Facebook has value, but no matter what your privacy settings are set to, no matter what you delete, always assume that anything you write or do on Facebook - in any context - will be embarrassingly public. 1) Because it will and 2) because it just makes life easier.<p>When my wife and I were first dating, for religious and cultural reasons her parents didn't know. Her parents are conservative Muslims and mine conservative Christians. She had a picture of the two of us as her profile picture, and it was set to private (that existed once). More importantly in the picture she wasn't wearing the hijab (the head scarf).<p>One day Facebook removed the ability to have private profile pictures - automatically converting every profile picture to public. Her sister saw the picture and long story short that was the last time she talked to her parents. That was 2+ years ago. Facebook can't be blamed for the cultural and relationship issues at play here, but they can be blamed for how they went about this. And we can be blamed for trusting them.<p>I still use facebook. I don't blame them for trying new things, pushing the boundaries, etc. I have however learned that no matter what that data isn't mine. It's facebooks. And whenever facebook decides to innovate they will do whatever they want with their data to try doing it.
FB has, over the years, gradually lost my trust until I deleted my account in November 2010 after having been a member since late 2004 when FB was college-only.<p>As a 20-something living in SF, it's a daily thing now: I don't get invited to parties, I don't know about birthdays, I don't see my friends' photos, I don't have any contact with anyone from high school or college anymore.<p>There is a real social cost for someone in my situation to not be on FB. I struggle to quantify the harm, but it's there. I struggle too to explain to my friends why I'm not on FB. And yet I still think I'm better off without it.<p>The whole situation contributes to the isolation I already experience as an introvert and someone who doesn't much care for bars, clubs, or alcohol -- though I suppose I don't need to remind this audience that being alone != loneliness.<p>I guess it doesn't matter much anyway, since FB is still collecting information on me (and other 'shadow profiles' of users not on FB).
My name is Scott Renfro, and I’m a software engineer at Facebook working on security and privacy. I thought I'd post the comment I submitted on the original blog post here as well. We’ve put a lot of work into making deletions permanent, so I can imagine how frustrated you must be. I’m pretty sure those story deletions are permanent, and I can’t think of any place where we can or do automatically restore user-deleted content months later.<p>If you happen to have any more details about specific stories that reappeared, I’d love to try and figure out exactly what happened. Admittedly, that may be difficult now that several months have passed.<p>As one of the other commenters mentioned, your Activity Log is a better place to get a full list of your activity and delete it item-by-item. It also shows posts that Timeline omits and includes other types of content such as likes and comments. This help page may be useful <a href="https://www.facebook.com/help/activitylog" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/help/activitylog</a> and you can find your Activity Log at <a href="https://www.facebook.com/me/allactivity?privacy_source=activity_log&log_filter=all&filter_onlyme=on" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/me/allactivity?privacy_source=activ...</a><p>I couldn’t tell from your description, but one possibility is that you only saw and deleted the stories rendered on your Timeline, which is just a summary of your activity.
I deleted my Facebook account a few years ago. The whole deal - waited the requisite month or so to ensure that it was gone, and any further login attempts wouldn't re-instate the account.<p>Six months later I signed up with a different email address, and Facebook forced me to confirm my account with my phone number. Javascript Error - that phone number is associated with another Facebook account. I click OK, and I'm redirected to my "new" account with all my old Facebook friends (on the opposite side of the country) showing up as "people I may know."<p>Nothing is deleted from Facebook, ever.
I find rants like this quite interesting, especially when they end with lines like this:<p>> That is why I may delete my Facebook account. And that is why you should too.<p>"May". In spite of this pretty egregious behavior/bug, it's still a "<i>may</i> delete my Facebook account". That alone says something about the longevity of the business.
There seems to be a philosophical difference in how users versus services view ownership of data and posts like this. If you write status "foo" and someone else comments "bar," who owns what? Do you own the comment because it is subordinate to your post? If your post was just a letter, and someone wrote an essay in a comment underneath it, do you own that essay and can you delete it without permission from its creator?<p>No, we shouldn't trust facebook. But no, we also shouldn't pretend that the word delete means the same thing on your personal computer as it does on a shared resource like facebook. It's way more complicated than that. It <i>should</i> be simple, but it isn't, at least not yet.<p>Also, not upvoting this because of the eye-rollingly overdone "merriam-webster defines..." line. God, I can't stand that!
Another thing to note is that they don't want their users to delete stuff or do any action that may suggest abandoning the platform. I thought that I deleted my profile 1.5 years ago but I tried logging in last week (after seeing a similar HN thread) and was surprised to find that it was all there. It occured to me that I must have deactivated my profile. Then I tried looking for delete option but couldn't find it anywhere. All I could find was a _deactivate_ button. I had to use a third party (Google) to find out about how to delete my profile.<p>Facebook has made it unnecessarily hard to delete accounts and instead pushes the _deactivate_ option in a very psychologically manipulative way. Even after using the delete option, I'm sure that they're going to retain my data for as long as they like. I still did it for my own sake, prevent myself from using it at all.
Perhaps the way to delete the information in the account is to replace the status posts, comments, photos with junk. Words and sentences that don't mean anything; photos that are noise. Perhaps there's a way to do that in an automated fashion. I'd use that.
While I agree with the gist of the argument (Facebook shouldn't bring back user-deleted posts, and you shouldn't trust Facebook), the semantic arguments over the term "delete" are frivolous. It's not unreasonable for Facebook to keep storing things that I delete. Windows has the Recycle Bin, word processors have undo, databases have backups, etc. The problem is restoring the content <i>without the user's permission</i>. Citing a dictionary definition then overfitting your argument to that specific definition is something I expect from a high school speech class.
This is the frustrating thing about facebook. They often have bugs that make things suddenly become public, or settings for visibility of new posts all of a sudden reset to 'all friends' or public. G+ handles this kind of stuff far better.<p>I really wish there was an auto-delete items older than X months. Most of the value of facebook goes away after a month, anything older than that is usually negative history digging and stalking by others.
I wonder if I could get my account really deleted and my data put offline by breaking the terms [1] (posting ads and logos or sharing my password for example).<p>I'm afraid it would not work, though. Probably they delete the recent content, leave the rest online, and refuse me to log in...<p>Did anyone try?<p>[1] <a href="https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms</a>
I understand this is not good. I do.<p>But I'm surprised people think entity like Facebook, Google and any other web businesses delete records permanently. It's not worth it on so many level:<p>- People that actually want to retrieve their stuff,<p>- It's harder to implement a full delete than it is to add a flag,<p>- They would have to give up on data-mining assets.<p>I don't endorse, but I understand.
Timeline shows only popular posts you make. If you delete the posts on timeline then only a subset of your posts are deleted AND they will get replaced by other less popular posts you made in the past. You'd need to go into user settings and delete items directly from the activity log. This clearly isn't a huge usecase (1 by 1 item deletion).<p>This is just another case of user misunderstanding/error which gets blamed on facebook.
I stopped using FB over a year ago, and I deleted my account there last December.<p>Once you delete your FB account your profile remains visible for another two weeks, provided you don't login during the interim.<p>Today I can happily say that I am no longer on the publicly-available Facebook site, but who knows if FB maintains an LEO version of the site for use by the fascists (spies) and other government entities...
Every time this sort of articles come up, I feel glad I don't have a Facebook account. As I see it if you care enough about somebody, you have their phone number and their address.
I did the very same thing with my account, and also noticed everything that I deleted still showing up in the timeline. Pissed me off.<p>Need I remind everyone that Zuckerberg himself said people were "dumb fucks" for trusting him with their data?
Just create a fake FB account for things like authentication, or getting coupons, etc...<p>I don't trust FB, but I do need it for certain things. Keeping in touch with friends/family is definitely not one of them
I always think back to that time when Zuck was on stage a couple of years ago, and he was talking about user-generated content, and he slipped, and referred to it as Facebook's. There you go. Anything you put on their site is their property, to do with as they like. I really think their days are numbered. Not anytime soon, but eventually, they are going to become as obsolete as Friendster, Bebo, and MySpace are now, but first a new social network that is built in that same style must emerge.
I wonder what facebookers who are HNers have to say about this. Do you guys have any opinions about this -- it is by design? Are there ways around it? Will there be ways around this?
I just remembered a very interesting tale.<p>There is a social networks for some stuff that you don't want known (for example, sexual fetishes, or gay stuff, or anti-government stuff, and so on).<p>I know a case where someone (that was never found out who, although there are some suspects) in one of those social networks started to attack some other people there. Until things started to get out of hand, with the person finding the Facebook profiles of those involved (even if they had completely fake profiles) and posting on that network, and then getting their profile in that network and posting back on Facebook...<p>Then the attacker posted on the niche social network the Facebook profiles of children of the victims, stuff escalated to the point of people hiring private investigators and professional assassins (some of the victims were soldiers and/or military police shock troops, and were not amused at all at threats toward their family... and happily supported plans for a assassination).<p>Happily the attacker suddenly gave up, and things de-escalated... But it made me much more aware that social networks can be VERY dangerous...<p>Of course (considering the tone of social networks here, professions of those involved, and that people wanted to do illegal stuff) I cannot explain better or give more information.
Not having facebook makes you look like an anti-social element irrespective of what it does to your mental health and well being. At the end of the day, I feel like make a small circle of friends that engage with you on deep level and not just superficially. What kind of friend it would who couldn't or forgets to text or call you?
I've had similar issues with Facebook. After it became clear they were using my "likes" and profile information (favorite movies, books, tv shows, etC) to serve me ads I removed every single "like" I had ever done and all information from my profile. Yet I still get targeted adds based on that information.
Thank you. I didn't know that you can actually delete your facebook account until I saw you post. The only option I knew was to deactivate the account. From the UI, I couldn't find any other option, but a single Google point me to the delete account form. Thanks!
I bet when you "delete" something facebook (and many others) just marks it as "hidden" so you will think it is gone.<p>The same happen to me but with yahoo, I had an old account that was long unused, because I didn't want to lose any contact that could happen I redirected it to another email, then, after a couple of years, I decided to delete the account because only spams were being redirected. A year later I notice that emails started to come from this "deleted" account again and so I tried to login and for my surprise it was active.<p>So don't expect to "delete" anything, and I think we shouldn't expect to have our rights respected, these companies provide a service that is not really for us.
One thing that has always bothered me it's that if you ever decide to post a comment on a site that uses the Facebook commenting system and you decide not to publish that comment on your timeline, then you have no way of recovering it (and thus deleting it, if you ever decide so). You have to resort to search engines that behave poorly for this kind of things.<p>I admit that after some mishaps Facebook has greatly improved the privacy controls on the site and allowed user to more easily control what they share and with whom, but I guess pretty much everyone would agree that it's not enough yet. We need the ability to delete the very content that we create, everyone has the right to be forgotten should he decide so.
Clearly they have a bug, but as far as actually deleting your data; I am willing to be it'll never be deleted.<p>They couldn't possibly manage the data if you could remove pieces, since everything on facebook is intertwined (likes, comments, shares, etc).<p>aka this doesn't surprise me.
There is one part of this that I agree with, that is the part where you say that if you delete all items one by one (why don't they have a delete all?) you want them never to be visible for anyone again.<p>The part I don't agree with is that you expect that the data is physically deleted from the server. I think and expect that big companies don't wipe all your data on command, they simply set a flag for deleted records. Really deleting the data also has a technical impact for them, it probably depends on the company's policy. It would be great if they did wipe all data but I really think most of them don't and have some sort of an aging process or really never delete your data.
Personal story, but nevertheless humiliating and tied to facebook. I was never able to get an explanation or even contact FB's support about it.<p>Within a matter of hours, I lost over 150 facebook friends. Somehow, it was also tied into instagram and I unfollowed all my friends. Not sure how this happened. But you could imagine that it's embarrassing to have to re-friend people on facebook and explain that you didn't do it on purpose. I'm sure there are some people I forgot to refriend who think that I just de-friended them for personal reasons. This just ties into the fact that whatever happens to you on facebook will be broadcast to your entire social network.
Facebook lost me a while back when the Android app first came out. Logging into the site and finding contacts that had no account in my facebook "phonebook" felt like a breach of trust. I figured they'd act in good faith and enrich Android contacts with facebook data. I did NOT think they'd yank my contacts the other way, doing who-knows-what with it. Shame on me for not reading the app permissions with more scrutiny.<p>Leaving facebook removed a distraction I did not realize I was weary of. At risk of sounding dramatic, it felt like I got a few minutes a day of my life back.
