How to permanently delete Facebook account

http://www.wikihow.com/Permanently-Delete-a-Facebook-Account

by sushi • 16 years ago

134 56 16 years ago

imperator• 16 years ago

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.

sushi• 16 years ago

I have also deleted one of my facebook account which I could earlier just deactivate but never delete.

tokenadult3• 16 years ago

I keep the Facebook group

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=16929680703

"How to permanently delete your facebook account" in my Facebook profile.

I found this through a very easy Google search.

nob0dy• 16 years ago

Out of curiosity, what stuff that facebook has done recently makes you want to delete your account?

tripa• 16 years ago

Why would it have to be recent?

lambda• 16 years ago

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.

zaphar3• 16 years ago

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.

liuliu• 16 years ago

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.

eam3• 16 years ago

Doesn't myspace do this?

zaphar3• 16 years ago

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.

bobbyi• 16 years ago

People who accidentally hit that button would not be happy.

eam3• 16 years ago

Just throw in a couple of 'Are you sure you want proceed?' confirmation messages and it's set.

whereareyou• 16 years ago

One day you may really regret this

TeHCrAzY• 16 years ago

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.

guelo• 16 years ago

How to delete your HN account:

  1. You can't.
  2. ???
  3. HN is evil!

frossie• 16 years ago

Your HN account is not linked to your real identity, unless you want it to be. Many people think that's a big difference.

ivankirigin• 16 years ago

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

code_duck6• 16 years ago

Your facebook account is not linked to your real identity, either, unless you want it to be.

flipbrad• 16 years ago

it's my identity, though. real or otherwise.

cookiecaper• 16 years ago

HN is still a relatively small community. If you wanted, you could poll pg to run a query that would delete your account and see what he says.

ugh• 16 years ago

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.

groaner• 16 years ago

Even having pg nuke you from HN isn't enough. Your comments get indexed and archived all over the place: searchyc, backtype, ubervu, ridddlr, etc.

Here's a sampling of where I wound up: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Hacker+News%22+%2Bgroaner

davidmurphy• 16 years ago

4. PROFIT! (?)

apsurd• 16 years ago

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. ;)

rooshdi3• 16 years ago

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.

greyman• 16 years ago

Maybe to prevent deletion on impulse?

gojomo• 16 years ago

Or by a prankster with temporary access/credentials.

rooshdi3• 16 years ago

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.

nfnaaron• 16 years ago

The value of a network increases as the square of its nodes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfs_Law

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.

/speculation

rooshdi3• 16 years ago

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.

hussong• 16 years ago

It's probably more like n log( n ) (see: http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/metcalfes-law-is...) and your point is valid either way.

code_duck6• 16 years ago

If you delete your account, they'll have one less user. Why would they want that?

Anyway, I'm sure any deletion is a soft delete. They still keep your data so they can paw over it and sell it to people.

CaptainMorgan• 16 years ago

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.

eam3• 16 years ago

Method number 3: Violate Facebook's TOS. One instance would be to upload a nude photo of someone or for the brave souls, one of yourself.

tokenadult3• 16 years ago

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?

greenlblue• 16 years ago

I'll tell you what happened in 14 days.

Estragon• 16 years ago

I did it ages ago. Worked for me.

njn• 16 years ago

Thanks to all authors for creating a page that has been read 542,011 times.

I would like to see how Facebook's recent developments are affecting their member count.

cb18• 16 years ago

"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?"

code_duck6• 16 years ago

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.

code_duck6• 16 years ago

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.

How to permanently delete Facebook account

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