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How to permanently delete a Facebook account

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Re: How to permanently delete a Facebook account

#71

Post by dave5104 »

skrebbel wrote: post #12
kryten wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's perfectly possible and reasonable to delete all of your data. It's just hard. We have to do this with our clients if they shift off our platform and believe me, it's not much fun deleting 20-100Gb datasets from a shared database with over 2000 tables in it on production kit. But we do it, because we are honest. Facebook are dishonest. Simple as.

Hmm, I'm not sure what you mean by "our platform", but if I post a youtube video, it gets popular, but I get ashamed of it and decide to delete it again, the video will have spread far and wide to other video sites again. Some for public web pages and the internet archive, for stackoverflow answers/wikipedia entries and SEO rats, and so on. How is "your platform" going to help me delete my embarrassing drunk student…

It sounds like his platform is perhaps a private enterprise platform? In other words, it doesn't sound like Facebook or Youtube where information can easily spread, which is probably a prerequisite for having control over your data.

The company I work for deals with background checks and screening information on behalf of our clients' clients. I could definitely see us safely removing all of that personal information from our system and not being able to recover it. But at the same time, we're a much much much smaller organization compared to Facebook.

Re: How to permanently delete a Facebook account

#72

Post by Shank »

jonknee wrote: post #52
mjolk wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC, this removes the ability to use hangouts as well.

> You’ll need a full Google+ account to get access to all of Hangouts’ features including group video calls, sharing photos, and using Hangouts with Google+ circles. https://support.google.com/hangouts/answer/2944865?hl=en&ref...

A friend turned off Google+ and Hangouts was entirely shut down for him, even on the browser side. I'm not sure if that's a recent change, but deleting a Google+ profile seems to cause some unexpectedly bad things to happen, like that.

I know for a fact it is impossible to use Hangouts on iOS devices without maintaining a Google+ profile. A friend was forcibly signed out when she deleted the profile it created for her using the iOS app. Either Google+ is on or Hangouts isn't a stable option.

Edit: To clarify, two separate friends who don't like/use Google+. Sorry if I'm being confusing when trying to add context.

Re: How to permanently delete a Facebook account

#73

Post by dangerlibrary »

I deleted my Facebook account a few years ago through this process. I was very careful not to log back in, and when I tried a few months later I was rejected - no account linked with that email address.

Six months later I signed up with a different email address, and Facebook forced me to confirm my account with my phone number. Javascript Error - that phone number is associated with another Facebook account. I click OK, and I'm redirected to my "new" account with all my old Facebook friends (on the opposite side of the country) showing up as "people I may know."

Nothing is deleted from Facebook, ever.

Re: How to permanently delete a Facebook account

#74

Post by monkeynotes »

skrebbel wrote: post #7

To all the skeptics in threads like these: asking that Facebook actually, entirely, erase all your data isn't a reasonable demand. Unless, if course, you're also OK with Facebook's walled-garden, Facebook-is-the-Internet, Compuserve-wasn't-so-bad strategy. Anyone who ever tried to delete content from the internet knows this: The Internet Archive has long since made a copy of what you're trying to delete. Anything you…

Actually the Internet Archive does not spider content on Facebook:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://facebook.com https://www.facebook.com/robots.txt

Re: How to permanently delete a Facebook account

#75

Post by duskwuff »

rwmj wrote: post #42
300bps wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your general point but your example is not correct The Internet Archive makes it very easy to remove content from their site. I had a family web site accessible to the public for 12 years with about 25,000 pictures on it. For various reasons I took the site down but archive.org still showed the pictures. A quick change to robots.txt stopped that though. Basically, even if the archive grabbed the files at…

Make sure you maintain control over the domain and always have a robots.txt file present, because if you ever lose that, those files will become visible again. Good luck arranging for your descendents to do this after you die.

I'm pretty certain that this isn't the case. If anything, it's the other way around - if a domain changes hands, and the new owner sets up a restrictive robots.txt, the content in the archive is made unavailable, and stays unavailable even if the robots.txt (or the whole domain) later disappears.

Re: How to permanently delete a Facebook account

#76

Post by temp453463343 »

dangerlibrary wrote: post #73

I deleted my Facebook account a few years ago through this process. I was very careful not to log back in, and when I tried a few months later I was rejected - no account linked with that email address. Six months later I signed up with a different email address, and Facebook forced me to confirm my account with my phone number. Javascript Error - that phone number is associated with another Facebook account. I click…

The other possibility is that it's people that have looked up your name on Facebook before you had an account. So HQ logged it as X wanting to find Y. When Y makes an account, we'll let him know X was trying to find them.

Re: How to permanently delete a Facebook account

#79

Post by bcRIPster »

ghaff wrote: post #55
300bps wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your general point but your example is not correct The Internet Archive makes it very easy to remove content from their site. I had a family web site accessible to the public for 12 years with about 25,000 pictures on it. For various reasons I took the site down but archive.org still showed the pictures. A quick change to robots.txt stopped that though. Basically, even if the archive grabbed the files at…

It's also IMO a reasonable question what the "right" behavior should be in such a situation. I'm tempted to make the argument that once content has been made available to the world and archived by the Internet Archive, my descendants or a new corporate owner shouldn't necessarily have the right to remove that content from public view at some time in the future.

I'm in this camp. I owned a 4 letter TLD that I was first registrant on in 1994 and held it until I sold it in 2001. I had lots of interesting things published on the site and as soon as the new owner took the domain, he put up a robot.txt blocking the site my years of content disappeared from the archive. :(

I keep toying with the idea of trying to buy the domain back but it's value has become somewhat prohibitive. Maybe when I win the lottery :/

Re: How to permanently delete a Facebook account

#80

Post by chucknthem »

sdoering wrote: post #15
greyman wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd rather that my content belongs to everybody than that it belongs to Facebook. But you can't have it both ways. You can publish your stuff on Facebook or G+ as "public"... I saw some people are doing that, using it as a blogging platform. Then it belongs to everybody but you are also taking advantage of the social elements on those networks.

No it "belongs" (in your sense of the word) to the platform used to publish it. You loose a significant part of your rights to that content (be it public or private). The only way to "own" your content is to publish it on your own domain on a host you just pay for storage. You might then link to the content via your (so called) social playground of choice. But you will own the content in a "normal" use of the word. Y…

um...citation needed?

https://www.facebook.com/help/193430577370347/

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