Facebook: Why Some are Choosing to Leave the Social Site Behind

Most wouldn't dare dream of leaving their favorite social media networking site: Facebook. Yet a new study takes a more in-depth look into how some people are able to leave the site behind and never look back.

As Facebook remains the largest online social networking website founded in February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and fellow Harvard students, various reports show that some are permanently deactivating their accounts for various reasons, including lack of privacy, a loss of self-identity and other factors.

According to researcher Stefan Stieger, Ph.D. and coauthors from the University of Vienna, Austria, they compared more than 300 Facebook quitters to about an equal number of Facebook users, after which they recorded the participant's responses to assess measures focused on their level of concern regarding overall privacy, their tendency toward Internet addiction and personal traits such as extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and neuroticism, according to background information via the study.

"Given high profile stories such as WikiLeaks and the recent NSA surveillance reports, individual citizens are becoming increasingly more wary of cyber-related privacy concerns," Brenda K. Wiederhold, PhD, MBA, BCIA, Editor-in-Chief ofCyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, from the Interactive Media Institute, San Diego, CA said, via a press release. "With photo tags, profiling, and internet dependency issues, research such as Professor Stieger's is very timely."

The authors report these and other differences that distinguish those who decide to delete their Facebook accounts as a result of privacy, self-identity and other factors via the article "Who Commits Virtual Identity Suicide? Differences in Privacy Concerns, Internet Addiction and Personality Between Facebook User Quitters."

More information regarding this article and study background can be found via a special issue of Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking.