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How to permanently delete your Facebook account

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Re: How to permanently delete your Facebook account

#41
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could have written this comment word for word. People get _offended_ when you tell them that you don't have Whatsapp. But I let them hold that hot coal themselves.

This is so strange, no one in my social circle uses WhatsApp or has ever asked me to use it to talk to them. It’s all iMessage, Snapchat, and a growing group of people on Signal.

I assume you're in the US. In most of Europe Whatsapp is the main communication platform. SMS is dead and Android is more popular than iOS, so no iMessage either.

Re: How to permanently delete your Facebook account

#42
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Amazon is actually a different story to a certain extent. Sure, you can delete your account, but at the end of the day you've transacted with them and they can keep a record of who they've transacted with, right? Personally I think it would be unreasonable for me to demand that a shop I buy from delete the record of who purchased it.

Also at least in the EU you're legally mandated to keep transaction history along with customer information for some number of years iirc. Don't know how that combines with gdpr.

Actually the GDPR is very clear about this.[0] Instead of setting an arbitrary limit, it says it should be the shortest period necessary in the context of other laws and requirements. So if you need to keep the records for 5 years for tax reasons, you should delete them after 5 years.

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/refo...

Re: How to permanently delete your Facebook account

#44
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could have written this comment word for word. People get _offended_ when you tell them that you don't have Whatsapp. But I let them hold that hot coal themselves.

This is so strange, no one in my social circle uses WhatsApp or has ever asked me to use it to talk to them. It’s all iMessage, Snapchat, and a growing group of people on Signal.

Understandably, people who don’t use WhatsApp, don’t think it’s weird that other people don’t use WhatsApp.

People who do have WhatsApp, probably have it, because most of the people they know have it.

Re: How to permanently delete your Facebook account

#45

I got rid of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp about 4 years ago. Facebook and Instagram was easy, but people who have WhatsApp really think you’re weird for not having it. Deleting WhatsApp, while annoying for me personally, has resulted in many people I know joining Signal or Telegram — the network effect can be broken by being belligerent. If you don’t want to have a conversation about why you deleted WhatsApp, si…

Use mautrix-whatsapp [1] on a home server to bridge Matrix chat to WhatsApp and (optionally) add a dedicated VoIP phone number for WhatApp. Allows you to connect to/chat with WhatApp users using Matrix/Element. [1]: https://github.com/mautrix/whatsapp

Not GP commenter, but I suspect you're mistaking a functional issue (not wanting to use Whatsapp's applications) from a moral issue (not wanting to use the Whatsapp platform).

Re: How to permanently delete your Facebook account

#47
The situation is quite interesting here.

- Imagine, you're living outside of USA/UK/Europe.

- Formally, it's possible to proceed with "Permanently delete my account".

- You will even receive email assuring you that two weeks later profile would be completely deleted.

- Then, couple years later you'll occasionally seen email from facebook that someone tried to log in into your ("permanently deleted") account.

- You'll try to log in, probably restore and change the password among the way.

- And after that you'll be successfully logged in. And the profile's state would be like nothing changes. Nothing. Completely.

- You'll contact Support. Seriously? They'll ignore you.

- Maybe some interaction with 3rd-party websites triggered cancellation of the process, you thought.

- Then, you'll implement blacklist just to avoid any interaction with facebook, something similar to: https://pastebin.com/FAV2f9eA and try to repeat the flow again.

- Then another 2+ years later situation will repeat again. Deja-vu. And again. And again.

There's no way to delete facebook profile if facebook didn't really care about its users.

Re: How to permanently delete your Facebook account

#48
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could have written this comment word for word. People get _offended_ when you tell them that you don't have Whatsapp. But I let them hold that hot coal themselves.

This is so strange, no one in my social circle uses WhatsApp or has ever asked me to use it to talk to them. It’s all iMessage, Snapchat, and a growing group of people on Signal.

It can depend a lot on where in the world you and your friend group are or are from. It's quite popular with the Indian H1B contractors in my office in the US for example but not too many of my US friends use it. Same story with my fiancé and her lab groups which have a lot of European grad students and post docs, it's quite common there too.

Re: How to permanently delete your Facebook account

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also at least in the EU you're legally mandated to keep transaction history along with customer information for some number of years iirc. Don't know how that combines with gdpr.

Actually the GDPR is very clear about this.[0] Instead of setting an arbitrary limit, it says it should be the shortest period necessary in the context of other laws and requirements. So if you need to keep the records for 5 years for tax reasons, you should delete them after 5 years. [0] https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/refo...

Yes, and one of the cost of the implementation was actually the justification of keeping data, and segregating said data. We had some data we could keep 10 years, some (most) only two, some had to be deleted once the client left.
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