Should photographers delete Facebook? The #deletefacebook hashtag has been trending in recent days, ever since it came to light that the information of 50 million Facebook users had been harvested to build political profiles. The question of our overreliance to Facebook has resurfaced, as it does every time Facebook is caught in a controversy involving privacy or when it unveils new features. And photographers are asking themselves this question too. Should they continue to share their work and their data with a company that seems to care little for the security and privacy of this information. For years, I have written about the benefits of using Facebook in general and Instagram in particular to help photographers' businesses. For the first time, they were able to build their own audiences, bypassing the filters of traditional publishing partners. Photographers like Stacy Kranitz, David Guttenfelder, Ruddy Roye and Matt Black have amazed me with the way they used the platform to develop their voices and launch new projects. Guttenfelder created the first visual travel guide of North Korea, Black put America's poverty on the map and Roye offered one of the rawest insights into the issue of race. These projects, all originally published on Instagram, could have seen the light outside of the Facebook-owned social platform, but Instagram was crucial in their viral-like popularity. With two billions users on Facebook and more than 800 million on Instagram, the pool of potential followers dwarfs in size that of more traditional editorial avenues. That's not to say that it's easy for photographers to make a living based on their social followings, but it can help the shrewdest of them — those who can use that popularity to attract work from more traditional avenues — to build their brands. The problem I have with the #deletefacebook debate is that it focuses solely on Facebook's actions and fails to address our own responsibilities. Every day, we make the conscious decision to use the free service (everybody knows the famous line, "If you're not paying, you're the product") handing out information we would never share with a stranger. Every day, we make the choice to ignore the tools at our disposal to restrict the use of that information by third party companies. How many of us have granted access to our data to Candy Crush and the countless of games and apps that have built their business on Facebook's social graph? How many of us have delved into Facebook's privacy and ads settings to limit what the Menlo Park company can do with your information? That's not to say that Facebook should escape unscathed for mishandling our data, but we should not lose the sight that we are complicit each time we log into our account. -- Olivier Laurent | 
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