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What kind of friends are they, that don't notice and/or care to invite people except through Facebook?

Also, birthdays? Aren't those the sorts of things you find out about once per friend and then add to your own contacts? I've never had a Facebook account, but that's not a problem I've ever experienced.

Granted, I don't automatically know the birthday of every single person I meet or even get a number/email from. But I would go so far as to call that a feature, and because of that, the birthday notifications I do get are worth getting.

I don't think there's any malicious intent. In my demographic, (almost) all events are set up through FB because your friend graph, mass-invites, and guest lists are built in.

My flatmate's boyfriend is fond of throwing large house parties with hundreds of invitees, then hiring a doorman to check names off against the FB RSVP list. If you're not on it, you're not admitted.

My closest friends remember me and send me invites via email, but I can't fault them for forgetting now and then.

Since killing my account (because they kept resetting my privacy settings to public... bastards) I've outsourced my Facebook Birthday/Party monitoring to my girlfriend.

It's risky to own lots of stock in your employer because you losing your job would be more likely to come at a time when your investments were worth less. It's risky to let your SO handle too much of your social life for similar reasons.

I'm very close to my wife and can't imagine getting a divorce, but I think it's healthy that we manage our own social calendars.

I'm similar to BWStearns, I let my girlfriend monitor facebook for events, we often both get invited to events where only one of us attend or one of us is invited by the other isn't. That's not to say she manages my calendar. We have both our own GCals (viewable by the other) and a shared GCal, we've had a long standing agreement that if we book anything in our own calendar attendance by the other is not expected and our shared calendar is attendance optional unless otherwise specified.

Not to be totally pessimistic, but that's probably potentially even more dangerous than trusting all that data to Facebook...

I didn't mean to imply maliciousness -- rather to draw a line between the sorts of friend-of-a-friend-of-an-ex-coworker parties you might miss out on for not being on Facebook, and a party of an actual friend you know and spend time with.

In short: pointing to the line between friends and "friends" and (likely my personality coloring the value judgment) thus questioning whether you're actually missing out by not being so closely connected to those "friends".

(Frankly the very concept of a house party with so many attendees that don't actually know one another, that a door man and a guest list is required, sounds like a caricature of a straw man I might have cooked up to have a laugh at "things you might need FB to get invited to". But maybe that's just saying more about me and why I don't grok or value things like FB.)

I've talked to a few people who were sending out their wedding invitations and were legitimately worried about accidentally missing someone on their Facebook friends list or forgetting about someone who doesn't use Facebook.

It's definitely naive to think "oh, if you're really friends with them you'll remember their name without the help of a computer." This is especially the case with larger more inclusive weddings where now-disconnected friends are invited.

I think its more "if the party is of a certain size you don't notice who isn't there." so for acquaintances, dropping off FB can drop you out of a lot of invites.

That said, I find it challenging to remember my immediate families birthdays (not to mention, anniversaries etc) and while my crutch has always been a calendar, FB can provide that crutch for folks who don't have a calendar habit.

Bottom line is that the core premise of FB is actually quite sound, its just not easily monetizable. Its possible that after a while folks would pay to subscribe to a FB like service but long before that Google or someone else who isn't being held against the wall with a share certificate pointed at their head may find a more workable solution.

And of course FB could, their are a lot of smart folks over there.

This is how I've dealt with FB's negligent, frequent, and non consensual behavior:

1) No one can post on my wall

2) No one can tag me in pictures, post or places.

3) My profile picture excludes my face.

4) I post little to nothing.

5) I only friend a narrow group of people. Being an offline friend of mine for years is not enough.

6) People who make weird comments are unfriended quickly.

7) The list goes on, but it can be summarized as do as little on FB as possible.

My best friends, most of my girlfriends, my family -- I am not friends with on FB!

You can have a FB account and maintain some basic degree of privacy. It probably is not the way Mark Zuckerberg intends it. The more he does to interfere with my usage patterns, the less I use FB (and I hold him ultimately responsible for the UX.) I expect to continue to lose control over my account in the future. The more this occurs, the less I'll use it.

Strangely, over the past year I have begun to really enjoy and understand using Twitter.

