Facebook bans profile shredder Suicide Machine

Explaining the shutdown, Facebook said that it already provides people the ability to deactivate their Facebook account. But Suicide Machine gathers the entire log in information and deletes all the Facebook pages, which is an infringement of their Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.

“We've blocked the site's access to Facebook, as is our policy for sites that violate our SRR,” added Facebook.

The ban has indeed offended Suicide Machine.

Suicide Machine, on the other hand, has posted a message on its site stating, “After more than 50.000 friends being unfriended and more than 500 forever "signed-out" users, Facebook started to block our suicidemachine from their servers without any comment! We are currently looking in ways to circumvent this ungrounded restriction imposed on our service!”

Liberating the user forever
Suicide Machine, launched in December, has been getting quite a bit of attention.

The site has already deleted profiles of 879 users of social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and LinkedIn.

The sites homepage reads, “Tired of your Social Network? Liberate your newbie friends with a Web2.0 suicide! This machine lets you delete all your energy sucking social-networking profiles, kill your fake virtual friends, and completely do away with your Web2.0 alterego.”

While deleting the account, the site changes the person’s profile picture and password, removes all your friends and all groups a person is a member of.

Suicide Machine believes that its activity is not unethical as every user has the right to disconnect. It further states that merely deactivating the account is not enough, as social networking sites like Facebook still hold all the information about the person on their server.

Readers’ reactions
The latest move by Facebook to shut down access to Suicide Machine has stirred quite a number of users, who have taken to blogs and forums to discuss the social networking site’s approach.

A reader named Roger Eddit commented on networkworld.com “Although no one here is saying it, the reason that FB is blocking W2SM is obvious. FB cannot afford to let users leave their system. Although one can "deactivate" their account, it takes quite a bit to do so. Most people abandon their accounts. Should the exodus trend grow too strong, then FB will fail. Internet trends happen very quickly.”

Another reader named daredaredare stated on mashable.com, “I think it's quite simple...less users, less profit for facebook. Anything that attempts to do this like suicide machine...they gonna get rid of it.”

“Facebook's assets are key here, they are protecting the content that the users have "contributed" to their servers which can be used for a variety of purposes,” commented a reader named lycanr1 on CNET.