Humanism, atheism and other freedoms

Caving in to pressure from users and the New York Times, Facebook has finally created a process by which you can delete your account entirely. Now let’s hope we can trust them to do this, because there’s really no way to check.

As has been widely reported, it used to be that you could never really quite Facebook. You could ‘deactivate’ your account, so that it wasn’t usable or visible. But all that juicy information about you – all that spying you’d carried out on yourself on behalf of marketers and government agencies – remained in the databases. Facebook’s feeble excuse was that this allowed you to reactivate the account easily in the future. The truth is that the data is valuable – to them and their ‘customers’.

But the pressure has proved too much. Not that Facebook has made quitting exactly easy. If you opt for ‘deactivate’ from the account section, you still see no mention of the quitting option. Instead, you need to go to the help page which instructs you to fill in the general-purpose response form requesting deletion.

To save you some effort, the response form is here.

By all accounts, you have to be very specific about what you want done. Some suggest that you must put ‘delete account’ in both the subject line and the content. Here’s what I entered:

Subject: Delete this account

Your message: Please delete this account completely and erase all data relating to me from your servers and backups. Please email me to confirm that this has been done.

There’s a Facebook group with a discussion about how to leave.

Members of this group have reported that all info about them seems to have been removed. But who knows where copies of this information may have ended up. Certainly, you should regard anything you’ve put on Facebook as still being in the public domain – and in the hands of companies wanting to sell you stuff and agencies wanting to keep tabs on you. Much of this data may be aggregated and therefore not necessarily directly identifiable with you. But still…

I’ve sent my request for deletion, and there are suggestions that this may turn into something of a fad of its own, as The Register reported – see ‘Please don’t leave me … bitch‘.

Meanwhile, for those who haven’t seen it, here’s the famous video about what Facebook might really be about…

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