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Internet spring cleaning: How to delete Instagram, Facebook and other accounts

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Re: Internet spring cleaning: How to delete Instagram, Facebook and other accounts

#41

Post by yummypaint »

baby wrote: post #34

Please don’t do this. It’s really sad every time I want to reach out to an old friend and I can’t because they deleted their fb :( I mean, if you don’t have such connections then who cares, but if you do think about that

Calls, letters, and in-person visits are still a thing, and they are all vastly superior to facebook. Besides, the alternative to deletion is a bunch of zombie accounts that appear to be real people but will never respond to messages. Best to make it obvious and not leave an account around to cause confusion.

Re: Internet spring cleaning: How to delete Instagram, Facebook and other accounts

#42

Post by deergomoo »

derwiki wrote: post #30
Chernobog wrote: post #25

I communicate with a lot of people on Facebook, but I hated that I ended up scrolling my feed. So I unfollowed everything and now I have an empty feed and nothing to scroll. I realize many have reasons to get rid of Facebook entirely, but for me this was a reasonable compromise.

I’ve been using Beeper to use Facebook messages without using Facebook directly.

It’s also worth noting that you can continue to use Messenger with a de-activated Facebook profile.

Re: Internet spring cleaning: How to delete Instagram, Facebook and other accounts

#43

Post by astura »

derwiki wrote: post #30
Chernobog wrote: post #25

I communicate with a lot of people on Facebook, but I hated that I ended up scrolling my feed. So I unfollowed everything and now I have an empty feed and nothing to scroll. I realize many have reasons to get rid of Facebook entirely, but for me this was a reasonable compromise.

I’ve been using Beeper to use Facebook messages without using Facebook directly.

Messenger is a different app, you can install it without having the Facebook app installed.

Re: Internet spring cleaning: How to delete Instagram, Facebook and other accounts

#44

Post by kibwen »

amin wrote: post #33

I have friends and family, and groups in which I discuss highly specific topics. I don't think there's a better tool than Facebook that allows me to stay up to date on things that are important to me. The equivalent subreddits are of much worse quality. I know this will get downvotes, but this is my opinion.

Discord has taken over this role for me and all my social groups. And unlike Facebook there's no ads, no viral bullshit, no astroturfers, no personal information, and you can keep your identities separate across multiple social circles (all of which are private and invite-only by default).

Re: Internet spring cleaning: How to delete Instagram, Facebook and other accounts

#45

Post by Jhsto »

jorvi wrote: post #7

I have an Instagram account that I no longer own the e-mail or recovery phone number for. I have the password for it but every time I try to log in I get a ‘suspicious login’ warning and have to verify with said phone number. I want it gone but I cannot delete it. Loathe as I am I would even be willing to provide government ID. Instagram literally has no contactable support if you aren’t a massive account (200k+ foll…

I once got my old username released through their generic support ticket system. I never received a reply, but instead found one day that they had processed my request.

Re: Internet spring cleaning: How to delete Instagram, Facebook and other accounts

#46

Post by ahmedfromtunis »

To protect my mental wellbeing, I find that carefully selecting who to follow on some of these services improves considerably my experience.

For Instagram and Twitter, my rule of thumb is to prefer topical accounts to entity ones. That is, accounts that are dedicated to a single topic, no matter how narrow or large the scope, over those of people and/or companies.

Personal and business accounts, no matter how focused they are, tend to go off topic very often, and there's nothing to do about it. A designer or an art studio can still post about politics, religion, or whatever the controversy du jour is about. An account about logo design or some python framework, not so much if ever.

This allows me to have a feed whose content I sort of control. With Twitter, it gets even better with lists, so I have ones about dev stuff, others about business topics, etc. and the content there is almost on topic most of the time.

Since I started doing this, the impact of social media on my mood almost vanished, yet I'm still able to closely follow what's happening on topics I really care about.

When I want to see what's happening on the real world, I check my Facebook.

I'm sure aware of how bad these companies are with personal data. So it you think it'd be better to delete your account, then, yes, do it.

Re: Internet spring cleaning: How to delete Instagram, Facebook and other accounts

#47

Post by searchableguy »

If you want to clean history regularly instead of deleting the account, you can use https://redact.dev.

I use it to clean twitter on regular interval.

It works with every service except Google and Apple related ones (They can't add support for those without getting kicked off the app stores)

Re: Internet spring cleaning: How to delete Instagram, Facebook and other accounts

#48

Post by kibwen »

endisneigh wrote: post #27

Personally I think it’s a bad idea to delete any of your accounts. It becomes a huge hassle to claim anything if there’s a situation in which you need an account that can show that you have ownership. In particular if you see a photo of you or yours somewhere and want it modified or removed. Not to mention there’s really no value in deletion. Log out, stop using all of the clients. The end.

Whether or not you have an account with a service should not matter here. If your country doesn't grant you the legal right to get a photo taken down, then a service won't take it down even if you have an account. And if you do have the legal right do have a photo taken down, then the service will take it down even if you don't have an account, lest they become victim to a lawsuit that they will easily lose.

Re: Internet spring cleaning: How to delete Instagram, Facebook and other accounts

#49

Post by dflock »

jorvi wrote: post #19
adambyrtek wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need a lawyer to send a standard "right to erasure" GDPR request and they are required to respond within 30 days: https://gdpr.eu/right-to-erasure-request-form/

Yes, but here comes the problem: where would I send this request? Instagram notes no public facing physical address for my country and their support e-mail just sends back automated replies.

Their support email processing system may have a different code path for emails that contain "gdpr right to erasure" in the subject line?

Re: Internet spring cleaning: How to delete Instagram, Facebook and other accounts

#50

Post by yummypaint »

baby wrote: post #37
jll29 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please use email instead, which is a standardized open protocol that does give people some choices. You can always exchange email addresses before closing down accounts to stay in touch.

My generation doesn’t use emails basically. I changed emails quite a lot through my younger years as did my friends so it wouldn’t have been useful. We used to ask for people’s facebook shortly after meeting them. It’s the best tool to create and maintain your social graph. I understand that not everybody use it this way, and that’s fine, but if you do please think about that. It’s really heart breaking how I lost co…

Locating and contacting old friends is entirely within your means in 2022. What is most striking to me as someone in my early thirties is how much learned helplessness is associated with these communication technologies that supposedly enhance our capabilities.

Facebook makes it easy to curate the appearance of friendship, but meaningful relationships take time and effort in the real world to maintain. People have traded quantity for quality, and the true impetus for this transformation is that social graphs with more nodes are easier for facebook to make money from.

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