The last sentence resonates with me. My twitter account was started in 08 and largely unused until this year. I'm surprised how much I like it after it clicked for me one day. Twitter works (for me) by keeping the number of people I follow low and keeping the signal to noise high.

You sound like me. I have now recently deleted my Facebook account. I recently realised that I was not participating, only lurking, mainly because I no longer trust Facebook with my data (I've spoken previously about soft-deletes archiving versus physical deletes). I also no longer trust the NSA Facebook relationship post-PRISM.

If there are more people like me, then I truly fear for Facebook's long term success. (Disclaimer: I still own Facebook stock).

Sounds like you are a Facebook leech! Community involves active participation!

You just have to learn to ignore some posts - gloss over them.

If you swapped Facebook out for say a private email list - would you be more inclined to participate? And if that is the case - why don't people just use mailing lists?

Downvote me then without reason. The arrogance! ;)

As a fellow 20-something in SF, I feel your pain. I recently made a FB account that I keep absolutely bare except for my friends to invite me to things. It still results in 'leak' that I'm not fond of, but the alternate choice is to continue to be left in the dust.

What data "leaks" that a moderately sophisticated/equipped adversary could not easily learn via other means? In 45 seconds I was able to learn your name, basic age/location, and email from this post, your hn profile and github profile. Another 45 seconds and I found your google+ and twitter accounts, with better location data, education history and employer.

Most people aren't moderately sophisticated/equipped adversaries. They are just people you think have no business knowing about (parts of) your life.

Anybody who could or would actually harm you with the knowledge can easily acquire it is the GP's point, I think. A Facebook account, ipso facto, adds no additional risk.

Its not what people can know about you, but rather how much of what they know is controlled by you. You can put out there all the info you want to make public, but if you change your mind, facebook will still keep your data.

He was in control of the data and then he relinquished control of the data when he shared it with facebook (and google, twitter, github and HN).

Trusting facebook to prevent Eve from accessing to your data is not the same thing as controlling Eve's access to your data.

Everything you mentioned is actually data I've purposely made available, EXCEPT for the twitter account, which continues to vex me. I haven't tried to delete that recently; I'll try again soon. (I can't remember what happened the last time...)

I still am curious about the information that a "absolutely bare" FB profile leaks?

People that don't understand that I do not like FB are not my friends.

I used to think this, but the truth is more complex. Facebook makes it easy for a lot of people to manage very large number of friends. If you're not using Facebook but most people around you are using it, even though your close friends would probably care enough about you to communicate with you through some other means, you will probably be missing out on a large number of distant acquaintances.

The usual counter-argument to this is that it isn't worth it to care about such relationships anyway, and that you should only be concerned about close friends. It is true that close friends are important, but it might not be true that the optimal strategy is to care only about them. It may be useful to keeping distant connections with old friends in case you ever run into them again, or to have a large distant social circle with diverse backgrounds and physical locations to get more diverse recommendations, opinions, help, etc. More dramatically, say you arrive in a new city where you don't know anyone and no one knows you, but most people use Facebook: if you insist that people that don't initially know you should use your favorite communication medium rather than Facebook to interact with you online, it might be harder to get things started.

This isn't to say that you should use Facebook: I never used it and discourage people from using it. This is to argue that you should be conscious that not using Facebook may come at a personal disadvantage. I personally still think that it is more important to stick to my principles and make an insignificant effort to improve things by not being on Facebook, but I can understand that other people might think differently (though I disapprove their choice).

If you are not going to be happy if you are not honest to your beliefs.

Not true. You can be really honest to your beliefs and have a miserable life specifically because of that.

I have deleted by FB account twice and then I was spending lots of time explaining why, getting weird looks from people and being left out of comments (e.g. people would post something to FB and be laughing about it later but never explain about what.. really impolite of them but what can I do? engage in more arguments).

So yeah, be honest to your beliefs, just don't expect that will translate to happiness (unless you really work on telling yourself none of that unpleasant situations are really bad). We are human beings, how we interact with others matter (even if I didn't want any of that).

Well for me, sharing my beliefs with friends makes me happy. If someone does not share or respects my beliefs, then there is no sharing and understanding each other which is the essence of a friendship.

