Editor,

Recently I made a personal decision to stop using Facebook. I have a problem with a company this size that affects so many people that you cannot contact.

Recently, Facebook locked my page until I agreed to a privacy policy change. I did not want to agree to this without speaking to someone from Facebook.

Ha! Good luck with that. Facebook contact form on the site generates a preprinted email that says basically they will respond to next to zero requests. A further attempt to locate contact info lists no telephone or address to contact them. This seems quite odd for a publicly traded company.

This brings me to the Whidbey News-Times policy of requiring a Facebook account in order to respond online. I noted the Seattle Times has their own internal login system. However, when I contacted the editor of the Whidbey News-Times he indicated that this is the way many newspapers online are going for log-in responses.

Here is the problem. When I deleted my Facebook account — every comment I ever made online vanished. There is no record of the comments and, if you read the comment string now, you would be very confused as many comments have now been taken out of context with the disappearance of my comments.

I think the Whidbey News-Times needs to re-evaluate it’s log-in system unless it wants to continue with this charade with Facebook. People can set up fake Facebook accounts and then if they don’t like the responses, delete them, and start all over with a new fake account. This is unacceptable for a news organization.

I’d just like to have input on local issues without having to sell my soul to Facebook and the secretive company that runs it.

Thomas Koloske

Oak Harbor