Facebook Quitting Pledge Gaining Thousands of Supporters

There is indeed a difference between deactivating and deleting. Go here and read the how-to if you're wanting to delete.

http://www.groovypost.com/howto/security/permanently-delete-your-facebook-profile-account/

You can't delete your account. I know, I've tried. All they will let you do is "de-activate" your account. It's still there, just no one can view it. They tell you that your profile will be waiting for you should you decide to log back on.

I tried to start something like this with my friends, I was the only one that quit before said date of may 17th. I hope that those who actually know what kind of privacy derailment they're up against delete their profiles. One issue though, is the site doesn't permanently delete the profile, it just shuts it down until the next login.

It's not just a matter of worrying about "compromising" photos of yourself being out there. To make a hyperbolic analogy: are you okay with police randomly strip-searching you on the street just because you aren't concealing any contraband about your person? Hey, you've got nothing to hide, right?

The point is, FB is ostensibly a tool for connecting to your friends (and/or classmates or workmates). There's all kinds of innocuous information you can fill in, from your religion to your favorite books.
And yes, the understanding was that this was to tell other people about yourself, especially people you've just met in class, and let them find out things about you that might not otherwise come up in conversation for some time.

And maybe, just maybe, some people would like to put up lots of information about themselves and-- gasp!-- only have it appear to their chosen few (or many). Currently, anything you "like" (which applies to basically everything) will appear in your public profile with no option for limiting that. My boyfriend noticed that in a Google search for his name, posts that he had made to some of those pages came up as well. It shouldn't come down to "Facebook or no FB" just to have the option of some minor privacy (that FB used to afford its users but has been slowly stripping away, and good riddance).

I personally don't give a crap what information Facebook can gather, as I'm not inclined to put anything on my page that could somehow be considered compromising. Maybe if we all had the good sense to use it as the amazing tool that it is, keeping in touch with people we would otherwise only drop an occasional email to, instead of as a place to post pictures of naked, drunken shenanigans, than perhaps this wouldn't be an issue.
Have you typed your name in Google recently? The amount of information that can be gleaned that way is easily as disturbing as knowing your personal information is being hustled off by the social networking sites.