Sequel to the article incoming:<p>"OMG! I deleted my Facebook account two months ago, and my friends just told me that they wished me birthday on my timeline last night. OMG! Facebook, I trusted you! Why!? OMG!"<p>Seriously, I love the last sentence of the article: "That is why I may delete my Facebook account. And that is why you should too."<p>If Facebook will not delete the posts on the Timeline, why is the author still believing that deleting the account will genuinely delete the account? The data you disclosed to the social network is here to stay. The only way you can stop is to not give it more.
I wonder if this is the case because those wall posts aren't specifically yours. You posted those onto another user's timeline, and thus it's probably not within your power to delete them. I'm not saying that this is the right thing to do, but it fits with the available data. If you removed all your photos and they're still gone, but wall posts are still there, it's an issue with how Facebook view data ownership. If you delete status updates or relationships, work etc, they stay gone too I imagine.
Ditch Facebook and join Diaspora. It's a great project that Rails/Javascript devs can contribute to.<p><a href="http://diasporaproject.org/" rel="nofollow">http://diasporaproject.org/</a>
Yesterday I started deleting all my FB content. My FB account got locked and released 24h later. When I logged in, all my content was restored. I'm still trying to understand why.
"That is why I may delete my Facebook account. And that is why you should too."<p>We should also do something that you're not even certain you're going to do yourself?
Similar,<p>I deleted my twitter profile picture as well as account in 2008. I had a url of the profile image saved. After five years the the link works and image is still there.
I just went and looked too and all my content going back to 2007 which a painstaking hand deleted is back(!)<p>I hope mark zuckerberg ends up broke doing LAMP consulting.
For the 100th time, the only reason any of us are on Facebook and not Google+ or MySpace or Friendster or whatever is because all of our friends are on there with us.<p>Facebook can and will do whatever it wants to abuse this fact, and as long as they provide the most convenient way to communicate with other people, there is nothing we can do about it, period.<p>So rant away, my Internet friends, it's all we can do anyway.
The only reason I am on Facebook and also not use AdBlock on Google Search is, I am in the internet business. And if you are in the internet-business, you do have to be a part of the system: all in.<p>I do not want to mull over a social media monetizing idea and wonder if Facebook has already figured it out. I just need to be there and know it myself.<p>Sad reason, but that's the way it is.
<i>I am not going to waste time deleting all of my content a third time.</i><p>I did that once, there's a Firefox extension (the name escapes me at the moment sorry) you can use to create macros. Sure it's useless in a way, but it's also fun in a way :D If it pops back, it's macro time again -- better than nothing, right?
Thats exactly the reason why we built <a href="http://pixter.in" rel="nofollow">http://pixter.in</a> . Facebook's incentive is to get as much data of you and retain it. Our incentive is to build the best product. If your incentive's are clear and aligned things like this won't happen.
Regarding:
>> Or is it? If Facebook doesn’t understand what should happen when I delete my wall posts, who’s to say that if I delete my account, it won’t come back too?<p>I thought I had deleted my account in 2009, but I was curious when I saw this. It turns out I can still log in. Curious...
I'll give you a little advice that's been working wonderfully for me so far - don't ever post something that is politically/ethnically/whatever questionable and you'll be fine. Even better than that, it'll play in your favour.
Should you enter your real information on any internet site? It's kind of like when stores ask for your phone number: there's no real obligation to them to not use it for spam or re-sell it. I always give a fake and ask them to email.
"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."<p>It's simple folks. If you still trust FB with anything at this point you're going to get hurt. If you do trust them with something and they burn you then it's your fault.
I think the title is an overreaction. Just because something can and has violated your trust doesn't mean you should never trust it. Never is a very strong word.
Is this real life?<p>Do you really think it's still necessary to state that you should not trust a company that works with the NSA?<p>Does anybody do any thinking after reading the news?<p>What exactly do you need to wake up?<p>EDIT: :-D just keep downvoting and burry your heads deep in the sand...
"My name is Scott Renfro, and I’m a software engineer at Facebook working on security and privacy. We’ve put a lot of work into making deletions permanent"<p>Had to LOL at this comment