Just as many threatened to burn their U.S. passports and move to Canada if George W. Bush won the 2004 presidential election, but few followed through when he did, so has been the anti-Facebook backlash: Though every successive wave of privacy-eroding, profit-maximizing innovations prompts lots of threats to quit, deactivate, and delete, not very many people cling to principle at the cost of losing the well-established network of their friends. And there's a weird social cache to being tech-savvy and Doctorovian enough to be, like, pissed off about it: As reporter David Montgomery recently wrote on Twitter, "Complaining about Facebook privacy has joined fixed-gear bikes and ironic facial hair as a hipster trademark." But this afternoon, about as noteworthy a tech media figure as you can find -- Peter Rojas, the founding editor of Gizmodo, Engadget, and gdgt -- announced on Twitter that he was deactivating his Facebook account, prompting a flurry of retweets, baffled replies, and shows of support. Moments later, investor and Infectious Greed writer Paul Kedrosky did the same. Is the great wave of Facebook deactivation, prompted by the ruthless march towards unhideable social metadata inherent in the recently unveiled Facebook Open graph, upon us?
