Facebook & Forget It

I t started out as a bit of daredevilish investigative reporting. It ended up being the worst two hours of my entire weekend.

The trouble began Mon- day before last, when a rather disturbing announcement was made at school: A group of students had set up a Facebook page where teen- agers from Waitsburg could express their, er, true feelings about one another. Some- times, apparently, that sim- ply meant saying that they thought someone was attrac- tive. Other times, it meant anonymous derogatory com- ments.

Needless to say, I got pretty steamed.

A week passed. Yours truly had zero idea what the topic of her column would be. So I decided, against my better judgment, on a scath- ing expose of that Facebook page. Well, maybe not so scathing, but I wanted to vent a bit of my frustration.

But first, I needed to make sure the page was still up.

I tried doing an Internet search on 'Waitsburg crushes haters facebook'. It turned up the Facebook pages of a couple WHS students, but not the infamous page itself.

Okay, plan B: I tried searching Facebook directly, using the little search bar that says 'find a page', featuring Facebook's signature aver- sion to proper capitalization.

Facebook wouldn't dis- play a single result. Not one. Not unless I was a member.

Oh, I probably should've mentioned that I'm not on Facebook.

In my household, Face- book is discouraged. Part of it is the fact that we have dial- up internet, but mostly this is due to my mother's extreme weariness of free websites.

"They have to make their money somewhere," Mom reminds my brother and me on a consistent basis. "They mine data from your profile and sell it."

At that point, I was torn between my quest for facts and my longer-term mission to keep our data firmly out of the hands of others.

Finally, I settled on what I thought would be the perfect compromise: I created a fake Facebook account. My alter ego would be a 37-year-old woman named Tiffany Doe with no education whatsoever and no profile picture. I wouldn't post anything. I'd just search the site for the page of my loathing, write down all the gruesome details, and delete Tiffany's account.

The first part of the plan passed without a hitch. Tiffa- ny was created, and the home page lay before me. Then my mother walked into the room.

Embarassed, I apologized. She was surprisingly lenient, accepting it as 'not the end of the world'. I thanked her, vowing to track down that evil page and delete my ac- count from the annuls of the Internet, then purge the tracking cookies from our system.

Unfortunately, this was easier said than done.

First of all, the page I was looking for didn't show up on the search. That was somewhat of a relief, so I felt good as I perused the 'help' menu for the 'delete' button. The 'permanently delete your account' page was down. DOWN.

After jumping through a few more hoops, I finally did manage to deactivate the ac- count and delete the tracking cookies that Facebook had installed in our system, but that took way longer than starting the fake account up.

You see, folks? This is why I'm not on Facebook.