I deactivated my Facebook profile yesterday. I came across the TED talk that I found to be rather disturbing. No it’s not about curly fries. It’s about the data collected by social networks like Facebook:

Among other things, it talks about the uses that your Facebook data can be put to:

An example I often give is that, if I ever get bored being a professor, I’m going to go start a company that predicts all of these attributes and things like how well you work in teams and if you’re a drug user, if you’re an alcoholic. We know how to predict all that. And I’m going to sell reports to H.R. companies and big businesses that want to hire you. We totally can do that now. I could start that business tomorrow,and you would have absolutely no control over me using your data like that.

If I’m going to be pimped by Facebook at the very least I’d like a cut. So I decided to make use of this weblog instead of just posting to Facebook. Since there’s no regulation of what Facebook can do with your data and they can arbitrarily change their user agreement, I feel better about using an environment where I have some control.