Facebook isn't particularly additive to your life. However, it's also not particularly competent. Certainly, they're mining more data than you want them to. Just as certainly, they're mining more data than they can use.

There are a couple red herrings in the column - the pregnant teenager thing never happened, for example (the point made by the predictive analysis guy who started the whole foofraw was that it could, however) and the New York comic who got SWAT called on him probably should have expected something similar to happen:

"Joe Lipari might walk into an Apple store on Fifth Avenue with an Armalite AR-10 gas powered semi-automatic weapon and pump round after round into one of those smug, fruity little concierges," a paraphrased quote from Fight Club.

That's not a privacy issue. That's a guy with 3,000 followers making a very specific threat to a very specific place for a very specific reason. I, too, wish we lived in a world where the SWAT team didn't show up every time you mention using an assault rifle in jest but we haven't for a while now.

I also wish we lived in a world where we could just tell Facebook to leave us alone. But Facebook, Linkedin, Google, and all the rest of them absolutely synthesize you from your friends, and you're not going to get your friends to leave Facebook.

Although I invite you to try.