I often have friends ask me why I am not on Facebook, since they all are.  They are constantly updating their profiles, and commenting on their news feeds.  They also complain a lot about other users violently disagreeing with them on Facebook, and doing so using nasty language.

Well, I am a 67-year-old woman, and pretty conservative in my outlook and opinions.  I don’t take kindly to being figuratively spat on or ripped to shreds.  I subscribe to the internet newsletters of Kim Komando (yep, that’s her real name!), and she often has articles about the goings-on at Facebook.

Like THIS, very recently.   Or THIS from a couple of months ago.  If you go to your favorite search engine and enter the words Facebook and Danger, you get millions of hits.  I acknowledge that most of the dangers of Facebook are to young people, but I’m really not anxious to have my identity stolen, or every internet move tracked by a social network.  Experts have listed in profusion the many ways that you can be harmed by Facebook.

Update on May 11, 2016.   As told by some former Facebook employees, the social media site deliberately suppresses conservative news.  We have suspected this for a while, and many of my Ricochet friends have anecdotal evidence of this.  Now, everyone is aware that the techies in Silicon Valley are heavily liberal and intolerant.  This is just more evidence for this.  One more confirmation that I am doing the right thing in avoiding Facebook.

And, aside from all those dangers, I simply am not interested in sharing every little thing about my self and my life.  I don’t think that all of my friends (real friends, not Facebook “friends”) are interested in knowing what I had for breakfast yesterday, or where I am at this exact moment (which is why I’m not on Twitter either). There are still parts of my self that are mine alone, and not public knowledge.  In my world, there is still something known as privacy.  There is still something known as shame.  Many young people seem to have lost all sense of shame (which is why you see people voluntarily posting naked pictures of themselves online), and when they are “exposed”, they simply shrug it off.  Not me, not now, not ever.