To all the skeptics in threads like these: asking that Facebook actually, entirely, erase all your data isn't a reasonable demand.<p>Unless, if course, you're also OK with Facebook's walled-garden, Facebook-is-the-Internet, Compuserve-wasn't-so-bad strategy.<p>Anyone who ever tried to delete content from the internet knows this: The Internet Archive has long since made a copy of what you're trying to delete. Anything you post on the internet, the real, open internet, is forever.<p>If you don't want that, then you'll need to accept that a single entity has full control over what happens with your content, locks it behind a log in so that it can't be easily mined, and does with it what it pleases.<p>I'm not willing to accept that. I'd rather that my content belongs to everybody than that it belongs to Facebook. But you can't have it both ways.
At least I have the option to delete my FB account. On the other hand, Google has lately been aggressively pushing me to convert my YouTube account into a G+ account. Once this is actually forced upon me, is there any way to 'delete' my Google+ account without deleting my YouTube one?
I work on this at Facebook and we do permanently delete your content when you delete your account. It's an interesting distributed systems problem, and we're happy with the framework we've developed for this. We're working on a blog post with more details and hope to publish that soon.<p>Also, I mentioned why account deletion is a non-trivial problem in this comment thread last week: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5976947" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5976947</a>.
Saved to favorites - Right next to Lucy's Instructions for kicking a football.<p>So I visited my Linkedin profile earlier this week. They had automagically added a long disconnected telephone number to my profile - as in disconnected for over five years. I suspect it came either from extended internet data mining or more likely an obsolete contact in some acquaintance's uploaded address book.<p>A Facebook profile is mostly a Collection of Pointers. Deleting the pointer doesn't delete the values at the other end. Until garbage collection, they will persist. In other words, unless my friends and family and groups to whom I have sent information delete their accounts, data about me will persist.<p>Accounts are not zombies. They are vampires, never having died in the first place.
pretty sure this is not a real full delete.
Probably just switches around the profile_status field:<p>0 - visible/default/active<p>1 - deactivated<p>2 - it is gone, really! I swear! <i>crosses fingers</i><p>3 - suspended for tos abuse (we don't like you but your data might be valuable at some point)<p>edit:
also to be fair:<p>4 - memorial mode
In the UK there are laws requiring businesses to retain certain data for several years, so that the authorities can get at it if they need it for evidence in the future. Yeah, I know...<p>So, is facebook bound by the same sort of laws? If not in the US, what about the UK and other counties? Are there different policies per country, or does FB only do what US law says, if it says anything at all.<p>If they are bound by such laws, then we cant really blame FB for keeping the data. They may have no choice. Also, by then, the likes of the NSA/GCHQ could already have a copy of such data.<p>I went through this delete procedure a while ago. I don't know how I try to find out if my data was deleted or not. No way do I want to try to login as I am worried it will reactivate my account and data. So, I'm just left with some one's say so.<p>I wonder if in the UK a freedom of information act application would reveal it?<p>Added:
How do you even contact facebook? Looked at their site and I see nothing. Of course in order to ask on a FB forum you need to sign up. Is there a simple email address?
I deleted my Facebook account a few years ago through this process. I was very careful not to log back in, and when I tried a few months later I was rejected - no account linked with that email address.<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.
Careful - if you even attempt to log in during the two week window, they will reset the timer for deletion (it can be easy to almost unconsciously log in if you're a heavy user). They even do it before you confirm or deny that you're reactivating your account. Seems like one of those psychological games: "come on, do you <i>really</i> want to leave? Now you have to wait even longer for your account to be deleted! Just come back to the fold!"
In terms of privacy I see two categories of data on a network: (1) data that leaked/has been copied to other people and (2) data that hasn't yet leaked.<p>The thing is you can never know with certainly when a piece of data has changed from "not leaked" to "leaked", so effectively you have to act as if all data is leaked in all circumstances as soon as you put it on the network.
Worth adding, because it's not mentioned on the linked page:<p>When I deleted my account in 2010, there was a one month cooling off period, during which any sign-in would cancel the deletion request.<p>Perhaps that's sensible to catch malicious/accidental deletions, but I imagine it also makes it hard for Facebook addicts to leave.
> Your account has been deactivated from the site and will be permanently deleted within 14 days. If you log into your account within the next 14 days, you will have the option to cancel your request.<p>I guess I better delete all cookies before I accidentally get logged in back.<p>Why can't they just delete it?
I gather this link points to facebook.com. Funny, I deleted my facebook account years ago, but Im sure as heck not going to click on a facebook.com link and find out if I really did!<p>(subtitle, I react to facebook.com links as if they were phishing links and what would be the difference? scraping my contacts, selling my personal data, rewriting my TOS at every opportunity. I view the home page of facebook even without logging in as a phishing site. Sorry Mark. :()