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How to permanently delete your Facebook account

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Re: How to permanently delete your Facebook account

#91

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…

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

Are you saying that Facebook doesn’t enable full account delete outside of countries that require it by law?

Re: How to permanently delete your Facebook account

#92

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…

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.

I have (and have always had) a dumb phone so obviously no Whatsapp. I don't really undertstand its appeal. Being part of tens of groups that sends you notifications constantly because someone's posted a picture of their cat but you don't leave not to offend anyone does not sound a cool thing to me.

If people need to send me some information they text me. If sending a text is too much for them maybe I did not really need to know what they wanted to send. If I want to communicate with my friends and family I call them like we used to do in the 20th century.

Re: How to permanently delete your Facebook account

#93

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…

There is, you basically spend a year rewriting your profile step by step with garbage data. Then delete the garbage posts and replace them with other stuff. It's long and it takes effort.

I assume that when you do it all at once they will just disable you and keep the old snapshot in their facebook graph.

Re: How to permanently delete your Facebook account

#94
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How _dare_ they not having xmpp and matrix accounts while I, the real mensch, selfhost both _servers_. And what's with all the downmods and downright flags lately? I'm trying to be funny here.

No humor allowed. HN is srs bsns

On the contrary. HN loves humor. You just need to put some effort into it (or get lucky with timing).

Re: How to permanently delete your Facebook account

#95
post #91

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…

//Imagine, you're living outside of USA/UK/Europe. Are you saying that Facebook doesn’t enable full account delete outside of countries that require it by law?

Would you be surprised?

Re: How to permanently delete your Facebook account

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. - I explicitly check to avoid any "disabling". - The only intent was to permanently delete the account. - You can believe me or not and I did it really careful.

Move to a European country and Sue there for GDPR violation.

Yes that sounds entirely reasonable and practical.

Re: How to permanently delete your Facebook account

#97

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...

Thanks for clarifying + supplying references :)

Re: How to permanently delete your Facebook account

#98
post #80

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…

In Europe, people just assume that you have it. I often get the first contact from pensions and airbnbs on WhatsApp. I convinced a few people to switch to Telegram, but there are still a few stragglers on WhatsApp and even Facebook Messenger.

I believe Telegram is inferior to WhatsApp due to missing default end-to-end encryption.

Re: How to permanently delete your Facebook account

#99
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Messaging clients tend to be regional. WhatsApp is massive in Europe. From what I gather WeChat is dominant in mainland China but Hong Kong still used WhatsApp (though I think they might be coming round to Signal?) and the US, who have a higher ratio of Apple users vs the rest of the world, tend to use iMessage a lot more.

Interoperability between these systems should be a public policy goal. I don't have to buy an AT&T phone anymore to call my friends; not sure why I have to buy iOS to chat with them.

Then again, I've kinda given up on email privacy since at least half of my emails go to Google's servers anyway. I'm not sure if we can avoid Facebook having my IP address (or whatever future attack vectors are found after the protocol has been standardised) if I message WhatsApp users from my Signal account.

Re: How to permanently delete your Facebook account

#100
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interoperability between these systems should be a public policy goal. I don't have to buy an AT&T phone anymore to call my friends; not sure why I have to buy iOS to chat with them.

I agree with you but this is a problem that date backs to the 90s (anyone remember Bitlbee, Trillion, Pidgeon, etc?). Unfortunately incompatibility is seen by businesses a feature rather than a flaw -- despite the annoyances it causes for users.

At one point the US Govt did mandate interoperability on AOL Messenger, once it became the dominant platform.

So there is precedent for this, but we live in very different times now.

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