But for viewing what your friends and parents are doing on Facebook? Well, they could change their privacy settings to be public, but that would hurt their privacy. You want to be in their social graph, but not have a Facebook account. What does that even mean? Do you just not want to have a password? There's no rule you have to post any content, if you just want to view other's.
This stops after a while. Even when you stay a pleasant person, you'll always be "that guy" requiring an extra action to contact. The social ripple/ping of an event stays inside Facebook.
> You want to be in their social graph, but not have a Facebook account.
In the ideal form this would be a totally open protocol (with backing of Facebook, Google, ... and W3C).
In the current form, I do not know enough about Facebook to suggest a good system. Yes. I want to be in their social graph, but not have a Facebook account or be under Facebook TOS. If that is meaningless at the moment, maybe we should make it mean something.
They can, but they generally don't.
You won't convince your social group to delete their Facebook account. You may, however, convince them that you are not cool.
I'll probably take the other advice, open a new account, use a week for invites, turn on email-updates, and bite the bullet.
They'll still get -some- data off you, but frankly it's a lot of the same data they would get even if you didn't have an account.
I do not trust your company, and I think you are bound to act unethically in the future. But I do not ask you to become a trustworthy ethical company. Mess with the accounts of my friends all you want. I just want to be invited to the next BBQ. People have stopped using e-mail for announcing these social events, and _all_ use Facebook. Could it be possible for me to not be on Facebook, yet still stay up-to-date on what my friends, or hell, even my parents now, are doing? A more advanced social graph API that hooks into email, RSS, Twitter, whatever... ?
I'm sure you also have my email-address from the address books of my contacts, so you could verify me.
As one of your longest non-users (I remember when TheFacebook required a Harvard-email for invite), please let me become a semi-user. It won't pay you a dime, but it will make the world a better place.