Thank you for posting this. In light of the recent stuff that Facebook has done, I'm deleting my account. I'm glad I'm not alone in seeking the information on how to do that exactly.
Started giving your personal information away to third parties without your consent.
Deliberately ignored your privacy settings when doing so; even if you had your account set to the strictest privacy settings, they still started giving your information away to Microsoft, Pandora, and Yelp.
Slightly longer ago, suddenly changed everyone's privacy settings from defaulting to sharing most information only within your network (college, city, etc) to sharing it publicly.
Basically, they've repeatedly reduced the privacy of your account, causing you to reveal potentially embarrassing information to a much wider audience than you had intended. In some cases, you could get the old privacy settings back, but only by laboriously going through many pages of privacy settings and resetting them, every time Facebook rolls out another such update.
I'm just saying that if they do find out you're not who you pretend to be then your account will be closed. A primary reason for this would be to prevent identity theft (e.g. accounts that appear to be a real person and add a group of people who all work together/study together/went to the same school).
Changing your name on facebook is easy. I hear it is common when high school students apply for college. The site works best with your real social graph, imho, but it is easy to enhance your calm re: privacy
All name changes have to be approved before they go into effect, at least from what I remember.
They actually have human reviewers approve every change. If the name seems fake, they deny the request.
I read an article once about people with fake-sounding but real last names like Batman, etc. having their name change requests denied, and needing to convince Facebook employees of their own identity. They have gone to great lengths to ensure their data on you is tied to a real name.
Yes, they confirm name changes, but I don't think they're very strict about it. Some anecdotal evidence:
My Facebook middle name is Emacs. It used to be 'emacs'.
I have three friends who share a Facebook account, which is probably against the TOS anyway. They change the name rather frequently. Last month they were named Krishanu Coke Zero Austin Steve.
They actually have human reviewers approve every change. If the name seems fake, they deny the request.
I have a number of quite odd and very apparent pseudonyms among my Facebook friends. Most are married women with children, who have some well known reasons to desire more online privacy than young single men. I don't know how those names were approved. My entirely real name on Facebook took a long time to get approved when I initially opened my Facebook account, which I thought was quite silly.
My guess would be that they have a blacklist of well-known celebrity and fictional character names that gets your request flagged for further review. Misspellings might avoid triggering the blacklist.
What would that entail? I don’t think deleting all your submissions or all your comments is something that you should be able to do. That’s very disruptive and, well, HN never pretended that what you submit or write here would not be public. (That, to me, is the big problem with Facebook.)
Someone could, however, find out who is behind your username and that might be a problem. One thing HN maybe should allow you to do in such a case would be to replace all instances of your username next to your submissions or comments with “deleted”. No perfect – others replying to you might mention your username – but close enough.
That's cute but nowhere in the linked article does it accuse facebook of being evil. The article simply provides helpful information about how to go about getting a task done that some may want to have done.
edit: heh, just realized the page in question even has a "like" button. ;)
This should really be as simple as a single button. It wouldn't even significantly reduce their membership since the average person doesn't care. It would however improve their image.
Can this really be implemented? No system in that size can invalidate any information in every CDN center instantly (or even in bounded time). The fact is, once your information is online, it will never go.
It can be implemented for facebook but not for facebooks apps or for scraped and cached information. However the article wasn't about removing your content from the web completely. It was about removing your content from facebook.
That is false security of the type much beloved by engineers. It fails for all sorts of cases, such as people who are less literate than you are (ask me about the time our outsourcing team Hit Next To Continue without being able to read the Japanese trac interface they were using -- better yet, don't ask), vindictive ex-girlfriends, dormroom pranks, etc, etc, etc, etc.
The single button can be located somewhere unlikely to be accidentally clicked. You can keep the 14 day timespan so that undoes are possible. Your concern over accidental clicks is valid as is your classification of are you sure dialogs as false security. But an undo alleviates that concern and is the proper way to handle them. Making it difficult to do that task is not the right way to handle it.
It should still be a button not a painful complicated set of steps.
I too wonder why Facebook makes it so difficult for users to permanently delete their accounts? It should be a straight forward and simple process, yet Facebook doesn't even make this option easily locatable through their service. They should at least openly explain to their users why the deletion process is in its current form (user experience, security, spam reasons, etc). However, making the deletion process so isolated and obscure, without an official explanation, only makes me more skeptical of Facebook's agenda.
The value of a network to a user is in the number of people he can communicate with. The value of a network to Facebook is in the number of accounts it can claim; the more accounts, the more attractive is the network to advertisers.
If Facebook reports number of users to advertisers and investors, it would never want to be in a situation where they have to show a loss of users. So they make it obscure to delete your account.
Yes, I can understand why it would be in Facebook's best interest, but what about their users' self interest? They are the ones who made them who they are today.
Agreed. The article states permanence, but who's to say they're not actually pulling the curtain on you and keeping your information on file? I think the bottom line is, if one is not comfortable with the sharing of information, don't sign up in the first place and consider the repercussions of your actions before making anything public if what you might do would later concern you... in that sense similar to getting a tattoo.
That explanation would be too selfish on Facebook's part and incredibly disrespectful to their users from a privacy and information control standpoint, but who knows, it may be the unfortunate truth.
An email is sent to the user to notify them that their account has been queue'd for deletion - after that it takes 14 days for the deletion to happen, during which time a simple login will cancel the deletion request. So I doubt it's about pranksters. These other controls seem adequate to prevent that type of thing.
The worst case is when someone gets temporary access to your EMAIL credentials. They do a "forgot password" on Facebook, delete your account, then delete the confirmation email. Of course, someone with access to your email can do far worse things than delete your Facebook account.
A million years ago we used to do that to our friends ICQ account.... it got to the point where he started keeping seperate list of all the skanks he was chatting up.
"It should be noted that quite how deep your deletion goes is highly questionable: does facebook still store your information even though you've destroyed your way of accessing it?"
I have no doubt that they keep your info. If nothing else, it may be helpful if law enforcement or a court came looking for info. Soft delete is generally a best practice anyway, as far as I know, and also, it is convenient for referential integrity.
Don't you think that Facebook would keep all of your information in its files, even if not publicly viewable, for its own legal protection if you tried something like that?
I'm proud to say that I mistrusted and hated facebook from the very beginning, and don't have to delete my account because I do not have one I've used for anything other than to sign in and look at pages that require one to be signed in.
That's right: I'm so hip, I knew Facebook was a horrible, horrible company which I hate before it was cool to think Facebook was evil.
I didn't. Deleted my account a few months ago, and have not looked back. My reasons were probably 40% privacy issues (I felt at the time that facebook was going the wrong direction) and 60% just to avoid the massive time sink.
