Did I ever mention that I'm not on Facebook? I did have a Facebook account at one point, but I wasn't using it, so I suspended it years ago, and I never told Facebook all that much about myself. And, oh boy, am I ever glad that I'm not heavily invested in the Facebook ecosystem, because OMG what a fucking mess.
Facebook themselves have been really quiet about the whole Cambridge Analytica situation, to such an extent that I keep seeing articles commenting on how weird the silence of their CEO is, at a time of such crisis for the company, but that hasn't prevented the flood of "how to delete Facebook" articles, the start of the class action lawsuits (from their shareholders, natch, complaining that FB's mishandling of the matter amounts to negligence and is costing their shareholders money), and at least three official investigations from the governments of the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. So much for their hopes that an "independent" (yet still internal) audit would be enough to keep the steadily building outrage to manageable levels.
Suddenly, the probably-inevitable failure of their VR adventure (along with everyone else's VR adventures) is looking like the least of Facebook's problems. Mark Zuckerberg has gone from being a rumoured Presidential hopeful just last year, to being a dead CEO walking at the company he himself founded, with CNBC calling for him to step aside and let Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg take over. And an industry that was built on collecting, and then selling, their customers' private and personal information is suddenly facing the very real prospect that they'll find themselves regulated, and heavily, within the year.
And all I can say is, it's about damn time.
Seriously, the Big Brother nature of Facebook and Twitter creeps me all the way out. I mean, Google might want to collect as much information about you as possible, but they're not literally selling your private deets to companies outside Google, they're not leveraging using your contact list to gather information about you without your knowledge or consent, and they're not doing this all behind a black-box wall of obscurity that allows you no visibility or control over the process at all.
My Google account settings have turned all of the data collection off, because Google lets me do that. Google lets you opt out. Facebook doesn't let you opt out, and will collect information about you that you didn't know they could access, all without even asking first. The fact that they're in the business of selling your information to others, and not just advertising services powered by that information, has always been all the way wrong, and crying out for regulation. And, as far as I can see, regulations really can't come soon enough.
And so, the last of the Wild West dot com boomers will be brought to heel, and we will spend the next decade (at least) grappling with the fallout from their recklessness, arrogance, and greed.
In the meantime, here's The Verge's guide to deleting Facebook.