Facebook Quitting Pledge Gaining Thousands of Supporters

As controversy swells around Facebook's latest changes to its privacy policy--which is now longer than the Constitution and offers some 50 settings and over 170 options--users' interest in deleting their Facebook accounts has soared.

A group of dissatisfied Facebook users have teamed up in an effort to organize a mass, coordinated exodus from Facebook--and they're using social networks to do it.

Their site, QuitFacebookDay.com, asks users to "commit to quit" Facebook on May 31 by signing their name or Twitter handle to the list of pledges.

The cause has attracted several hundred pledges--about 780 at the time of writing.

There's also a Facebook Page devoted to the planned exit.

"If you agree that Facebook doesn't respect you, your personal data or the future of the Web, you may want to join us," QuitFacebookDay.com explains.

For those who oppose Facebook's new privacy policy, but find "Quit Facebook Day" too extreme, there is an alternative that doesn't require immediately letting go of Facebook-based online social connections, photos or videos.

Facebook Protest seeks to challenge Facebook's recent push for more openness by proposing a boycott of Facebook services on June 6.

"Facebook's real customer is the advertisers that they work with: NOT YOU," Facebook Protest's official statement reads. The soon-to-be protesters also ask participants to:

commit to not logging in or interacting with Facebook in any way. Be sure to log out of Facebook in all of your browsers no later than the evening of June 5th. On the 6th, be sure to not use Facebook connect or click any "Like" buttons: basically refrain from ALL Facebook related activity.

The movement already has a following on Twitter (@FacebookProtest), and even has its own Facebook Event page.

On the other hand, if you want to delete your Facebook account without waiting until May 31 (or June) here's how.

Click here for a recap of Facebook's big privacy changes and what they mean.

Check out a list of Facebook's latest security features, and then watch a video of how to fix your Facebook profile's privacy settings in two minutes.

Bees See Your Face as a Strange Flower

Bees can learn to recognize human faces, or at least face-like patterns, a new study suggests.


Rather than specifically recognizing people, these nectar-feeding creatures view us as "strange flowers," the researchers say. And while they might not be able to identify individual humans, they can learn to distinguish features that are arranged to look like faces.

The results suggest that, even with their tiny brains, insects can handle image analysis. The researchers say that if humans want to design automatic facial recognition systems, we could learn a lot by using the bees' approach to face recognition.

Training bees

The study was spurred by work conducted in 2005 by biologist Adrian Dyer from Monash University in Victoria, Australia, which showed that the insects could be trained to associate pictures of human faces with tasty sugar snacks.

Martin Giurfa from the Universite de Toulouse, France, was intrigued by the research and wondered what strategy the bees used to discriminate between faces. The pair of scientists teamed up to tackle the puzzling question.

The team first tested whether the bees could learn to distinguish between simple face-like images - stick drawings like a toddler might make, which consisted of two dots for eyes, a short vertical dash for a nose and a longer horizontal line for a mouth.

The bees were trained to distinguish between images in which the features were cramped together, and ones that had features farther apart, and the insects were rewarded with sugar snacks when they chose one particular pattern over another.

But when the researchers took away the sugary-prize, the bees still returned to the correct face, indicating they could learn to distinguish between the two patterns that were organized like faces.

More complexity

Next, the researchers tested whether or not the bees could tell the difference between "face-like" and "non-face-like" images, even if they had never seen the pictures before.

Indeed, they could.

The bees were able to learn the face images, not because they knew what a face is, but because they had learned the relative arrangement and order of the features, the scientists figured.

But how would the bees cope with more complex faces? The team upped the test difficulty by embedding the stick-and-dot faces into face-shaped photographs. While the bees were trained with the photographs as the background, they could still recognize the stick pattern once the background was removed.

However, when pictures of real faces were scrambled by moving the relative positions of the eyes, nose and mouth, the bees no longer recognized the images as faces and treated them like unknown patterns.

Although the bees seem to be able to recognize face-like patterns, this doesn't mean they can learn to identify individuals, the researchers say. The insects learn the relative arrangements of features that happen to make up a face-like pattern, and they may use this strategy to learn about and recognize different objects in their environment.

The results were published in the Jan. 29 issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology.