Why do social networks scare me?

During the past six months most of my friends and acquaintances started their facebook accounts and as a consequence I have been listening over and over the reasons why I should join and how this is a “must have” in the XXI century. It all appeared a bit strange as only a few months ago I have had the same kind of conversations with more or less same people on the necessity of using mySpace. Listening to the argumentations such as how it permits you to stay in touch with people you know from abroad, how this is a sign of being socially active in the age of the internet (while showing me graphs of how ones contacts are interconnected amongst themselves and how often they are in contact, etc.), and the very important one, you can upload and look at photos.

But after almost caving in to making an account with this new miraculous, fashionable and free social network site, due to the vast number of arguments and peer pressure I all off a sudden started to get different kind of messages. Several friends started to complain to me how they are fed up of being bothered by strange and unknown people. This is the point I became really sceptical of this new technology. First of all I have been experimenting with photography for around eight years now and there were many photos I would like to share with other people, but I don’t want anyone stealing them and using them with out my knowledge. Now this question for me was a very big one as I have been looking at the time at how could I preserve the especially digital photos in case of a computer failure, but the idea exposing my photos to the whole internet made me look for different alternatives.

The second problem I encountered was when I thought that if I am not prepared to expose my photos why I would want to expose any other information. As if there is not enough cases of abused identities on the internet, people were now voluntarily posting all kind of information onto the internet often for all to see just for the fun of it. I know that it may seen a bit paranoyed but I can easily see someone slowly gathering information and using it for a scheme or in case of photos even for blackmail, as people really post everything up there, and we shall see if all of a sudden people start getting panic over photos they made and got published years ago.

The third argument for why I’m not on facebook came just a few days ago and has confirmed most of my greatest fears and that is that it is impossible to get out of facebook, which means that you can freeze your account but at any given moment you can reactivate it. Or put in a different way what you put on the internet stays on the internet. Worried?

P.S.
I have decided to write this coment after reading the article Social Network Sites: Definition, History and Scolarship by Boyd and Ellison and remembering the debate we had with professor Jankowski when drinking beer one evening. And we got there without the use of invitations trough facebook.