Facebook CEO Mark ZuckerbergFacebook, the social networking site that has so far avoided the flash-in-the-pan fate of its predecessors, is finding itself increasingly under fire for privacy issues.

Writing in yesterday's Washington Post, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that his social network's privacy settings are "too complex." He also assured Facebook's users that he is neither selling nor giving away their personal information to advertisers or anyone else they wouldn't want to see it.

Perhaps the 26-year-old needed to make this clarification in light of a recently exposed text message conversation he had six years ago. In it, he referred to his Harvard classmates as "dumb f**ks" for trusting an early incarnation of Facebook with their personal information.

Or maybe it was reports that, for his own personal amusement, Zuckerberg created a program that mined Facebook users personal data and communication patterns to predict with 33 percent accuracy who the user was going to be dating within the next week.

Basically, everything you do in Facebook is being closely monitored, recorded and stored. While you should have known that already, these recent revelations -- and Zuckerberg's damage control -- serve to drive that point home. Is it enough to make you consider deleting your account?

Read on for the pros and cons of getting off of Facebook's grid.

Should you kill your Facebook account?
Yes -- I already have (or I am seriously considering doing so)444 (43.9%)
Maybe -- but I'm pretty sure I won't 311 (30.7%)
No -- there are far bigger privacy issues to worry about than those posed by Facebook257 (25.4%)


Kill It
  • The human brain is only capable of managing 150 friends at once. So, if you have more than 150 Facebook "friends," you are sharing all your information with people who aren't really your friends -- people who don't have your best interests at heart.
  • Posting pictures on Facebook -- what good can ever come of that?
  • Maybe it's because we're starting to get a little older, but Facebook has increasingly become a forum on which parents share pictures and little anecdotes about their children. Is that really what you signed up for?

Keep It
  • If you are worried about privacy, you should be far more concerned about Google, the only website that gets more traffic than Facebook. If you've signed up for any of Google's services -- such as Gmail -- they have all your searches neatly organized and stored. And that's far more potentially damning than anything Facebook has on you.
  • For that matter, you should probably also stop using credit cards, which are also riskier than Facebook.
  • This is the biggest fear of most Facebook users: Somebody is going to develop a program that exposes whose Facebook pages you've been checking out for all to see. But let's say that does happen -- maybe the chick you've been silently keeping tabs on since high school is also checking out your profile an embarrassing number of times a week. Then you can get together and have, like, millions of babies.