Dear Candy.. Not all your 12,643 Facebook friends really care that you top scored in Bedazzler, or that your farmville farm is thriving, in fact, a very small number of your perceived ‘followers’ couldn’t really give a shit about you at all.

Anthropological Studies have shown that it’s difficult to maintain stable social relationships with groups larger than 150 people. That limit being a direct function of neocortex size, apparently, our brains can’t conceptualise stable inter-personal relationships with large groups of people.

Are we so narcissistic as a society that we strive to value ourselves by the numbers of ‘virtual’ friends we have? The whole time ignoring privacy and security.. Recent events notwithstanding, do you honestly believe that within the ‘virtual social circle’ you have painstakingly built that all your ‘friends’ have your best intentions at heart? What about so called ‘friends’ of your friends, the third party freaks that given default Facebook options can see your personal details.

Sure, Facebook has sufficient options that allow a savvy user to filter out freaks, no argument there, however, how many people on your friend’s list do you honestly believe are capable of understanding the ramifications of Facebook’s complex privacy settings. Add to that Facebook’s regular changes to their privacy settings and the average user has no hope of maintaining stealth from the freaks.

Think about the personal information you are currently divulging on your Facebook profile page, chances are you’re divulging your date of birth, mobile number, place of work, interest, etc. Certainly enough information for a freak to build a detailed profile which can be used for nefarious means or worse, as was the case recently.

Should you delete your Facebook account?

Recently, several groups have pushed for a large scale deletion of Facebook pages, there’s even entire websites dedicated to it, with countdown timers ticking down to ‘D’ day. Given Facebook’s continued lack of respect for your privacy, one has to argue they have it coming to them..

“Facebook has 500 million users, so what if a couple thousand paranoid hermits delete their accounts, Facebook won’t miss them.” I hear you say, I tend to agree with you in the short term, however, I feel that in several year’s time when Facebook has become the new MySpace we’ll look back to this time and realise that it was the beginning of the end for Zuck’s megalomaniacal visions.

No matter where you stand on the argument that Facebook is becoming the new MySpace, I urge you at the very least to delete your personal information from your Facebook profile page. Let’s face it, your ‘real’ friends already have those details.