Back in September of last year I said that I was going to delete my personal Facebook and Twitter accounts, however I was so addicted to social networking at that time that it only lasted three days before I gave up and saved my accounts from permanent deletion.



Well if you are reading this, that means that I have finally done it for real. That's because I am writing this from in the past right after I deleted my Facebook and Twitter accounts for the last and final time on July 7th, and I scheduled this to publish now on July 16th. By now I've gone without my personal accounts long enough to realize that I don't need them anymore.



Also if you're reading this, it means that I didn't hurry up and reactivate my accounts and stop this post from publishing!



Why did I delete them? Well, for the same reason I tried to delete them back in September, because I don't want to give the government a daily play-by-play of my life. When I gave up in September, I figured I could probably slow government spying by locking down my Facebook and Twitter accounts with their privacy settings, but since news broke of the NSA's PRISM program, and how the NSA has direct access to Facebook, it would seem that Facebook's privacy settings are futile.



One thing that enabled me to break my addiction to Facebook and Twitter was that when I gave up in September, I did make the concious decision to change the way I used social networking. I stopped using services like Foursquare, and I stopped posting my daily activities on Facebook and Twitter. I restricted my use to an occasional picture, and bitching about the government. So quitting now is way easier than it was then.



I still have my fan pages and Twitter accounts for Bauer-Power and Mainwashed though, so if you were friends with me on any of those, you should switch to keep up to date with what I'm doing on the blogs. However if you want to stay up to date on my personal life, you will need to call me or email me.