A YEAR ago, your correspondent decided life was too short to spend an hour or so a day reading what friends on Facebook were about to cook for supper or some such thing. After three years of mild amusement, the time had come to pull the plug. What finally nudged him into action was not Facebook's cavalier disregard for its users' privacy, nor even its dodgy data-mining tricks that targeted users with adverts based on interests gleaned from their personal profiles. That was all business as usual, he assumed, for an enterprise bent on dominating the universe.

No, the final straw was a new algorithm deployed by the site's Live Feed feature that selected news stories based on the number of times the item had been noted by others. The result was a flood of garbage that could not be stemmed. More than anything, it said the folks at Facebook just don't get what user-control is all about.

Months after he had fled the scene, the fiasco over Facebook's revised privacy policy that went into effect last December only confirmed his impressions. Unconscionably, this made lists of friends and photos from user profiles public for all and sundry to see—even those belonging to users who had chosen explicitly to restrict such confidential information to their own inner circle of friends. Making things worse, the control for rehiding the information was abruptly removed.

No matter that the first rule of online behaviour is never post anything that you do not want to see splattered all over the internet in perpetuity. If you do, it will be—and there is no way of ever deleting it. Even so, Facebook's breaches of personal privacy were not the result of some software screw up, but a calculated business decision to further the social network's own financial ends by trampling over people's rights.

Apart from exposing more and more of users' profiles, pictures and postings to the public at large, Facebook also launched a program to share such personal information with other websites. To prevent that from happening, users then had to go to all the pains of instructing the sites concerned (such as Yelp and Pandora) that their personal information be kept private.

No surprise that lawmakers, goaded by civil-liberties groups, began to get antsy. With investigations threatened by Congress and the Federal Trade Commission, Facebook finally realised it had gone too far. Some fast footwork followed in a bid to defuse the outrage. On May 24th, Facebook's founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, took to the pages of the Washington Post to announce that the network's former privacy rules would be reinstated, along with some simpler privacy controls. Even so, users would still have to opt out of sharing information with third parties, rather than having to opt in to do so.

Before all this came to a head, the lesson your correspondent drew from trying to sever his relationship with Facebook was that it was—and, by all accounts, continues to be—an ethically challenged outfit that will continually push the boundaries of acceptable behaviour. There are those who defend such practices, saying that is what entrepreneurs have to do to change the world. Your correspondent disagrees. But there is no denying that Mr Zuckerberg has done much to change, at least, the way people use the internet. It is no accident that close on 500m people—half of all internet users—find Facebook an engaging, enjoyable and even addictive place to wile away their hours. No other social network comes close—not even MySpace, once the leader of the pack by far, but now with less than half Facebook's membership.

But Facebook's bare-knuckled tactics are hardly the thing for fostering community spirit. They are also the kind of practices that invariably prove counter-productive in the long run. Take the rigmarole it puts users through when they wish to close an account. This is clearly designed to thwart fleeing members and verges on the deceitful.

Many of those attempting to quit Facebook would be forgiven for thinking they had actually deleted their account, only to find they had merely deactivated it. All their personal details continue to reside on Facebook's servers. They can still receive spam from Facebook and its clients, and be “tagged” in photos that others post. And woe betide the naïf who tries to log back into Facebook within 14 days—if only to confirm his account had actually been deleted. All the user's former settings will instantly be reactivated as if nothing had ever happened.

A year ago, your correspondent learned the hard way. After several abortive attempts to say goodbye, he finally found a link buried five clicks down in Facebook's online help page that offered an escape route. Fortunately, he was not using a Facebook app on his mobile phone, nor the “Facebook Connect” authentication service to log into other websites. Otherwise, he would have had to delete these first before attempting to kill his Facebook account.

The coup de grâce was eventually administered by navigating to the bottom of Facebook's home page and clicking on the help link. At the “Help Center” page, a search for “Delete Facebook” brought up the site's “FAQ” page—which listed, among other things, the item “I want to permanently delete my account”. After clicking that link, Facebook still tried to persuade fleeing users like your correspondent merely to deactivate their accounts rather than delete them. Ignoring such threats and pleas, the answer was to click the “Delete My Account” link and put up with further reminders that this represented permanent deletion (oh joy!); and that all the content added to the account over the years would be lost for good (hurray!). Like intrepid escapees before him, your correspondent bravely clicked the “Submit” button.

To be on the safe side, he has never revisited Facebook since resigning his membership—and is unsure whether this escape route still works. He has Googled his name in conjunction with Facebook and found no reference. He assumes his profile has been expunged from the network's servers, though he has no way of checking. Others have noted that if you try to re-register using your old e-mail address, Facebook will curtly inform you that the address is currently in use. He has not tried to do so, and therefore does not know whether Facebook still keeps a record of previous inmates.

But here's the quandary. Your correspondent's daughter has just turned 13, and is now officially old enough to have a Facebook account. Since she is one of the youngest in her class, most of her school pals are already using the social network to swap snaps and gossip, and even helpful hints about homework. Should he let her join the fray?

Reluctantly, he has decided to do so—though with all the necessary provisos. Facebook's 500m innocents-at-large are prey to every imaginable online predator, paedophile, spammer, scammer and ne'er-do-well. Nevertheless, he feels reasonably confident that he can lock down her account, given Mr Zuckerman's three recent revisions to Facebook's privacy settings: the ability now to set a default privacy level for a user's account; the restoration of Facebook Connect's original privacy controls (without which users' likes, interests, education, history of employment, hometown and current location were automatically made public); and the revival of the user's former ability to opt out of sharing information with the whole, wide world.

There is one further requirement he will insist upon: that he be allowed to become a Facebook friend as well as a father, free to read the group's discussions. Whether he actually does so or not is another matter. One way or another, though, it does mean he'll have to rejoin the Facebook horde.