I know this not the crux of your post, but have you tried turning off email notifications from Facebook? I did sometime ago and I haven't gotten an email from them in years. Moving Facebook notifications out of my inbox and into a space that I had to explicitly poll went a long way towards reducing how annoying FB could be.

1) Facebook do not sell your information to advertisers. 2) The emails are pretty easy to remove - case in point, I stopped them sending me emails in 2009, and have not received one since. Linkedin on the other hand, go straight into spam because they just won't stop sending me mails...

First thing I did was disable all email notifications. Not a trivial task: I had to turn off like 30 different types of notifications one by one. However, these sly bastards just kept coming up with new notifications, that were turned on by default. So I kept getting emails from facebook, even though I thought I had disabled all of them.

That was my experience a year or two ago. At some point I deleted my facebook account, because the value I got out of it wasn't sufficient to tolerate all those annoyances: changing email notifications, constantly changing privacy settings and policies, annoying ads, annoying messages from people I barely know...

I got rid of everything a few years back. The only thing they introduced was the mentions, and i disabled that a few weeks ago (after my friends learned about it). I didn't have the same experience, to be honest. I found Linkedin much more difficult.

Mind you, the constantly shifting privacy settings are weird, its easy to be really granular (go to your Activity Log) but it is effort. You can also change privacy on a post by post basis, but its sticky, so you need to be careful. The ads never really bothered me (except for the dating ones just after i came out of a long term relationship). In fact, I never ad-blocked facebook because I could x out of ads I didn't want to see. The annoying messages from people is not really Facebook's fault, though I feel your pain....