A Quiet ‘Quit Facebook Day’

Quit Facebook Day didn’t exactly take Facebook’s bottom line by storm.

As of 10:30 p.m. Pacific time on May 31 — after the official “Quit Facebook Day” had ended in the Central and Eastern time zones in the United States — only about 33,700 people had committed to quitting Facebook, according to the Quit Facebook Day Web site. That’s about one out of every 12,000 Facebook users. (Facebook estimates it has more than 400 million users.)

But the organizers of the grassroots Quit Facebook Day — who were protesting, in part, Facebook’s convoluted privacy controls and how it handles users’ data — had indicated even before the day began that they didn’t necessarily expect a deluge of quitters.

“I personally never expected high numbers,” Matthew Milan, co-founder of Quit Facebook Day, tweeted on his Twitter feed on May 30. “But something doesn’t have to viral to be successful.”

The Quit Facebook Day movement was only one small part of an avalanche of criticism about Facebook in recent months. Users, Internet privacy advocates and even members of Congress had lambasted Facebook for its confusing user privacy controls, and for how it handles users’ personal data in general.

More recently, Facebook’s “Instant Personalization” program began granting third-party Web sites such as Pandora and Yelp access to Facebook users' personal information without users permission.

The criticisms led Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg to announce Facebook changes on May 26 that meant users could more easily control their information on the site. Those changes were met with mixed reviews in the days after Zuckerberg’s announcement. (A PCWorld contributing editor wrote that "managing your Facebook privacy is still a remarkably convoluted process which isn't explained clearly enough.")

But all of this attention to privacy controls does seem to be reminding people that they should be more careful with their personal information online. A survey of Facebook users by research firm Vision Critical found that 81 percent of survey respondents said they are being more careful about how they use Facebook, according to a PCWorld report. And 76 percent are sharing less personal information than they used to on the social network.