Snuffing out web life

Are you facing Facebook fatigue? Do you want to knock off your Twitter feeds? Or get rid of a stalker on the line? Well, the reasons to leave the social web could be many, but one way to do it is through web suicide.

A website, called suicidemachine.org developed by group of Dutch and German geeks allows you put the noose around your online alter-ego. They claim to have created a software that can delete all private content, links and relationships at one-tenth the time it would take for a person to do it by himself: 52 minutes using the web suicide machine against a 9 hours & 35 minutes if one plans a web exit manually.

Once you hand over your log-in details and click Commit, the program will methodically delete your info — Twitter tweets, MySpace contacts, Facebook friends, LinkedIn connections — much like users could do manually.

What appeals to many of the site’s boosters is the simplicity of the exit. When trying to close an online account, users are often asked to fill out a questionnaire. More important, their information and connections aren’t then erased; they’re just unpublished. By deleting all your data, this website says, your private information is snuffed out on website servers. Rough estimates say that 3,000 people have gone to the gallows.

But everybody doesn’t think the proposition is cool. The site was blocked by Facebook recently, citing a violation of users’ privacy. “How can I be sure that my data is not backed up by these guys?” remarked Hari Vaid, a professional.
Srividya Iyer

Suicide Machine isn’t the first collaborative new-media project for this group of software junkies, who also operate media lab Moddr and are members of the Rotterdam-based artist collective Worm, newspaper reports say. Inspiration for the Web 2.0–suicide idea took root when Worm threw a 2008 New Year’s Eve party themed “Web 2.0 Suicide Night.”
Srividya Iyer