For all you Facebook users out there, did you know that if Facebook decides you violated their terms of service, they can delete your account at will?

Once the cyber-alligators have your Facebook files, you're a goner.

Well they can. And by delete, I don’t mean put you on lock-down or suspension.

Delete as in gone. Dunzo. All those pictures, contacts, messages? Flushed down the cyber-toilet. And the worst part is, you can’t even climb into the cyber-sewer and fight the cyber-alligators to get it all back: Facebook doesn’t take ‘help’ phone calls.

Help is on the way. ODU grad student and Portsmouth’s own Carlton Northern has developed a program that can back-up all of your Facebook essentials. AltDaily asked him a few questions about what it is, how it works, and on whether or not we should trust the likes of Facebook.

AltDaily: I think you read a couple of months ago about how Facebook deleted AltDaily’s profile (story here). We lost all those pictures, posts, and most importantly to us, our friends/readers. That’s messed up, right?

Carlton: Yeah, I think it is pretty messed up. I think a more graceful way to do that would have been to disable your account, and essentially force you to turn it into a fan page. Facebook apparently, doesn’t think that way though, and now you’ve lost all the connections that took you quite a while to build. This demonstrates Facebook’s lack of respect for your data, and that’s why you need to back it up.

So what does your new thingie–what is it called, exactly?–do to protect people against this?

My new thingie is called ArchiveFacebook. It’s a Firefox add-on that will automatically save your photos, messages, status updates, notes, friends list, etc. to your hard drive. Once you’ve archived your account you can view it locally–the  same fashion you would in Facebook–without being connected to Facebook or the internet at all. The way it works is by instructing your Firefox browser to one-by-one load all the pages associated with your account and save them. It’s a pretty simple process actually.

What was the motivation for this? Were you masquerading as a celebrity, spamming, perving… give us the scoop.

Heh, no, nothing devious like that. I actually can’t take credit for the idea.The project stemmed from academia out of ODU and Harding University. Professors Michael L. Nelson (ODU) and Frank McCown (Harding University) authored a research paper entitled What Happens When Facebook is Gone? that explores the idea of digital preservation in a social media environment, specifically Facebook. I (as a grad student in the Computer Science program at ODU) was later brought on to do the dirty work of implementing an actual working prototype. They had the idea when one of their friends unexpectedly died and their friend’s family had no recourse to obtain and preserve his social interactions of the last few years stored in Facebook.

Do you think people realize just how much power social networking sites have over semi-vital things like our photographs and contacts with friends and business associates?

Unfortunately, no. I think most people take social networking sites for granted. For instance, my brother-in-law’s grandfather was given the congressional medal of honor for jumping on a grenade that otherwise would have killed like 5 other soldiers. He was close to death but managed to survive. He lost touch with his outfit after coming home, but attended a reunion in 90′s at the urging of his daughter. Upon arrival, half his platoon were awestruck to see him standing there. They thought he he died over 50 years ago.

With the advent of social networking sites, these kinds of things just don’t happen anymore. This ability to find people you know from anywhere in the world, get up-to-date contact information, and see “what they’ve been doing” is quite an amazing thing.  We tend to take these things for granted. It’s not until these services are taken away, do we realize how important they are.

In the end, is Facebook our “friend,” in your opinion, or ultimately are they just another corporate structure that will use the fine print of the terms of service toward their own monetary gain?

Yeah, I think Facebook is our “friend”, but even a friend might try to sell you a set of Cutco knives to make a buck. Facebook realizes that what they are selling is a product, and in order to sell more product they need to make their customers happy. I think Facebook has mostly done a pretty good job at listening to their users and providing them with what they want.

One thing that they haven’t done well though, is to allow users to export their content. There has been a big push from a movement called DataPortability to make data (social media in particular) more portable, i.e. transportable from one service to the next in an automated fashion. A data portable web would allow you to do things like upload pictures to multiple sites at once, fill out profile information once and synchronize changes with other sites, build your friends list once instead of over and over again at every social network you frequent. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, said in 2007, “It’s the user’s date. We want to [make it portable]. That’s the goal.” But, we haven’t seen any real movement in this vein since that comment was made. We’re hoping that ArchiveFacebook might nudge Facebook into this direction, but we’re not holding our breath.

Finally, give us the nuts and bolts for how to make this thing work.

So, first of all you need to be running the Firefox browser.  Secondly, you need to install ArchiveFacebook.  Do this by going to http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/personal.html and clicking “Add to Firefox”.  Follow the installation prompts after this point.  Directions for usage are posted on the install page under “Usage”.  Finer grain usage instructions can be found here http://docs.google.com/View?id=d29mphw_348sc9hzbd2.