While John Connor leads humanity against Skynet and the machines on the blue screen, perhaps it is time for another John—Oh—Connor to take on another kind of resistance.

While Merritt may seem like an unlikely breeding ground for such a campaign, it could work, and it is working in at least one city in Canada.

Toronto-based web technologist Joseph Dee declared May 31 Quit Facebook Day in defiance of what he calls a lack of "fair choices and best intentions," on behalf of Facebook.

Dee has quit the world's most popular social engineering, er....social networking website and so have 36,000 others.

Dee is asking Canada's 15 million users, who have their photos, personal information, and even their precise mood logged for the world to see, to unplug from the six-year-old mega site.

The charges levelled against Facebook are many, but nobody can deny that the network is helping us stay connected with friends, family, and even potential mates better than we ever imagined possible.

Dee and many others bring up the obvious personal privacy that is exploited when one posts their page to the world wide web, but the concerns run deeper than that and are based on lack of trust some users have.

I, myself, have refrained from succumbing to the social networking hype, and I don't plan on ever signing up. It is, quite frankly, a civil libertarian's nightmare.

In an age where identity theft and big government are on the rise, why on earth would anyone want to open themselves up to more of that?

There are many good things about facebook: ease of communication, convenience, and staying in touch on a second-to-second basis, but that comes at a price.

What that price is exactly, nobody really knows for sure yet, but every couple of months there seems to be a story that surfaces of some company, some individual, or some government being involved in a situation where confidential information is revealed through a Facebook posting.

Just how easy is it to restrict access to your facebook page? According to Dee, difficult, and apparently the default privacy settings reveal too much.

Facebook is making changes to their privacy settings and is allowing users to stop third party applications from accessing their personal data, but why wasn't this done from the very beginning?

There is also the little-talked-about issue of potential negative social effects from social networking websites.

Are we going to lose our ability and desire to meet face-to-face with people? Are we going to disconnect emotions from words to the point our words become meaningless? Are you really laughing out loud when you type LOL?
The Facebook resistance certainly has legitimacy in my eyes.

— John O'Connor