Facebook is changing their tune to avoid another “Beacon” fiasco:
On Monday, Facebook modified its help pages to tell people that if they wanted to remove their accounts entirely, they could e-mail the company to have it done. But on Tuesday, representatives of Facebook stopped short of saying the company would introduce a one-step delete account option.
“We’re always working to improve the user experience,” Katie Geminder, director of user experience and design at Facebook, said in an e-mail.
“We are measuring the effects of the change we made yesterday, and if we think more needs to be done to improve the user experience for deleting an account, we’ll test different implementations and measure them accordingly,” she added.
The updated Facebook help page now includes the question, “How do I delete my account?” The answer reads, “If you do not think you will use Facebook again and would like your account deleted, we can take care of this for you. Keep in mind that you will not be able to reactivate your account or retrieve any of the content or information you have added.”
The entry then says, “If you would like your account deleted, please contact us using the form at the bottom of the page and confirm your request in the text box.”
Geminder said Facebook’s policies reflected the fact that many people came back to Facebook after they had stopped using the site for a period of time. “On any given day, the number of users reactivating their accounts is roughly half of the number of users deactivating their accounts,” she said.
Feel free to let us know how it goes: tips@consumerist.com.
Facebook tries to help users delete accounts [Seatlle P-I]
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As big of a database as it is, with as many tables it probably is, deleting is probably a bitch. All kinds of links to information
@Bladefist: True, but I can’t imagine that its built on anything other than a database system at the bottom. A cascade delete would work so long as you had appropriate blocks to prevent it to bleeding into another account.
“On any given day, the number of users reactivating their accounts is roughly half of the number of users deactivating their accounts,”
Maybe they should provide both an option for deactivation and deletion?
Say: “Would you like to delete or deactivate your account? If you delete your account, everything will be permanently removed. However, if you deactivate your account, we will save all of the content for you indefinitely, should you choose to reactivate in the furture.”
Sounds like its not terribly difficult to me.
that would be one hell of a delete statememt…
I’ve always wanted to know how incompetents manage to run successful technological ventures like websites.
It’s not hard to take the content of an account and back it up in case the user wants to restore it later. Or — even better — let them do that and store it themselves. I’m sure you could easily fit the whole unique content of a Facebook page in a tiny fraction of the space you get from a GMail account.
The point is to take a user’s online presence offline when they ask.
I love these kids that start these overnight-success websites who went to technology schools and yet they are operated like no one working for them knows how to use a computer. Did these guys ever actually attend any of the classes at the school on their sweatshirts?
I was able to (quite easily) delete my account entirely a couple days ago by deleting everything on my account and then sending a brief, polite email asking them to completely delete my data and explaining why I would like them to do so. They were very quick and polite in their reply and deleted everything immediately.
@Tux the Penguin: I agree. I just wonder if its more difficult because they started out as a college social networking site. It has quickly emerged into this giant beast. I guess it depends on how far they planned out, if they designed it to infinitely grow, or if their code and db is just an absolute cluster f__k. Being its worth katrillions, i would hope its a clean enterprise system in which your recommendation would work.
Asking politely usually helps in any situation.
@krom: Have you ever, you know, USED facebook? Speaking as a programmer, user interface designer, and an internet-using human being, facebook is an excellent site, operating on what must be a brilliant back-end.
Furthermore, they already did take users’ presence offline when asked. People were getting annoyed because they had no way to *permanently* delete their accounts. What is it with the snarky comments on topics that people aren’t even familiar with?
So will they really REALLY delete it, or just make it unavailable?
WHO DO WE EMAIL!?
@CapitalC: I think I emailed security@facebook.com and a very nice customer service guy named Doug helped me with everything. I have no idea if they REALLY deleted everything, but there isn’t a trace of me on their website at all.
@Tux the Penguin: Knowing a thing or two about databases, I’m sure they CAN delete everything, but would they? By the time you ask them your data has probably already been sent to a data warehouse somewhere. A compromise might be if they “anonymized” your data instead of completely deleting it. They could strip off your personal and contact information and still do all the analysis they like based on your networks, groups, interests, etc.