Today is Quit Facebook Day and while I personally haven’t quit Facebook due to my FARMVILLE ADDICTION I don’t share any “personal” information with them either. I learned that lesson a couple weeks after joining when they changed their privacy settings making my entire friends list available to everyone even though I had it set to show to no one but me. I figured not only did they not respect my privacy choices, they didn’t respect my friends and family’s privacy either. So I deleted all my “real world” friends from my Facebook account at that point and haven’t given them access to my real life since. Now I only use Facebook for dopey games so it wouldn’t be the end of the world if they disabled my account for spamming my FarmVille friends with too many gifts. Don’t laugh, that’s actually happened to some people, just go read the Zynga forums sometime.

Anyway, here are MY reasons to quit Facebook:

Facebook arbitrarily changes its privacy settings on a whim without notifying users before or after changes are made and has on more than one occasion made information public even if you had it manually set in the privacy settings to private.

Facebook owns everything you upload to their site, including posts, status updates, photos, and your “data”.

Facebook doesn’t seem to have a clue how to program a site so that it’s both secure and works. (Newsfeeds anyone? Missing friends in games anyone? Apps sharing personal information to developers anyone?)

Facebook exists to make money by selling your information to advertisers, including those advertisers who release apps that harvest data and then sell that data to others without your knowledge or permission.

Facebook may disable your account for posting information that puts Facebook or its policies in a negative light. Don’t laugh, it’s happened.

Facebook requires you to use your true legal name (they can even disable your account if your legal name is William but you sign up as Bill,) yet provides no protection of that information to keep it out of the hands of stalkers, spammers, etc. Good luck if you have an uncommon name that can easily be Googled. I find this particularly disturbing for minors using the site. Facebook requires your child to use their legal name, yet does not allow you the parent to protect that information from pedophiles and the like. And their user agreement actually forbids anyone but the account holder (in this case your child) from logging into that account, so a parent cannot log into their child’s Facebook account to make sure they don’t have weirdos added as friends, because by doing so that parent has violated the user agreement and the account can be disabled by Facebook.

Just in case those didn’t scare you enough, here’s a few more: Gizmodo’s Reasons, Facebook’s CEO’s Plans, Eroding Privacy Trend, and Other Reasons.