Like many other people, I have a Facebook account. One reason is to keep track of what’s happening in the planet’s largest social network, including what application developers and users are doing there.

Another is that some of my friends — actual friends — are using the site. Facebook helps me stay in touch.

But the privacy fiasco of the past few days has left me feeling that I really can’t entirely trust Facebook, even with the limited amount of things I’ve said and done on the site since I got an account several years ago. Maybe I’m over-reacting — and I continue to admire the company’s accomplishments in many other ways — but that’s just the way it is.

Why don’t I feel safe and sound in their benevolent hands? Because although some of the changes they’ve made in their privacy settings are actually helpful, they are suggesting that users share much more of their data and other information, much more widely than ever. Facebook’s extremely smart leaders know perfectly well that the majority of users are likely to accept these suggestions, because most people say yes to whatever the default settings are in any application.

I wasn’t very happy with my Facebook situation in any case. Early on, I said yes to just about everyone who asked me to “friend” them, including people barely knew and some I didn’t know at all.

The privacy changes — and my continuing uncertainty, given the number of pages you have to look at to modify your settings — made me realize I’d rather take fewer chances. So I’ve made a fairly drastic change.

This morning, I deleted my account. Then I started a new one.

Actually, I scheduled the old one for deletion several weeks from now, which is all Facebook allows. The company figures, perhaps correctly, that some people will have made this decision rashly and wants to give them a way to reconsider. And it’s clearly in Facebook’s interest to avoid as many cancellations as possible for business reasons.

It wasn’t easy to figure out how to delete the account, which no doubt is part of the company’s strategy, too. If you go to your Settings page, the only option in this realm is to “deactivate,” not delete.

But a little searching on the site turns up this Facebook Group called “How to permanently delete your facebok account” (more than 35,000 members) — which in turn reveals this link to a delete-account form.

Before I did the actual deletion, however, I went to my Account Settings and opened up the Username option. I’d previously set my username to “dangillmor” so my Facebook URL would be facebook.com/dangillmor, and wanted to be able to use that again. I changed the username to something else, and only then did I delete the account.

Then I started a new account, using a different email address, and set the username to match the old one.

Next up was a check of the default privacy settings for new users. They’re pretty un-private, in my view, sharing way too much with people you don’t know. I systematically went through the various screens — Facebook makes this chore both annoying and obscure, perhaps on purpose — to ratchet down the settings to something I can live with.

Look, we all know what is Facebook’s best interest: exposing to search engines and advertisers the largest possible number of pages by among the largest number of people willing to create stuff and make it all public. Marketers drool at what they can do at Facebook if the company will only let them, and Facebook’s entirely rational goal, like almost every other Internet company’s, is to make profits in almost any way it can. What’s in the corporate interest, however, doesn’t necessarily match what’s in my interest, or yours.

So I’m still at facebook.com/dangillmor — though my real Web homebase is dangillmor.com — with just two Facebook friends at the moment. I’ll be adding more, but not in any hasty way.

UPDATE: Wired News explains How to UnFacebook Yourself.

And Jason Calacanis asks, “Is Facebook Unethical, Clueless or Unlucky?” I vote mainly for the first.

Searching for Thomas Crampton

Industries that talk proudly of the “content” they offer — raise your hand, journalism organizations — have a special need to preserve what they’ve created in a consistent and easy-to-find way. Content, in this context, includes the links that people have been using to find it.

You would imagine that the news industry would understand this. If so, you would be overestimating the industry’s collective common sense.

A current case in point is what the New York Times Co. (a company in which I, perhaps stupidly at this point, still hold a bit of stock) just did to my friend Thomas Crampton and a host of other journalists whose work has appeared in the International Herald Tribune (owned by the Times) in recent years. In an open letter to the NYT chief executive, “Reporter to NY Times Publisher: You Erased My Career“, he observes:

The IHT website earned an ever-increasing pagerank due to all of the blogs and sites linking to stories there. (Based on the number of Internet pages linking back to a site, pagerank starts at 1 and rises to 10. A page with a Google rank of 5 will show up higher than a page with a Google rank of 3 and the IHT.com grew to match nytimes.com at a Google rank of 9. You can check pagerank of any site here.)

So, what did the NY Times do to merge these sites?

They killed the IHT and erased the archives.

No doubt, the Times will eventually make his and other IHT journalists’ articles available again via search through the mother ship’s own archives. But not preserving the URLs is truly foolish move.

Thomas isn’t alone among media folks in this content carnage, as he reported in a follow-up posting. Changing the URL structure of websites is a too-common event. Even if, as is the case most of the time, the originals are still around, disappearing the links is tantamount to hiding the original material.

In my case, when I worked for Knight Ridder, what happened was considerably worse. My former employer deleted my entire archive of blog postings — not just once but twice.

The first time, Knight Ridder moved all of its Web properties to a centralized system. This was part of a move decreed by the bosses who’d been sold on the notion that homogenizing the company’s content — and, more importantly, centralizing the display advertising engine — would be a brilliant business move. I question that, by itself, but I can assure you it was a stupid journalistic move to wipe out years worth of what I’d been creating for Knight Ridder.

The second time came after I left the company. I was offered a CD of my blog archives before the site was turned off, but I don’t recall ever receiving it, and by the time I realized I didn’t have anything it was too late.

I was enraged, both times. And entirely powerless to do anything about it.

I’ve learned my lesson. Anything I write — for myself or for someone else — is backed up on my machines under my control. I’m creating a cloud backup as well. I realize that there are circumstances under which I could lose even those copies, but I can’t make my stuff 100 percent safe.

This applies in spades to other kinds of things we store online. As far as I know, practically every service you use reserves the right to delete your account. Some of them will give you an opportunity to download what you’ve posted, but you should not even count on that when push comes to shove, especially in when economic pressures are as high as they have become today. 

The point is that I no longer rely entirely on the good graces of other people, including employers, to preserve what I’ve created, much less keep it available for you to see. I try to rely on myself.