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 way that the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine works is that you provide them with your login information for the various social networking sites on which you have accounts, and then the Suicide Machine’s system logs into all of your social networking accounts and deletes all of your data (and then changes the passwords so that you can’t ‘unpull the plug’, as it were, even if you are tempted).
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.
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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.
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Does this mean that Facebook have actually BLOCKED the suicide machine? I have ‘commited’ to remove my faceboob account, but NOTHING is happening. No traffic reported on Netmeter. I know it says it can take 52 minutes but i cannot see any activity and wonder if the site is blocked?
Will report back in an hour. (also, it is supposed to ‘show’ you the stuff getting trashed via a flash program, but that is not happening either)
Hooray, what an innovation. I’ve been trying to delete all my social networking sites and find it cumbersome. If, as you state someone has come up with a program to delete these space taking and boring sites I would certainly subscibe.
Kinda makes me want to completely remove myself from Facebook. I recently deactivated my account. Have people forgotten there is a ‘real’ world to enjoy? I expect to see a lot more of this as ‘addiction’ becomes the new euphemistic term for “I can’t control my compulsion to play farm games on Facebook.”