Web “Suicide Machine” Service that Helps You Unsub from All Social Media Gets Cease and Desist from Facebook   - 988 Views, 2 Comments

The so-called Web 2.0 Suicide Machine - a service provided by Moddr that lets you delete all of your social media accounts at once (or as they put it, “delete all your energy sucking social-networking profiles, kill your fake virtual friends, and completely do away with your Web2.0 alterego”) - has certainly gotten the attention of Facebook. It started with Facebook blocking the IP addresses of the social networking suicide machine and similar services, however now Facebook has taken the much more aggressive action of sending the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine a Cease and Desist letter. Which means that Facebook is prepared to sue someone for helping people who don’t want to be on Facebook close their Facebook accounts.

The Suicide Machine service claims that using their service will take care of closing all of your social media accounts, and removing all of your related data, in under an hour, compared to the more than 9 hours it would take to manually close the standard social networking accounts with 1000 friends.

They then suggest, once freed of all of these addictive, time-sucking social networking accounts, that you “Try calling some friends, take a walk in a park or buy a bottle of wine and start enjoying your real life again.”

In fact, rather than suicide, the service is intended to do the reverse - to give people their lives back again.

Of course, Facebook doesn’t want people to have real lives - they make their money by keeping people on the Facebook site. Whether, apparently, they want to be there or not.

Thus last week, Facebook sent the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine the following legal threat:

Explains a Facebook statement, “Facebook provides the ability for people who no longer want to use the site to either deactivate their account or delete it completely. Web 2.0 Suicide Machine collects login credentials and scrapes Facebook pages, which are violations of our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. We’ve blocked the site’s access to Facebook as is our policy for sites that violate our SRR. We’re currently investigating and considering whether to take further action.”

In other words, while Facebook openly admits that they view their users as having no expectation of privacy, it’s not ok for anyone else to be privy to their users’ “private information” even if the user grants permission (thousands of 3rd-party Facebook apps notwithstanding) - especially if it’s for the purpose of helping that user close their Facebook account.