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The situation is quite interesting here. - Imagine, you're living outside of USA/UK/Europe. - Formally, it's possible to proceed with "Permanently delete my a

• c8g 5y ago
  probably you were in a hurry or distressed and didn't read the text while deleting the account and probably, you have disabled your account. They will offer an option to disable account in case you change your mind later. Please stop spreading misinformation.
  • swamp-agr 5y ago
    Disagree. - I explicitly check to avoid any "disabling". - The only intent was to permanently delete the account. - You can believe me or not and I did it really careful.
    • iforgetti 5y ago
      Move to a European country and Sue there for GDPR violation.
      • sbarre 5y ago
        Yes that sounds entirely reasonable and practical.
      • OneTimePetes 5y ago
        Couldnt you transfer your account temporary?
      • swamp-agr 5y ago
        I am in the middle of exactly that process!
        • puglr 5y ago
          What are the actual remedies available to you in your jurisdiction? Which one(s) are you pursuing?
      • flipbrad 5y ago
        You don't need to live in the EU/EEA to invoke GDPR rights. Case in point: the UK authority upheld a US resident's GDPR claim against Cambridge Analytica (and yes, Facebook was involved). https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/news-and-events/news-and-blogs/2018/05/ico-serves-enforcement-notice-on-scl-elections-ltd/ https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/news-and-events/news-and-bl...
        • cutler 5y ago
          Pre- or post-Brexit?
          • OJFord 5y ago
            Why would that matter? Here are the changes: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/969514/20201102_-_GDPR_-__MASTER__Keeling_Schedule__with_changes_highlighted__V4.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... Afaik it's entirely administrative, e.g.: > ~~an adequacy decision by the Commission~~ relevant adequacy regulations under section 17A of the 2018 Act ('the Commission' being the European Commission, and no longer relevant.)
  • itomato 5y ago
    "disabling" until later is the opposite of immediate deletion. Please stop spreading disinformation.
    • c8g 5y ago
      Even your computer has delete and cancel button. Isn't the cancel button opposite of immediate deletion when I am explicitly trying to delete file. Hope you can understand and don't mock others.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• j2bax 5y ago
  //Imagine, you're living outside of USA/UK/Europe. Are you saying that Facebook doesn’t enable full account delete outside of countries that require it by law?
  • IlPeach 5y ago
    Would you be surprised?
  • swamp-agr 5y ago
    I don't know - whether they partially disable functions on purpose - or there are region-dependant backend code errors.
  • Nextgrid 5y ago
    There's no reason to believe it's a "full" account delete even in the countries covered by the GDPR considering they brazenly breach the GDPR with their "consent" flow.
    • nobody9999 5y ago
      >There's no reason to believe it's a "full" account delete even in the countries covered by the GDPR considering they brazenly breach the GDPR with their "consent" flow. Given FB's business model, and the fact that they create "shadow" profiles for folks who don't even have FB accounts, I have no doubt that while their UI might pretend that your account has been "deleted", all the data still exists for their use. Which is why, when I left Facebook in 2014, rather than attempting to delete or disable the account, I posted a goodbye to those on FB that I cared about and explained exactly why I was leaving (their predatory and invasive business model). I then logged out and haven't returned. I did this because I figured that any activity on their platform would be logged and stored with everything else they'd already collected. And that was seven years ago. Given what we've seen from them since then, it's pretty clear that I was right. Just go away and don't look back. Otherwise you'll just give them more data.
      • cratermoon 5y ago
• rjzzleep 5y ago
  There is, you basically spend a year rewriting your profile step by step with garbage data. Then delete the garbage posts and replace them with other stuff. It's long and it takes effort. I assume that when you do it all at once they will just disable you and keep the old snapshot in their facebook graph.
  • davidjytang 5y ago
    I tried to download my Facebook data once and found that it had all my ancient and deleted posts, ancient relationship status, ancient cities of dwelling, etc. Anyway how would filling in garbage help in deleting Facebook account?
