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'Quit Facebook Day' Looks Like A Hard Sell

28.05.2010
With the deafening media uproar over 's confusing and sneaky , you'd think that the upcoming "" would be a grassroots hit among the social network's hundreds of millions of devotees. But as of Friday May 28, just three days before the big event, fewer than 24,000 Facebook users have committed to quitting the service.

To put that number in perspective, Facebook currently has more than 400 million active users. So, yes, a miniscule 0.006 percent of the site's fans are miffed enough by Facebook's mystifying privacy settings to take their online socializing elsewhere.

Backlash Brewing?

It's possible, of course, that the number of Facebook quitters will rise dramatically on Monday, May 31--the official "Quit Facebook Day"--as word of the protest spreads across the Web. But the lack of interest thus far is a telling indication of the average Facebooker's indifference to the ongoing privacy debate.

Then again, a recent by security firm Sophos shows that at least 60 percent of Facebook users are considering quitting the site over privacy concerns, so who knows what people are really thinking.

Privacy and consumer advocates have blasted Facebook for the way it shares user data on the site and across the Web. The social net's "" approach to privacy--your personal data shared with third-party services by default--plus the site's needlessly complex privacy controls, have also incurred the .