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How do I permanently delete my account?
- throwaway613834 9y agoWhy is this on the front page...? EDIT: I'm not complaining, I'm literally asking what there is that people find interesting about this link, since I feel like I must have missed it. Though feel free to keep downvoting through the floor.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- nitemice 9y agoBecause people want to highlight the ridiculousness of needing to contact support to permanently delete an online account?
- Mz 9y agoYou don't need to contact support. The "let us know" link goes to the deletion confirmation page. It is stupidly worded, perhaps intentionally so to discourage deletions, but I just did this recently.
- parallel 9y agoIf you're asking about the ranking algorithm it's described here https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
- minimaxir 9y agoIn addition to what everyone else says, it is currently a national holiday in the US and there are relatively few submissions being posted now, so new submissions can rise much easier.
- 1001101 9y agoI'm waiting for the next time I'm in the EU to get the 'deluxe clean.'
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- quickthrower2 9y agoDo you need to be an EU resident, citizen or just on holiday?
- andkenneth 9y agoGDPR will cover anyone in the EU. Doesn't cover citizens outside of the EU, and does cover visitors to the EU while they are there. EDIT: But it's also likely that they will enable the protections for everyone in the world, because the risk of accidental non compliance is huge. Similar to how the cookie notification is just displayed everywhere now.
- hellofunk 9y agoActually, my experience in Europe is that some organizations only remove data that is visible by others on the same continent or even just a single country in the EU, while allowing that content to remain visible outside the EU.
- busterarm 9y agoCouldn't you just spin up a VPN on a cloud service within the EU and log in through that to get your free, deluxe clean?
- fragsworth 9y agoI did not know they really had this as an option. I'm glad to hear it's available. I'd like to know how thorough they are with deleting you, however. With stories of "ghost" profiles that they build on individuals who don't have accounts (and/or are not logged in), I would be surprised if they actually delete everything they know about you.
- cVwEq 9y agoHard to say what data they still retain and for how long. However, the sooner you delete your FB account, the less data FB is likely to have on you in 5 or 10 years, assuming data retention periods, etc. I found the process easy to complete using the directions in the link. It was quite liberating to have my account deleted, actually. Don't miss it at all, although it left some friends and my mom scratching their heads.
- roy3jake 9y agoI'm really glad they allow you to do this
- HoochTHX 9y agoThe option is a lie, I did this the fall after the Snowden releases, and then this past summer decided to see if the delete actually happened after the two week period that was part of that process then, everything from my account was still there, nothing was deleted.
- erebus_rex 9y agofwiw I did this and it worked for me. It can take more than two weeks and if you login the process is interrupted. A good bet is to ask your friends when your messages appear as "facebook user". After that my login didn't work anymore.
- 0xcde4c3db 9y agoMost of the big services whose stuff I've actually read have a clause somewhere in the ToS or privacy policy saying that "deleted" data is not necessarily deleted from all copies in their possession. I suspect the primary purpose of this is to allow them to have append-only or offline backups, since that's incompatible with users being able to reach in and nuke all their stuff.
- andkenneth 9y agoThe GDPR is a huge deal and absolutely no joke. This is part of the compliance for that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula... It has the potential to completely change the way tech giants are able to provide their services. Each "purpose" that data is collected for must be individually consented, and it's prohibited for purposes to be withheld if others are not consented to. This allows a user to allow the purposes that are a cost on the company, and deny those that are revenue earners. Will be very interesting to see how these heavily data based companies adapt.
- an_account 9y agoI assume that companies can deny services that cost them money if you don’t consent to services that create revenue. Is this true?
- andkenneth 9y agoNo it's not true. That's exactly why this is so interesting and potentially devastating.
- dannyw 9y agoNo, the EU doesn’t mess around. I don’t see any provisions in the GDPR allowing companies to do that. I guess companies can charge money for services that cost them money, and give you money if you enable certain services.
