deleting a facebook account
Posted on Friday 5th October, 2007 by James Young | 4 comments
I signed up to Facebook a little while back, I was slightly curious to see what the site had to offer. I kept getting invites from registered friends asking me to join various groups and so on.
I did what everyone else in the world seemed to have done, I signed up
It’s taken a little while but after using the site and being the victim of dozens of stupid “vampire bites” or “jedi invites” and other crap, I decided I didn’t see much personal value in being a Facebook member.
Now, I figured that as I’m already in touch with everyone I know via email and seeing friends for booze and gigs I didn’t really need to add myself to the masses on Facebook to show off my photos, last.fm tracks and various messages on my “wall” so I decided to delete my account.
Now, surely, as with most sites when you no longer wish to be registered I thought I’d log in and simply have to click a “delete my account” type link somewhere in my control panel. Not so.
Facebook is suprisingly difficult to remove yourself from and I still don’t really know if they hold all the information I’ve added about myself and my friends over the last couple of months. They say they’ve deleted my account but I really do have my doubts.
How to permanently delete your Facebook account
You can’t delete your Facebook account yourself. They do it for you. This would be ok if you didn’t first have to manually delete all the information in the account yourself. That means deleting all your friends manually, one by one. Not too much of an issue if you’ve only got a small number of friends but I’d imagine that would get tiresome if you’ve got hundreds.
Next, you also need to delete any applications you’ve installed, along with photos, profile information and anything else. Basically, you need to create a blank account by removing absolutely everything.
Only then will Facebook delete your account (after telling you it’s best just to “deactivate” it instead of deleting) and to do this you need to contact their support team to request it.
Now, I don’t really have any issue with Facebook itself but I really don’t like thier policy on removing your account if you no longer wish to use the site.
Please, please Facebook, just make it little less hassle to remove yourself from the site. The step of making users delete all their profile information and uploads before you delete the account is surely unnecessary.
I won’t be back on the site, not because I hate it, just because I felt that I didn’t actually need the profile in the end and I’d really have appreciated not being made to feel like I was being pressured by some boiler room salesman for wanting to leave!
I probably should have included the email address in the post!
I just emailed their customer service team at info@facebook.com to ask for my account to be deleted. It takes a couple of days but they did get back to me.
James.
hi i want my faceboook account deleted- how long should it take?
I’m not sure if they have a set timescale really, I don’t think deleting your facebook account is something they wish to advertise or encourage (they seem keener on “deactivation”) but I found that it took about 4-5 days before they replied to my email request after I’d deleted all my profile information.
Hope that helps.
i would like to delete this account