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I just deleted my Facebook account after reading this article on Salon, which revealed that Facebook is now sharing my home address and telephone number with third party developers.
"In a platform upgrade on Friday, Facebook announced that these 'new user object fields' were free game for anyone and even gave detailed instructions on how to access users' addresses and phone numbers."
That was the last straw.
Although I had over a thousand Facebook "friends," I rarely used the service, so deleting my account was not a big sacrifice.
By the way, Facebook makes it easy to deactivate your account, which will temporarily hide your information until you reactivate it, but they make it more difficult to permanently delete your account.
So, here is a short-cut for permanently deleting your account: log in to your Facebook account, paste the following URL into your browser:
http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account
and follow the subsequent directions.
UPDATE: After reading some of your comments, I reconsidered. Luckily, my account deletion did not take affect yet (it can take up to 14 days), so I reactivated my account and made my personal information as impersonal as possible.