- Terribledactyl 9y agoGDPR doesn't need to reenumerate this. Selling service above cost is already allowed.
- dannyw 9y agoI mean as, want to use Messenger? That's $20 a month. Want to let us monetise your messages for ads? We'll pay you $20 a month. Of course, I don't see Facebook actually doing this, but just food for thought.
- alexforster 9y agoThere's a one-click page to permanently delete your Facebook account here: https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account
- doug3465 9y agoYeah, and it's linked. I guess they make it all shady with "let us know" to discourage clicks on it.
- bcook 9y agoLast I checked, this doesn't permanently delete your account. You can still return with the same email and have all your old contacts (and post history, etc?).
- actuallyalys 9y agoIf I remember correctly, this option does delete your account[0], but not right away. If you change your mind and log in within the grace period, it stops it from being deleted. [0] At least to all appearances. Of course, Facebook could secretly be keeping it, as is discussed elsewhere in this thread.
- justhw 9y agoHow do we really know that this is actual deletion and not a deleted="true" in their databases? > It is inaccessible to other people using Facebook. The wording does sound very convincing but I really don't think we can just believe their word. After all it's Facebook.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- onion2k 9y agoHow do we really know that this is actual deletion and not a deleted="true" in their databases? We don't know that. If you're feeling charitable you could believe they're being honest, but if you not then you just have to wonder. There is no way Facebook could prove they don't have a secret server with your data on it somewhere. Proving that would be impossible.
- catmanjan 9y agoThey could be explicit about exactly what they do with the data - that way there is some PR risk to them if they get caught out "recycle binning" data.
- whack 9y agoThe first related article implies pretty strongly that they will delete most of your data from their storage, and even backup storage. It may take up to 90 days to delete data stored in backup systems. Your info isn't accessible on Facebook during this time. Copies of some material (example: log records) may remain in our database but are disassociated from personal identifiers.
- gerhardi 9y agoIt’s the regulation. I work on EU GDPR tech stuff currently (this stuff is HOT at the moment and I have a feeling that even many large companies are quite late on the train!) in financial services sector and while some data needs to be kept for x years according to the law anyway, rest really needs to be deleted and at least my current client really doesn’t want to play with the financial risks involved with getting caught in a possible EU GDPR compliance audit.
- m6g6a 9y agoWay much easier: https://m.facebook.com/account/delete https://m.facebook.com/account/delete
- sincerely 9y agosomewhat related - if anyone else is still using the browser version of Facebook on their mobile phones (m.facebook.com) instead of downloading the app, it doesn't let you view messages and gives you an unskippable prompt to download Messenger, but this restriction is not there if you use the mobile basic interface (which also uses less data! mbasic.facebook.com)
- remarkEon 9y ago>Some of the things you do on Facebook aren’t stored in your account. For example, a friend may still have messages from you even after you delete your account. That information remains after you delete your account. Why? What possible purpose does this serve?
- TAForObvReasons 9y agoIt's pretty obvious: A message between two people exists as two separate units in two separate locations. Deleting the account deletes only one copy, namely the copy that exists on your end. The digital analogue is a text message -- deleting the text message locally, say by physically destroying your phone, doesn't actually erase the message on the other side.
- dannyw 9y agoI’d be very surprised if Facebook is wasting half of their messages DCs by storing each message twice, instead of deduplicating them.
- actuallyalys 9y agoIt's probably not literally true that Facebook stores two copies of each message (or three or more copies for group chats), but it makes sense for Facebook to act like it does because that's how email and text messages work.
- remarkEon 9y agoSee my above comment. I don’t see how Facebook can reconcile deleting your comments on things like statuses and preserving messages in the Messenger app. Maybe that just means they aren’t actually deleting your comments.
- saagarjha 9y agoI’m all for the ability to delete Facebook accounts, but I think that once you’ve willfully shared a message with someone, deleting your account shouldn’t delete your messages. Chats feel like “shared” ownership of the messages in them.
