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Facebook doesn't want you to deactivate your account.
- RossM 17y agoThat's a really good way of empathising with your users. I've seen "sitename will miss you!" type messages, getting social connections involved would be a hell of a lot more persuasive.
- erlanger 17y agoThat is, unless your Facebook "friends" are actual friends with whom you have many channels of communication...it just seems tacky and manipulative to me.
- zimbabwe 17y agoManipulative? Yes. Tacky? No. They're reminding you that you have friends on Facebook. Tacky would be them telling your friends to convince you not to abandon your account.
- erlanger 17y agoIt's tacky because the psychology they're attempting is disingenuous. It attempts to form an association between their self-serving message and your friends' pictures.
- zimbabwe 17y agoBut your friends all use their service too. What's to say Facebook doesn't have a good reason to remind you of them?
- zaidf 17y agoClaiming "_______ will miss you" is not always a safe assumption...and at worst is a lie:)
- Eliezer 17y agoEvil with style.
- zimbabwe 17y agoConnecting people and trying to sell them things they might like is hardly evil.
- grinich 17y agoBusiness with style.
- Radix 17y agoI'm curious, what about this do you find evil?
- Eliezer 17y agoImagine the following more dramatic version: "If you deactivate your account, we'll kill this kitten." Same essential principle. If you want a detailed ethical analysis, it would have something to do with saying that your friends will miss you, as though they're asking you to stay, when they said no such thing.
- zimbabwe 17y ago"If you deactivate your account, we'll kill this kitten." Actively threatening a life. "Your friends will no longer be able to keep in touch with you." Suggesting there might be passive harm caused directly by a user's action. Yeah, those two are ethically correlated.
- LargeWu 17y agoOf course they don't want you to deactivate your account. It's their business to try to retain their members/customers, just like every other company in the world. Now if they are pretending to deactivate your account but leaving it accessible to others, or other shenanigans, then we've something to talk about. But this? Big deal.
- pc 17y agoNo-one's suggesting they're doing anything untoward. Just that what they're doing is interesting.
- ben 17y agoI refreshed the deactivate page, and it doesn't seem to be completely random, but it also isn't 100% the same every time. It seems to pick between the same 20 or so friends for me. Another thing that's interesting is that the deactivate option is exactly where it should be, rather than buried many levels deep in menus. I tried to remove my classmates.com account the other day, and it was a mess.
- chris11 17y agoNot only is it their business to retain customers, I think they are also trying to retain your personal data. I don't really know what their business plan will be, but I'm sure it won't involve normal users paying any money. So they have to make money off of me somehow, whether it is through targeted advertising or selling information to marketers. The current privacy policy allows them to give information from your profile to third parties as long as you cannot be personally identified. So while I'm not saying they will do anything unethical, an inactive account is probably worth a lot more than a deactivated account.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- tlrobinson 17y agoI wonder if it wasn't a coincidence that all the people who Facebook says will miss him are girls (well, and one restaurant)
- collision 17y agoAnd "cucina" is a feminine noun, right?
- randomwalker 17y agoFacebook is probably using an algorithm that picks from among the friends that the user has interacted the most with. At least that's what I would do if I were implementing it. They already use such an algorithm internally to detect if your account is compromised (i.e., if the set of friends with whom you communicate changes sharply at some point.) Given that Facebook might be doing this, it is likely that the top few friends would be of the opposite gender, in a heteronormative context. This intuitive expectation has been confirmed in research studies of social networks. e.g., http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jure/pubs/msn-www08.pdf http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jure/pubs/msn-www08.pdf ("people tend to converse more frequently and with longer durations with the opposite gender"). Perhaps pc can confirm/refute whether this is true in his case?
- tlrobinson 17y agoWe can try it ourselves. Just log in and go to http://www.facebook.com/deactivate.php http://www.facebook.com/deactivate.php The 5 that show up for me are people I recently friended (unfortunately all dudes)
- zimbabwe 17y agoIt appears to be completely random. I got entirely different selections on two separate clicks.
- treyp 17y agoRandom selection of people I've been in pictures with. edit: they've tagged me in their photo, or i've tagged them in mine. age of picture is all over the place, so not just recent ones.
- marcusbooster 17y agoIt bothers me that they won't let you actually delete your account.
- tokenadult 17y agoThis URL may only be visible to Facebook users, but please let me know if this helps. http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=16929680703&ref=share http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=16929680703&...
- michaelawill 17y agoThis is the first link on google for "delete facebook account" It works. They deactivate your account for 2 weeks and then permanently delete it. Worked for me.
- ersi 17y agoThey don't let you actually delete your own account, but giving them a "written slip" via e-mail works - they'll remove your account. I'm not sure to what degree they remove stuff though. I think your profile is removed and your tags/links are void. I've got friends who've mailed to support@facebook.com and gotten their accounts removed following. I'd be interested to hear if other people have had similar encounters.
- d64 17y agoI once tried to remove my Facebook account. I found a form (via Google) for this purpose and filled it out. However I got an error reply via email which looked like the email sent by the SMTP form was not being accepted by some Facebook server. I complained of this via support, and within one day they removed my account.
- spaghetti 17y agoI had my account "deleted" over two years ago. I went through the email back and forth with the customer service representative who confirmed my acount was deleted. Unfortunately I just received a legitimate friend request from a college friend. Looks like it wasn't deleted after all.
- zimbabwe 17y agoYou can send friend requests directly to email addresses. My middle school brother just found me on Facebook that way.
- michaelfairley 17y agoI just tried this, and for me at went as far as selecting pictures that have both me and the other person in them. Really trying hard for that personal touch.
- GavinB 17y agoYou can't see the small print on the deactivation screen in the photo, but here it is: Note: Even after you deactivate, your friends can still invite you to events, tag you in photos, or ask you to join groups. If you opt out, you will NOT receive these email invitations and notifications from your friends. It's a bit unclear in what sense your account is actually deactivated.
- fuzzmeister 17y agoWorld of Warcraft does something similar: http://img17.imageshack.us/img17/6985/wowcancel.jpg http://img17.imageshack.us/img17/6985/wowcancel.jpg
- jamesbritt 17y agoI accidentally "disappeared" my first FB account by creating a new account and unwittingly using the same email address as the existing one. No warning, nothing. But I could no longer sign into the first account. When I realized what had happened, I went looking for signs of the that first account. I had been the sole admin of a group; now, that group listed no admin at all; I seized admin rights with my new account. So perhaps that's the best way to deactivate: exploit bad code.