Perhaps the social media frenzy of 2009 has led to a new year’s resolution of permanently disconnecting from one of these sites. Well Facebook is certainly not going gently into that good night.
A service known as Suicide Machine allows jaded users of social-networking sites to sign out forever from MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter and until recently, Facebook.
What Suicide Machine does, with your permission, is log into your social-networking account, changes your password and profile picture and essentially scrapes all personal data and tosses your friends so you don’t have to.
Rather than simply deactivating your account, Suicide Machine says it offers this service in order to prevent your old data from being cached so you’re not just walking away from your online social life and leaving it untended, you are spectacularly stripping your digital self of the social ball and chain. Every tweet deleted, every friend kicked to the curb and every status update lost forever.
Facebook servers have blocked Suicide Machine’s IP due to “abusive behaviour”.
Says Suicide Machine on its website: “After more than 50,000 friends being unfriended and more than 500 forever ‘signed-out’ users, Facebook started to block our suicidemachine from their servers without any comment! We are currently looking in ways to circumvent this ungrounded restriction imposed on our service!”
By Marie Boran