No matter how strange your beliefs are, you will always find people that think similar. The world is very diverse.

It seems that FB even changes the fundamental meaning of a friend. Which is a shame and a lack of social culture.

I had my account around the same times as you did. And deleted for various reasons. When I deleted my account people were up in arms, "Why would you get rid of facebook?" And I am more the type of "why would you want it?" Now I miss out on all sorts of stuff like new babies and marriages, but at least it means really catching up with people when we do get together. Facebook is what I was into when I was growing up on AOL, then it would have been cool. But is it really beneficial to be linked with everyone you have ever met?

On the Saprano's they said something like 'nostalgia is every mans weakness'. In my eyes facebook breads nostalgia, thus I keep away.

I was deleted my account only to recreated it months later due to social pressure (yeah, I'm weak). When I logged back in, FB was suggesting I add all my old friends... I was immediately angry because it seemed FB hadn't really deleted my account so they still had all that data. Then it downed on me that they didn't have to keep my data... all my other friends were sharing so much information about me that I didn't even have to do it. FB knew my college friends, girlfriend, parents, etc..

It is really hard to go off the grid. Does anyone know if I job change, city change plus a name change would help? :)

I've been where you are, it sucks. In fact, I don't really have friends because 1) I have moved around a lot since 2000 and 2) I stopped caring that FB ruled my friendships (in the way you mention). There are definitely people I'd be friends with, if they lived in my city, but since they don't, they only keep in contact via FB, which I don't use socially. I only have it for news feeds from Pages.

Most of my friends are on FB as well whereas I'm not. They almost always tell me when something is going on. Sometimes they forget, but then they apologize.

Try to focus on getting a core group of friends that you maintain regular contact with. Call them, email them, sms them. Use communication forms other than FB to get at them and eventually you'll train them to include you. If not then get some new friends.

Join a table top gaming club. There seems to be a resurgence of table op gaming going on that's really exciting. And it's a great way to meet people.

Growing number of my friends are in FB with fake names and identities. It's more complicated when you add new friends or they want to add you, but otherwise it's ok for keeping touch with close friends.

Yes, its against FB user agreement but fuck that.

I'm (real life) friends with a handful of minor celebrities. Most of them have a 'public' profile for PR and every single one of them has a 'private' profile under a pseudonym using generic, non-descript images as their profile pic. It's pretty common.

And when I travel and try to add new people to my friend list, to verify it's me logging in, facebook shows me pictures of food and cats and asks me to identify my friends that have tagged everything but themselves. Plus I'm remembering a hundred fake names, because nobody uses their real name.

I'm the same, I do it too and think it's very neccessary, but it can interfere with FB procedures in funny ways.

But then again, all this isn't new information. I have never really trusted a webpage with relevant stuff. ECHELON is old news, and servers can be hacked. The level of trust some people put into the net amazes me.

In theory it sounds like a good idea, but imagine a scenario where your bank needs to confirm your identity and they outsource this task to a 3rd party that has incorrect data about you (actually happened to me) and when you provide the correct information they tell you it's incorrect and conclude you are not who you say you are. In my particular case they just had old data that was simply inaccurate. Is it unlikely that 3rd party would buy data from Facebook or some entity that obtained the inaccurate data from Facebook? I don't know but I think you see my point. Incorrect data that was inadvertently connected to you could potentially come back to cause you frustration in the future. That said, I don't necessarily disagree with what you're doing and hope Facebook is soon replaced by P2P software.

>Is it unlikely that 3rd party would buy data from Facebook or some entity that obtained the inaccurate data from Facebook?

Probably. Using a fake/altered name is incredibly common on Facebook, especially among younger people. I think any 3rd party assigned with that task would realize that and avoid it.

Pretty sure that a sufficiently deeply filled out social graph can be leveraged to figure out who Foo Bar is, even if he has no info about himself.

Oh, I absolutely guarantee it. Your FB search history, other people's FB search history (of your real name and of your fake name), which pages you view in correlation with what e-mail contacts you might have, the schools the people you talk to went to, etc.

Luckily there's no online record of relationship history or it'd be an open and close case.