| News.com.au Technology Blog
DOES Facebook make it unnecessarily hard to delete your profile?
An article on The Punch today details how difficult it has been in the past to delete your profile from the social networking site.
“I set about looking for the Delete button. Ever seen that option? I’ll save you the hassle. There isn’t one,” wrote contributor Lachlan Hardy.
In the end, Hardy was forced to delete each bit of information – such as who his friends were, who he was in a relationship with and so on – individually.
That was about 18 months ago. Since then Facebook has copped more than a few criticisms over the way it handles user data – including a report by the Privacy Commissioner of Canada that found some of its practices may be illegal – and has announced some measures to address them.
So, I figured it was time for another test with a dummy account under the name “Andy Ramadge” – complete with silly photo.
The quick version
If you’re reading this article because you want a quick way to delete your account, log in to your Facebook profile and then follow this link. It should take you straight to the “Delete my account” form.
Read on for how to get to that page within Facebook.
Deleting your profile
The first place most people would look for a delete option is on the Account Settings page. And they’d be out of luck. From there you can only deactivate your profile.
Deactivating your profile is like putting it on ice. Facebook will keep all of your information, but won’t use it or display it to anyone else. This is so you can take a break for a while and come back to it later.
However, I want to delete my profile – so that all my data is removed from Facebook’s servers.
The next thing I did was search for a help page. There’s a button called About at the bottom of each page that will take you to Facebook’s profile, where you can read product announcements and so on.
On the left-hand side, there’s a link to the Help Center (sic). It’s not particularly prominent, but it is there.
The Help Center contains links to question and answer pieces on things to do with Facebook, grouped by topic. Except there’s no topic for either deleting or deactivating your profile.
Thankfully, there’s a list of the most popular search terms on the right. The third and fourth terms, when I checked, were about deleting your profile.
Clicking on one of the relevant search terms will, finally, take you the question and answer page titled “Deactivating, Deleting, and Memorializing Accounts”.
One of the questions is “How do I permanently delete my account?” The answer will try to talk you into deactivating your account instead of deleting it, before eventually offering a link to the page you want.
The last step, a form titled “Delete my account”, is pretty simple. It gives you a warning and asks you to provide your password and fill in one of those visual word tests to make sure you’re not a robot.
And that’s it, sort of. After filling in the form, Facebook will deactivate your account immediately and schedule it for deletion in 14 days, giving you a window of time to change your mind.
“Andy Ramadge” immediately disappeared from search and other people’s news feeds.
Conclusion
Facebook certainly doesn’t make it easy to delete your account. There is no obvious link to the right form, so you have to go searching for it.
Along the way you will be bombarded left and right with information about deactivating your account instead of deleting it.
However it still only took me five minutes to find the right form and fill it out, wiping poor old “Andy Ramadge” off the social networking site for good.
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