There comes a point when a service gets too big. Facebook has hit that state for me. According to Mark Zuckerberg at a recent press event to announce new features, Facebook now exceeds 50,000,000 registered users of which 25,000,000 unique people visit Facebook everyday. Facebook is doubling in size every 6 months and the users generate over 65,000,000,000 page views a month.

This was great and fine. I don’t have a problem with that kind of size. I’m jealous. But what I do have a problem with is what is starting to happen as a result of Facebook having such a huge and captivated audience. And the invasiveness of Facebook into my internet life that I do not choose to share with the company is the reason I have deactivated my Facebook account.

The press event announced new features of Facebook that are aimed more at business and web partners than they are at the users. Primarily the Facebook Ads platform and the new Facebook Beacon system. There is also the Facebook Pages system, but for the most part I’ll ignore it.

Facebook Ads is Zuckerberg’s way of finally cashing in on Facebook’s massive audience. It takes targetted advertising to a whole new level that even Google will be jealous of in the short term. Facebook knows so much about you and who you are friends with and what sorts of things you like and dislike that they can really start to show you advertising that is more of interest to you than any other form of advertising.

This is on a whole new level to contextual advertising. No longer are the ads based on your search terms or the content of the page. When Google released Google History it was one of the ways in which they could provide you with more relevant search results, and also more relevant advertisements.

But what Facebook’s platform does is a whole lot more powerful and subtle. Invasive? It could be. But for the most part, Facebook Ads on its own is not actually a problem. They’re using information that is provided to them by the users.

But what does get me, and is probably the thing that will end my Facebook patronage, is the new Facebook Beacon.

Facebook Beacon allows participating websites to send info back to Facebook and put notices on your profile when you visit their website or buy something from them or …. you see where this is going? Suddenly, not only is Facebook getting access to information I provide them, they’re now getting access to information about me from other sites.

“But Google has been doing that for years, whats your problem?”

Yup. Google has been. But Google doesn’t traditionally have the information about us that Facebook has unless we specifically give it to them.

I can easily make it impossible for Google to track me online. I do so frequently. Even with the Google Bookmarks and Google History, I have no problems at all hiding my web habits from Google as I wander the net.

This new Beacon “feature” of Facebook does not allow you to opt-out until after a site has tried to use it while you’ve been browsing. I attempted to edit my privacy preferences and because no site had attempted to do so, I couldn’t opt-out yet.

This means that even if I do click the “No Thanks” link on the toaster popup, at least some information about me is being sent back to Facebook. So Facebook still has a way of tracking my browsing habits even when I don’t want them to do so. Short of deleting all my Facebook cookies and rejecting cookies in general while I browse, I cannot think of a simple way of disabling this feature on Facebook.

So what have I done about this? How annoyed with it am I?

Simply put, I have “deactivated” my account on Facebook. You can’t delete your account, so everything they already know about you they will continue to know, but you can deactivate the account which essentially puts the account into a kind of stasis I guess.

Unfortunately, I didn’t go through and delete as much of my information beforehand as I could have. I was acting in my usual way and going off without thinking it through. Still, that’s life I guess.

Secondly, I have deleted all Facebook cookies from my browsers and blocked Facebook from being allowed to create any more cookies in the future.

Finally, and probably most importantly, I have installed a Firefox addon called BlockSite that allows me to not allow my browser to have any communication with any of the sites specified in its configuration. I got this tip from a blogger who noticed that one of the sites he was on wanted to send information back to Facebook. So he figured out how to block Facebook Beacon in this way.

When you deactivate your account, Facebook ask why you’re deactivating it. I made it very clear that I did not like the privacy implications of Facebook Beacon and stated that there was no way I would willingly continue to use a site that tried to deliberately gather information about me in this way without providing me with an Opt-out before a site tried to use it.

It sucks that its come to this. Until this point I actually really liked Facebook. Compared with other social networks I’ve used in the past (such as Orkut, MySpace, bebo and so on) it was by far the best. The fact it has such a huge user base shows that I’m not the only one that thinks this. But there is a line I draw in the sand when it come to my personal privacy online, and unfortunately Facebook has now crossed it.

As one person on TechCrunch put it, this is no better than “openSpyWare.” To me, this is far worse than Google Adwords + Analytics + History + Orkut combined.

The new web behemoth just went a step too far and stood on my toes.