- internalfx 9y agoGo back in time and stop yourself from ever creating it.
- martin1975 9y agoRMS, is that you?
- afro88 9y agoThey suggest downloading a copy of your data first. How does one do that?
- krtkush 9y agoIt's a link. It takes you to the page which explains how to do that.
- toomanybeersies 9y agoYou do it from settings, from the main settings page. I just did it myself, it's quite terrifying how much data they have on me. I also discovered that all my contacts from my phone have been synced to Facebook, despite my trying to avoid that.
- RRRA 9y agoBest thing I ever did...
- nodesocket 9y agoWhy if you request your account deleted can you not create a new account at a later time? This might sound a little over the top and conspiracy theorist, but this is all part of Facebook's and rain man Zuckerberg's psychological warfare. Facebook hires people who work in the gambling industry to make their product more addictive. Zuckerberg is playing us all. Facebook is a major (if not number one) contributing factor to the polarization, narcissism, depression, constant outrage (both sides), and dividing of the US and frankly world.
- not-sbrin 9y agoNot to beat this horse to death, but was reflecting on the same earlier today: https://segahmeer.com/post/stepping-out-of-sergey-brin-shadow-thanksgiving-reflections/ https://segahmeer.com/post/stepping-out-of-sergey-brin-shado...
- schlock509 9y agoThank you for sharing. must have been hard to write it.
- ninkendo 9y agoI “deleted” my account years ago using this link (back in 2014), came back last year and found that it was never really deleted. I happened to click “login” when I realized my password manager was still filling in my password (to be expected), and it logged me in just fine, same profile page... it was as if I never clicked delete. I deleted it again, and it finally “took” this time, but I have no idea what happened before. My best guess is that iOS was still logged into it through its facebook integration and that counted me as having logged in before the grace period expired. Either way it left a really bad taste in my mouth. (I was a facebook user in 2005 and kinda stopped using it around the time they stopped letting you have your “news feed” just be a simple time-sorted list of your friends’ posts. Neither of my attempts to delete my account were any kind of statement — the site was just boring to me and I never found myself posting much.)
- zuppy 9y agoThere are 2 different actions: one that deactivates your account and one that actually deletes it. You've probably used the deactivate functionality, because the other one needs more digging in order to find it.
- grumpopotamus 9y agoI went through all the steps to "permanently" delete my account in 2010, did not log in for 4 years, then tried to see what would happen, and my account and all its data was fully restored.
- Antrikshy 9y agoThat was in 2010. As someone pointed out, this is likely meant to comply with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula... The law goes into effect in May 2018.
- a254613e 9y agoIt's kinda ironic that all the people here are complaining that facebook might not actually really delete literally every single bit of information that you have, while hacker news doesn't allow you to edit your comments, delete them, or delete your profile. This sort of functionality should exist on every platform that even has accounts. Does anyone know if GDPR (or similar law in the future) will actually force HN and other sites that don't have this feature, to remove accounts, at least EU ones, upon request?
- tscs37 9y agoThe GDPR does force anyone who stores user data to delete it upon request. However, IIRC, there is not much of a requirement of having a dedicated form of it. An email is sufficient notification you want this to happen (and you're of course free to ensure the user's identity). After that they have to delete all data and take note of the deleted datasets so in case of a backup recovery the data will stay deleted.
- vidyesh 9y agoI understand your sentiment but I don't think deleting comments would make sites like these (community driven) appealing. Missing comments creates a big hole to a comment train, look at reddit. Missing/Deleted comments make the whole comment tree below it quite meaningless. HN would invite a lot of trolls with this an would make it really difficult to create a submission archive that makes sense. Now I don't know how it handles account deletion but reddit handles that well, a deleted account will retain its comments without a name if the user hasn't deleted all their comments. That makes sense and works well.
