Facebook irritates me

I have no interest at all in "social media" I socialize with real people, not electrons on a machine. I joined Facebook after I received a barrage of "Friend" requests thinking it might be a good way to connect with people. Sadly, it connected me with hundreds of people I don't really know. Friends of friends of tatters whose names I don't even recognize. Initially, I accepted the friend requests of people I recognized or people used tatting as their profile pictures, so I had a vague idea who they were. Many of whom like playing various games on Facebook collecting peas or butterflies or whatever, and consistently send me requests to accept, or send some little bit of something. Signing up for a Facebook account required providing information that I didn't think Facebook or anyone else needed to know so I left those fields blank.

No one on the internet needs to know my personal information. They don't need to know my phone number, address, sex, age, school, occupation or any other of a myriad details that so many people seem cheerful to divulge. Now I know that a lot of these details are on the internet anyway, but why would any sane person want to make it easier for nefarious individuals to collect personal data?

I go on Facebook once in a very long while, but recently I have been receiving emails from Facebook telling me that I have notifications pending and after I ignore several messages, I log into Facebook, delete the messages, many of them from a niece who thinks everyone in the world wants to see the forwarded pictures of whatever animal she thinks is cute, or endless requests for butterflies or peas or whatever other stupid game is being played.

The last time I got another one of these stupid emails I tried to log into my Facebook account and was asked to verify who I am. After typing in the CAPTCHA I was asked to verify who the people were in a series of pictures.

Wait a minute. Who is Facebook to insist that I verify my familiarity with other people? That isn't something Facebook needs to know. As it happens, many of the pictures that they asked me to identify were pictures from other tatters. Like many of us, I only know these people online, not in person. A lot of us use avatars that are somewhat anonymous and if/when we post pictures of people, they aren't people that other tatters could identify.

The whole exercise just makes me fuming mad. Facebook could drop off the face of the earth and I wouldn't lose a second of sleep over it. So I've decided to consign all of their notifications to file 13. I would remove myself from the service entirely, except that I've heard that you can't really, once they have your info, it's there forever. Of course, to remove myself, I'd have to be able to sign in, which I can't.

I don't want help with it. What I'd really like to do is blow it up. NO, NOT REALLY! SHEESH! You can't even express your frustration with things these days without having to pick your words carefully to be politically correct.

mutter, mutter, sputter as she  shuffles off back to her cave.