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Want to Kill Your Online Persona?
January 4th, 2010|
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Guest post by Kathy Wilson.
Lexicographers are adding new words to the English language every day, thanks to Twitter, Facebook and many of the other phenomena that are sweeping the online world – we now have cool terms like “unfriend” and “retweet” to add to our already impressive vocabulary. But then, a few other words seem to be disappearing or having no business whatsoever in today’s Internet-oriented world, one of them being “privacy”. Very soon we’re going to have people asking “What is that?” if we ever mention the term “privacy”, and we have only ourselves to blame for this.
We live online 24/7; we never turn off our computers and we’re always connected to the Internet; we have 457 friends, all of whom know our likes, dislikes, personality, character, and even what we’re thinking about every hour of the day. This means that we have less time for our families and real time friends, the ones who we see and interact with every day. Some of us are so addicted to the net that we don’t get any work done and get into habits that are destructive and even illegal. We may want to quit this addiction, but the problem with the net is that it so pervasive and vast – you may delete your mail accounts and the profiles on your social networks, but some data and information is always left behind. If you’re wondering how to get rid of every single trace of you on the net, here’s a way out – Web 2.0 Suicide Machine.
The application allows you to delete every trace of yourself on social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others of their ilk. All you have to do is provide your login id and password, and through a small virtual window on your screen, you can see yourself being annihilated, slowly but steadily. All your information, photographs and messages are wiped out from your pages, and hopefully from the servers of these social networking service providers.
web 2.0 suicide machine promotion from moddr_ on Vimeo.
As of now, Facebook has blocked the IP address of this application, so if you’re on FB and want to commit online suicide, you’re going to have to do it the hard way. But as far as other social networks are concerned, you can outsource your bid to die online and end up getting your (real) life back.
While most people are not in a rush to get out of the online world, Suicide Machine claims that it has deleted 52,000 people from Facebook and 1,75,000 from Twitter. So if you want to be among these statistics, here’s your chance to do so. However, you should know that if you plan to leave a suicide note for your hundreds of online friends, it will be deleted too along with the rest of your information in a matter of minutes, so unless they’re constantly online, it’s going to be lost in the tons of information that rolls down their social network pages every day.
This article is written by Kathy Wilson, who writes on the subject of Photography Colleges. She can be reached at her email id: kathywilson1983@gmail.com. You can also write a guest article and share tools which you like.
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I don’t have any use of this application now, but seems interesting but i cant try it now :P
How many from Twitter? You wrote 1,75,000. Is that 1,000, 75,000 or 1,750,000?
1,75,000 = 175000
This would be useful to others but not for me and certainly not now :) But, thanks for sharing.
Unless if you really want to quit from online activities, than you can use this Suicide Machine to kill all your online information and data.
While the net is swarming with onliners wanting to stay connected with others, this ’self-destruction button’ application seems inconceivable.I think more and more people will give this a thought. Good job though!
While this may work as touted to remove all server held information, the wild card is information that has been archived by friends and followers. Many services/programs exist for harvesting tweets based on users, hashtags,or timelines and turning them into CSV or pdf files. Others allow for downloading all images from Facebook and of course nothing prevents a right click save, or at the least a screen capture. In short if you made it public, chances are you cannot completely rely on anyway of getting it back.
Exactly the problem.
The issue is not that privacy is disappearing, its that we are willingly giving it up in exchange for other’s lack of privacy. Nowadays, its almost common to meet somebody new, and then find out all sorts of interesting things about them in your free time. This practice scares me.
But I’m not worried. I have a Facebook, but it isn’t mine. Somebody from high school wanted to look me up, they had to do it the old fashioned way – asking people that we both knew, if they knew where to get ahold of me. Just how I like it.
Odd thing is, when I was just getting started on this whole ‘internet’ thing, I wasn’t very keen on posting tons of personal information online. Early school assignments were to create your own webpage (this was back in the Geocities days); I always made mine fiction, wondering why my classmates wanted the entire world to know they liked pizza and dolphins.
Myspace came about, and all I ever saw was annoying ads, unwanted annoying music, and the most horrible eye-raping ‘layouts’ conceivable.
Facebook was much more sane, but then at the same time, I realized that anybody on my ‘friends’ list would be able to see everything I’d ever written, to anybody. What possible use could I have for this? I could never have all my people on the same list, because most of my people don’t get along with each other. Some groups are into illegal things, some groups are into immoral things, and I have to somehow fit my mother into this mess of tangled Web2.0? No thanks.
All in all, I’ve watched Internet become a bad place to be. Farmville, designed to never end and never get better, but always always always keep you on that page with that ad for just a few minutes more, and while you’re at it, why not get your friends to play too? A new animal is the reward for what amounts to unwanted harassment of people you call friends, but if you want people to see your new animal, you need to pay us with your credit card!
I mean…why? Why? Is it really so profitable for ad companies to zombify the entire populace of a website?