    • _0ffh 5y ago
      I think the idea is to seed mistrust in the data because there is no way to distinguish between the genuine and the fake data you put on your account. So the fake data makes the genuine practically useless.
      • everybodyknows 5y ago
        Exactly. Taking it to the next level, leave your own tracking info in the fakery, e.g. "favorite vacation: France". Then if someone cold-spams you with tickets to Paris, you'll know why.
• classified 5y ago
  They lie about everything else, why would this be different?
  • sgregnt 5y ago
    How this exageration contributes to a discussion here? It is very popular now to bash facebook. This kind of herd conformism and unsubstantiated claims are harming hacker news community in my humble opinion. If you do not bring new evidence or ideas, please refrain from exaggerated accusations.
    • demygale 5y ago
      All discussions about Facebook must include a reminder that they lie about everything. Pretending that they are trustworthy or reliable is disingenuous. Truths about Facebook’s lying can’t be repeated enough.
    • hetspookjee 5y ago
      Ah please. It can easily be found in the record that almost every statement made by Facebook is a lie or not truthful. Just one influential for me is the promise not to do anything with WhatsApp and Facebook. Incredibly naive at the time to approve that acquisition on the pinky swear they’d hold their word. At this stage I’m astounded by any official taking the word of Facebook. Their incentives to spin are insurmountable.
• Le_Dook 5y ago
  I live in Ireland. A while after GDPR came into effect, I went about deleted a Microsoft account I didn't use anymore. Deleted it on the site, contacted support to request all data be wiped. Done. About 3 years later I get an email that it was accessed and they disabled it for illegal activity. Deleted it in the site, contacted support to request all data be wiped. Honestly think it's more worthwhile to just change the account info to garbage and leave it
  • swamp-agr 5y ago
    You cannot be quite sure - that someone who takes over your "garbage" account - could fake someone else (on your behalf) - with a traces on corporate servers that will lead authorities to you in the future. It might be highly unlikely to happen, though.
    • hardlianotion 5y ago
      One way to leave is to garbage the account, then put a max size password on it, generated randomly. Then forget about the whole thing. Maybe that is safe enough?
      • epicide 5y ago
        Until they actually delete the data, there's a way for someone other than you to get to it. It could require a terrible password reset feature or a breach, but the data is still there.
  • OJFord 5y ago
    I live in the UK, I tried to delete my PayPal account (that I never wanted to create, it came out of what I thought was a 'guest checkout' flow) and was repeatedly told I needed to provide PII that they didn't currently have in order to 'verify' my identity so they could delete it.
    • Svperstar 5y ago
      I got locked out of my PayPal, after 5 years of inactivity PayPal finally deleted the account themselves.
• winternett 5y ago
  Nobody seems to remember the time back when FaceBook forced everyone on the platform to use their real name... It was exactly the point their plan to gather data matured I believe. This is also why many sites and apps offer verification programs as well in my understanding... Verifying a user's ID has been a practices for ages now, but it did nothing to stop the growth of disinformation because that's not what verification was for IMO. An unregulated private company asking you for official government documentation and your real name is definitely tracking you in my opinion. Even friends commenting with your name and family associations/connections on your account can easily ID everyone. They are not a government agency with the authority to ask people for government ID, but somehow they convinced everyone to use their real name, and it didn't stop the decay of conduct decorum on the platform, it only served to track information more accurately. Even people who have never registered for FB are indexed by them based on tagged photos and in posts that others have made about them using their names. They also track people based on interactions across other apps entirely not associated with FB... That's IMO why certain sites slowed and faulted mysteriously when their domain went offline. I am willing to bet that they have a really interesting splunk (or similar tech) dashboard they can look at and search any time they want full of analytics based on almost every human on earth. Account privacy settings have always been a very ambiguous "shell game" with FB and other social apps, and often do not work properly, what makes anyone think a "delete account" request would ever be honored by such a company that manipulates it's user base? I also suspect that each of the major social platforms do the same type of info gathering to varying extents as well. This is some serious "James Bond island cave villain" stuff, and whatever congressional action comes next (if anything does) may tell us where the future is going for our privacy and personal info rights... :|
  • xadhominemx 5y ago
    > An unregulated private company asking you for official government documentation and your real name is definitely tracking you in my opinion. This is nothing unusual? It’s extremely common for a private company to request identify verification
    • winternett 5y ago
• raverbashing 5y ago
  Maybe a better idea would be to actively go against the Terms of Service for FB and obfuscate the data in your account - Remove all photos and replace them with other images (nothing illegal) - Change all data relating to your person - Create several posts with unrelated data - Like as many pages as you possibly can
  • a_imho 5y ago
    Exactly. Deleting is giving up control over your account.
