for mere “deactivation” (like in the case of Facebook) because your data is kept fully intact, until you return.

Don’t hesitate to contact consumer defense groups during your account deletion process because even though you can beg the member service clerk all you want (usually without success), you’ll likely need the added muscle to be sure your data is -really- deleted, forever.

Until this privacy protection quagmire is resolved, to the user’s advantage, joining social networks will continue to be very risky business that could cost you dearly.

Tags: social networks, facebook, myspace, bebo, account deletion, privacy, risk