- hnlmorg 9y agoDeleted accounts could retain the comments but anonymise the accounts. Also I don't think having the ability to delete your profile invites trolls. Usually one deletes their account because they post something wrong but which they genuinely believe is true then get downvoted and / or trolled into oblivion. These people we should probably be working to retain because while they might have been wrong, their contribution did improve the content on the site due to the corrections that followed. However sometimes the negative rep and / or harshness of the replies can make the corrections a bitter pill to swallow. So I think there should be a downvote cap for incorrect posts (or even disallowing downvoting for all but rudeness and spam) and working harder on improving forum etiquette.
- otempomores 9y agoRip cable and socket out of the wall? Anytime there is a Facebook share icon on the web your unnamed ghost account is on Facebook.
- yotamoron 9y agoI deleted my fb account more then 2 years ago. Quality of life went up 10x. I highly recommend it, fb's value is hugely overrated.
- toomanybeersies 9y agoYour quality of life must have been rather low for it to go up 10x by deleting facebook.
- kevindeasis 9y agoI think what's also interesting is that some sites/apps have purposely made their UI/UX flow for account deletion very frustrating for the user. They do this to lower the probability of user completing account deletion
- justboxing 9y agoNot defending facebook, but almost every social site these days, and even SaaS applications, make it impossible to DELETE your account out of their systems. Unless laws are passed in the US to force their hand, this sort of behaviour will continue. Anything and everything you post on the internet, is FOREVER. Because chances are some dev somewhere has simply flipped an IsDeleted bit to true / 1 in the site's database :)
- cel1ne 9y agoThe GDPR law in the EU allow us-companies to be fined: https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2007530-how-the-eu-can-fine-us-companies-for-violating-gdpr https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2007530-how-the-eu-ca...
- whyagaindavid 9y agoSad that Apple does not allow you to delete your account. Even Facebook does? PS; if you think I am wrong post a direct link how to delete within Apple's domain. Trust me it does not exist.
- m6g6a 9y agoActually there’s some security reasons why. An iCloud id have muliple purposes in the Apple ecosystem. You can use it like an e-mail address or caller/messaging contact id. Now imagine if they will free up your username and later someone else will register it. Or worst, you used that e-mail address to register in some other services.
- whyagaindavid 9y agoWell they need not release the Apple-id to others.
- hartleybrody 9y agoWell then some record of it existing must be stored.
- piyush_soni 9y ago90 days to delete my data? Is a real person going to every server and manually changing the bits that store it? :) ... I wonder if this is an artificially inflated time period, just like the 'Unsubscribe' feature from unsolicited emails that tell you it might take "7 to 10 days" to unsubscribe your email address, when it should take less than a second.
- ehsankia 9y agoMaybe they have different tiers of backup systems, and manually trying to go in there and deleting one person's data on demand can be "expensive", so they do it in batches. You're only guaranteed to be fully wiped off after a certain amount of time.
- dredmorbius 9y agoSome years back working with another social service, a major issue was cached data through third-party providers (think Akamai, Limelight, Cloudflare, etc.). These are systems 1) outside the primary service's immediate control and 2) with their own data-retention policies and 3) data management tools. Someone I knew was tasked with removing large quantities of image data that had proved inopportune. There was limited support for doing this, though a method was developed. My understanding is that the caching service provider hadn't had to deal with such matters at that scale previously, though this information is incomplete. I strongly suspect that this is more frequently encountered now. I'm not excusing Facebook (and generally avoid doing so), but one of the interesting things about scale is, well, its sheer scale, and what seem like simple operations become complex.
- surrey-fringe 9y agoEver since deleting facebook I've felt so much ___. It's only once I quit the site I was able to take a long hard look at my perception of ____ and realized that everyone else does ____ while I should do _____. I realized that I'm actually ____, not ____. I started handling my _____ relationships in a healthier, more ____ manner.
- Zhyl 9y agoQ: How do you know if someone on Hackernews doesn't have a Facebook account? A: They'll tell you.