Privacy issues? Google engineers leaving Facebook in droves

Well I bet they didn’t quite expect that. In the wake of Facebook’s F8 conference this week, where it apparently bid to become the new Sheriff of the Internet, Facebook’s plans to effectively put ‘social’ into the very structure of the Web has a few people a little concerned.

The main issue is that there are concerns that Facebook, by default, now opts you in to allowing third party sites like Yelp to ‘personalise’ your experience, and there are questions about how much information is given away.

The result is that lots of geeks are considering leaving Facebook, and perhaps even more interestingly, veritable droves of Google software engineers are among them. This includes Matt Cutts, head of the webspam team at Google (see below) who has not technically left, but has deactivated his Facebook account.

Admittedly, there’s probably not a lot of love lost between Facebook and Google right now, but it is certainly fascinating to watch these Facebook departures from people who are early adopters, and deeply savvy about the Web.

UK-based Buzz search engine Buzzzy has picked the following up, and we reproduce some examples of this mass exodus below.