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Facebook doesn't want you to deactivate your account.

collison.ie

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Re: Facebook doesn't want you to deactivate your account.

#11

Post by chris11 »

LargeWu wrote: post #5

Of course they don't want you to deactivate your account. It's their business to try to retain their members/customers, just like every other company in the world. Now if they are pretending to deactivate your account but leaving it accessible to others, or other shenanigans, then we've something to talk about. But this? Big deal.

Not only is it their business to retain customers, I think they are also trying to retain your personal data.

I don't really know what their business plan will be, but I'm sure it won't involve normal users paying any money. So they have to make money off of me somehow, whether it is through targeted advertising or selling information to marketers. The current privacy policy allows them to give information from your profile to third parties as long as you cannot be personally identified.

So while I'm not saying they will do anything unethical, an inactive account is probably worth a lot more than a deactivated account.

Re: Facebook doesn't want you to deactivate your account.

#14

Post by randomwalker »

tlrobinson wrote: post #10

I wonder if it wasn't a coincidence that all the people who Facebook says will miss him are girls (well, and one restaurant)

Facebook is probably using an algorithm that picks from among the friends that the user has interacted the most with. At least that's what I would do if I were implementing it. They already use such an algorithm internally to detect if your account is compromised (i.e., if the set of friends with whom you communicate changes sharply at some point.)

Given that Facebook might be doing this, it is likely that the top few friends would be of the opposite gender, in a heteronormative context. This intuitive expectation has been confirmed in research studies of social networks. e.g., http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jure/pubs/msn-www08.pdf ("people tend to converse more frequently and with longer durations with the opposite gender").

Perhaps pc can confirm/refute whether this is true in his case?

Re: Facebook doesn't want you to deactivate your account.

#15

Post by erlanger »

RossM wrote: post #2

That's a really good way of empathising with your users. I've seen "sitename will miss you!" type messages, getting social connections involved would be a hell of a lot more persuasive.

That is, unless your Facebook "friends" are actual friends with whom you have many channels of communication...it just seems tacky and manipulative to me.

Re: Facebook doesn't want you to deactivate your account.

#16

Post by spaghetti »

I had my account "deleted" over two years ago. I went through the email back and forth with the customer service representative who confirmed my acount was deleted. Unfortunately I just received a legitimate friend request from a college friend. Looks like it wasn't deleted after all.

Re: Facebook doesn't want you to deactivate your account.

#17

Post by zimbabwe »

spaghetti wrote: post #16

I had my account "deleted" over two years ago. I went through the email back and forth with the customer service representative who confirmed my acount was deleted. Unfortunately I just received a legitimate friend request from a college friend. Looks like it wasn't deleted after all.

You can send friend requests directly to email addresses. My middle school brother just found me on Facebook that way.

Re: Facebook doesn't want you to deactivate your account.

#18

Post by ben »

pc wrote: post #7
LargeWu wrote: post #5

Of course they don't want you to deactivate your account. It's their business to try to retain their members/customers, just like every other company in the world. Now if they are pretending to deactivate your account but leaving it accessible to others, or other shenanigans, then we've something to talk about. But this? Big deal.

No-one's suggesting they're doing anything untoward. Just that what they're doing is interesting.

I refreshed the deactivate page, and it doesn't seem to be completely random, but it also isn't 100% the same every time. It seems to pick between the same 20 or so friends for me.

Another thing that's interesting is that the deactivate option is exactly where it should be, rather than buried many levels deep in menus. I tried to remove my classmates.com account the other day, and it was a mess.

Re: Facebook doesn't want you to deactivate your account.

#19

Post by tlrobinson »

randomwalker wrote: post #14
tlrobinson wrote: post #10

I wonder if it wasn't a coincidence that all the people who Facebook says will miss him are girls (well, and one restaurant)

Facebook is probably using an algorithm that picks from among the friends that the user has interacted the most with. At least that's what I would do if I were implementing it. They already use such an algorithm internally to detect if your account is compromised (i.e., if the set of friends with whom you communicate changes sharply at some point.) Given that Facebook might be doing this, it is likely that the top fe…

We can try it ourselves. Just log in and go to http://www.facebook.com/deactivate.php

The 5 that show up for me are people I recently friended (unfortunately all dudes)

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