Facebook Adds Delete Account Option 249
roseability writes "Facebook have quietly added the ability to delete you account. 'Deactivate Account', under Account Setting, has become 'Deactivate or Delete Account', and when checked it purports to permanently delete your account and all information you have shared. Facebook is actually willing to erase your data permanently? They must be counting on very few people doing so." Mixed reports on this: perhaps this is a limited test?
Re:Troll? (Score:4, Interesting)
Facebook has had a (generally difficult) way of deactivating your account for years (all along?). But their TOS say that they reserve the right to keep your data forever. TFA is implying that this may have changed and that deleting your account now may in fact remove your data from their servers. Personally I'm not holding my breath.
While I agree that TFA seems a bit speculative I don't think the OP is trolling. I think enough of us on /. have taken an interest in FB's over reaching grab on people's personal data that even speculation on it changing (esp. for the good) is newsworthy. (IMHO of course...)
is "delete" really an option? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I'm not into Facebook - yet! What am I missing? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A strange game... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes. Except that sometimes they spam you even if you've never played.
Re:Doesn't Matter (Score:4, Interesting)
When I filed for divorce, my name, my soon-to-be-ex's name, my current address, my martial status, my soon-to-be-martial-status was all made a matter of permanent public record.
Anybody can go to the state's court website and look it up, in perpetuity.
At least with Facebook, I got to consent to the privacy loss.
Re:Troll? (Score:5, Interesting)
Slashdot is a different beast, though. It wasn't started in a model that encouraged using real names/identities -- ie, using your .edu email address specifically to connect with people at your school. Registered slashdot users also tend not to be complete morons, and there is a lack of many features which morons find attractive, such as the ability to post pictures of ourselves shotgunning bear while holding a joint in one hand and an under-age girl in the other. You know, stuff like that.
A few months ago I started skunking my FB data, then removing it. Last week I deleted the account (there was a way to do it before they made it obvious). In FB's attempt to attract more users and build a "platform," they've just made it slightly less horrible than MySpace. I got phone numbers and email addresses for the friends that mattered and for whom I wasn't already in possession of the information, then just slipped away. Do you have any idea how much more time I have to waste on Slashdot again now that I don't have any competing sites?
Re:I'm not into Facebook - yet! What am I missing? (Score:4, Interesting)
I have recently signed up for facebook because my friends stopped calling and texting people and just started posting "I'll be at blah blah blah at 8pm tonight, come along". I was missing out on a lot of fun things I could possibly be doing because I didn't have an account, so now I have one.
That's the same reason I deleted mine. Kid whom sat at the same lunch table as me in 8th grade posted every single time he entered or left a restaurant or bar (kind of like a manual foursquare). I guess I could go alone, unfortunately he now lives almost 3000 miles away. Dude I worked with a decade ago posts every time he goes to the gym, for motivation, I guess. I guess I could go along, unfortunately he lives 200 miles away. Same deal with the guy who was my high school physics lab partner, now living about 100 miles away.
When I got rid of all the pseudo-spammers and ignored all my far away "old friends" there wasn't really enough left to bother keeping the account... So I used this "new" feature in May to delete it, and nobody seems to care except my wife.
Re:Troll? (Score:5, Interesting)
The Slashdot user ID was made to require people to use the same name/identity... Prior to that time, people could enter in whatever name they wanted (different for each post even), and people would often pretend to be Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds, etc. I personally think it was more interesting back then because there were flamewars between famous computing people. :^)
Re:is "delete" really an option? (Score:5, Interesting)
Positives: I got to touch base with high school friends, I got used it to organize some parties.
Negatives: I got to touch base with high school friends, It was impossible to sort though all the crap that came in, I was constantly ignoring this and that, I started unfriending people who posted too much shit to get shit from them for unfriending them. It started arguments with my family when I didn't want to friend them or I friended them and ignored them. I lost real life friends because facebook allowed me to learn more about their personalities then I ever really wanted to know. I got into real life arguments because I didn't check or respond to a facebook status.
Conclusion: I'm not 12, and if I'm not important enough to at least call on the phone, then I guess we really are not 'friends'.
