Humanism, atheism and other freedoms

I asked Facebook to close my account. And it seems they obeyed. But there was something about the company’s reponse that made me uneasy.

[Updated: 23 Feb 2008]

I reported earlier, in Facebook – the long goodbye, that Facebook now allows you to close an account permanently, rather than just ‘deactivate’ it. They don’t make it easy: there’s no simple form to do it. Instead, you have to send an email, via the customer response form, with the request. So I did. But when the reply came, I found myself wondering just how thorough they’d been.

The message I sent was:

Subject: Delete this account

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.

And this, several days later, is what came back:

We have deleted your profile information and removed your email address from our login database. Please let me know if you have further questions or concerns.

Thanks,

Patrick
User Operations
Facebook

Hmm. I wasn’t entirely happy with that. There was no specific confirmation that all data have been removed. Okay, so my profile information has, apparently, been removed. But does this mean only from the profile? Are there other versions of the data stored or copied in other forms?

And then there was that business about my email address having gone from the ‘login database’. Seems rather specific, doesn’t it? Is this because they have harvested my email address, along with everyone else’s, in some other form? Perhaps in marketing databases, or commercial versions they sell to third parties?

Naturally, I’ve responded. Here’s what I sent:

Actually, I do have some remaining concerns because your reply does not quite match my request and seems to leave some ambiguity. Please specifically respond to ALL of the following:

1) Please confirm that ALL data I entered or uploaded to my account has been permanently deleted from your servers, including notes, status updates, images etc.

2) Please confirm that you have permanently removed all data linking me to ‘friends’, groups, etc – that there remains no data or metadata that in any way identifies me, or can be used to identify me, with other people or organisations.

3) Please confirm that the same information as in 1) and 2) has been permanently removed from backups and any aggregated or derived databases.

4) You say that my email address has been removed from the login database. Please confirm that it has been removed from ALL databases operated and/or owned by Facebook.

5) Please confirm that no data I have ever provided, nor analyses derived from this data which may be in any way linked to me, remains anywhere on your systems.

6) Please also confirm that no such information, as outlined in 5) above, remains available to any third parties, either in whole or aggregated form.

I’ll keep you posted on what happens, probably by updating this post.

Update (23 Feb 2008):

Well, this is the reply I received:

Sorry for any confusion. All information that was located on your account has been deleted, including any email addresses associated with this account. Unfortunately, we are unable to delete messages you have sent to others on the site. Please be aware these users will not be able view your profile or reply to these messages. Additionally, since the information and content you posted, such as any comments on discussion boards, is often stored in many different places within the Facebook file system, there’s no easy way for Facebook to remove it all at once. Keep in mind that Facebook does not use information from disabled accounts, and third parties have no access to any of this information.

Something tells me that this is the best I’m going to get, though I’m intrigued by the use of the term ‘disabled accounts’ rather than ‘deleted accounts’. And you’ll note they still avoided saying anything about backups or aggregated data. I’m still deciding whether to follow up and demand more information.

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