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If you are ready to commit "virtual identity suicide," delete your Facebook account, and say good-bye to social networking sites, you are not alone.

Quitting Facebook is hardly "virtual identity suicide". You can have an identity on the web on your own terms by creating your own web site on your own domain. People were doing that long before Facebook or any other social network came along.

Unfortunately, this article doesn't really provide any information, only a link to the original research paper:

http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/cyber.2012.032...

The abstract of this paper says:

Social networking sites such as Facebook attract millions of users by offering highly interactive social communications. Recently, a counter movement of users has formed, deciding to leave social networks by quitting their accounts (i.e., virtual identity suicide). To investigate whether Facebook quitters (n=310) differ from Facebook users (n=321), we examined privacy concerns, Internet addiction scores, and personality. We found Facebook quitters to be significantly more cautious about their privacy, having higher Internet addiction scores, and being more conscientious than Facebook users. The main self-stated reason for committing virtual identity suicide was privacy concerns (48 percent). Although the adequacy of privacy in online communication has been questioned, privacy is still an important issue in online social communications.