Replacement options: Google Calendar for organizing parties, twitter for posting my useless comments no one cares about, and phone, email, texting for the rest.
Re:Doesn't Matter (Score:4, Interesting)
Marriages are in the public record, too. Did you complain about that when you got hitched?
Re:Uh.... Hello? Server Backups? (Score:3, Interesting)
I've done it many times, normally after they've pissed me off and caused me to waste some of my time. Tell them that an administrator is not qualified, and clicking a 'delete' button is not enough. Offsite backups deleted too.
Maybe they do and maybe they don't. There would be fun and games if they contacted me in the future.
Legal extortion is possible (Score:4, Interesting)
One of Facebook's options is to keep all the status updates and pictures for 10-20 years, then republish everything. For a "deletion fee", they will keep all your high school and college pictures, raunchy status updates, and other potentially embarrassing information off the internet. Most wouldn't care, but I'm sure there's plenty who want a high profile job that would pay dearly to keep that hidden.
AFAIK, it's completely legal, and already impossible to stop, they own the data and you (or someone you know) voluntarily published it once. It's pretty likely that they'll be replaced by the next big social media site or at least won't be doing nearly as well financially in 10-20 years as they are now, if they still exist. And if they go bankrupt, anyone could buy the data and do the same thing.
I don't think it's likely, but it is possible.
Re:Reality still wins. (Score:5, Interesting)
Thank you for the detailed opinion as to why you, personally, would have nothing to gain by deleting your own account on Slashdot.
But please realize that the fact that it's always been that way on Slashdot does not mean that it should be that way, and that others may have a different opinion than you.
I've been here a long time. There is far more personal detail about me on Slashdot than my Facebook page is likely ever to contain. Mostly, this is because I'm pseudo-anonymous here. I don't think I have enough publicly-available information on Slashdot that someone can pin my pseudonym down to who I really am, but it would doubtlessly be rather easy to do given access to Slashdot's non-public data.
Thankfully, Rob Malda, along with his handlers and peons, have over the years earned my trust that they will treat my non-public data with a reasonable amount of respect.
When the day comes that I feel like my trust has the potential to be violated, I want a button that says "Delete this account and everything associated with it," and I want it to work, at least within the confines of Slashdot. I expect this, in particular, from an organization such as Slashdot which has sometimes daily postings about privacy [slashdot.org] and abuses thereof.
I don't care if such a button is rendered somewhat meaningless [archive.org] by other web sites. I just want Slashdot to do the right thing and nuke my stuff on request, just like the editors here clearly expect everyone else to do.
Meanwhile, look down at the bottom of this very page. See the line that says Comments are owned by the Poster? That, too.
Re:Doesn't Matter (Score:5, Interesting)
If the delete option works, great. Personally, the split second another comparable service comes out that catches maybe 5 or so of my closets friends... I am gone. I probably won't delete my account, but I will purge the ever living crap out of it and leave it as a glorified address book page.
The issue with Facebook is that it has lost my trust. Facebook doesn't do what I want it to do anymore. Facebook started as a thing for college students to connect and share college studentie stuff. Now, my freaking grandmother is one Facebook. Yeah, I can sit around and fiddle with my privacy settings and make a special grandma list that I have to remember to use every time I wont to post something that she might hurt her 70 year old sensibilities, but it is a pain in the ass.
It is going to be pretty easy to get me to jump ship. Just give me a social networking site that lets me have a split personality. We naturally have split personalities. The face you present in a meeting at work is different from the one you present to your mom and different from the one you present to your friends on Friday night. Facebook absolutely sucks at making this distinction. Not only does Facebook suck at making this decision, they keep desperately trying to get you to post ALL your information to the world. The first social networking site with a clean interface and that understands that we all have split personalities is going to stand over Facebook's bloated corpse. They don't even need to destroy Facebook, just offer up something convincing enough that I will use the alternative and Facebook. A social networking site that lets me cleanly and smoothly deal with my co-workers and grandmother wanting to be 'friends' in addition to my real friends is going to have Facebooks head on a pike.