• e12e 5y ago
  > Imagine, you're living outside of USA/UK/Europe. Technically, with GDPR you only need to visit the EU to delete your account... So I suppose one might a vacation out of deleting Facebook, LinkedIn etc accounts?
• cratermoon 5y ago
  The problem is that fundamentally, to Facebook, a user's login account is a separate thing from the user's profile. You can delete your account, and with a straight face Facebook can assert you've deleted it. But your profile, the mass of data and content that you put on Facebook with your account, and all the data associated with it through their social graph and algorithms, that never gets deleted. In a very real sense, "you" still exist in Facebook. That's why when, weeks, months, or years later, when you login, Facebook recognizes you. You create a new "account", and Facebook very conveniently associates everything it knows about you (which it never forgot) with your new account.
  • fakedang 5y ago
    I tested this quite recently actually. I typed my Facebook password to login with all sorts of mistakes, although the core part of it remains the same, with some minor changes (all caps, a capital letter, an extra character, etc). In all cases the passwords were accepted. Which leads me to think that Facebook passwords might just be stored as searchable text rather than hashes. Granted I'm no cryptography expert though.
    • Nilithus 5y ago
      This was talked about in another HN thread a few years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13426544 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13426544 It's not stored in searchable text rather they simply have some heuristics that they modify the password submitted and retry automatically.
      • cratermoon 5y ago
        Yikes.
      • fakedang 5y ago
        Thanks. That's a very interesting approach by them.
• trutannus 5y ago
  This is a bit hyperbolic, and a little unbelievable. Is it possible that you experienced a bug in Facebook? Or that someone else had access to your account, which prevented the deletion? You've essentially asserted that you've caught Facebook lying about the account deletion process, while not showing us any proof outside of your comment. Not located in US/UK/Europe, however my deleted account is fully deleted. Can't even 'reset' the password on it since there's no email found when I try to use the reset. I don't like Facebook, but I don't think there's a point in getting riled up by one person's comment on HackerNews. It reminds me of the thread where someone was claiming they were under surveillance for using ProtonMail.
  • swamp-agr 5y ago
    Yes, it is possible that I experienced a bug at least three times (2010, 2014 and 2020), certainly. It might be the case, sure. Last email (as of today) about permanent deletion was one year ago. During next year I will give it another try: log in and come back to you, then.
    • trutannus 5y ago
      No need to get hostile. You've made an unsubstantiated claim, I'm asking for some proof of which there's still none. Remember, I tried the exact same test with the login as you, and couldn't reproduce. Like I said, there's a number of reasonable reasons why your account didn't get deleted, all of them pass the Occam's Razor test a little better than "Facebook just didn't delete my account/is not deleting accounts in secret". You're making a statement which, if true, is huge -- that Facebook is secretly retaining accounts after deletion, despite multiple credible sources (IE: TIME) running detailed articles to the contrary. On top of that your anecdotal evidence is contradicted by my anecdotal evidence. So I hope you understand if I don't take this at face-value.
• kelnos 5y ago
  I do wonder if manually deleting everything: every post, every photo, every comment, every interaction, will actually delete things behind the scenes, or if FB keeps everything regardless.