More on Facebook
A couple weeks ago, I “vented” in my Journal (May 4th) about Facebook and in general about all “social network” websites. After duly posting my article immediately below, my friend and webmaster sent me a link from a Facebook discussion group. The forum was under the title: How to permanently delete your Facebook account. (Kind of emphasizes my point, doesn’t it, that it would even be necessary to have a discussion forum dedicated to that question?) Here is the first post in that forum:
“Ever tried to leave Facebook and found out they only allow you to ‘deactivate’ your account? All your personal data, including photos, interests, friends etc will still be saved indefinitely! You don’t have to be a conspiracist to find this quite fishy (or simply annoying)!
“Maybe you see no reason to leave Facebook yet? In any case, information about how to close an account should be easily available to all members. Join this group to keep the information handy the day you appreciate your privacy more than updating long lost ‘friends’ of your life.”
And then are given instructions on exactly how to permanently delete your Facebook account...which consists of the same thing I already did, where you come to a point which tells you that your account is “deactivated,” and they hope you will come back soon. It was time-consuming enough for a Facebook rookie like me just to find out where one goes to close the account, because I prefer not to “share” (wonderful politically-correct word these days) my personal data, photos, interests, etc. with the world. (Yes, I know there are options to only share with a closed circle, etc. But that is only if you believe Facebook would never “share” your information with those outside your defined circle of friends. Really? Then please read my aforementioned Journal entry.)
As it turns out, according to a post in the forum, if you do not log back into your “deactivated” Facebook account for two weeks, then Facebook actually purges your data from their memory banks. Except that I don’t see on Facebook where it tells you that (and I am not going to spend any more time looking for it). Perhaps the forum poster discovered that when he emailed Facebook. In any event, I successfully logged back in—which was not a good sign, since it had been past two weeks since I first deactivated it—and I went through the process again of deactivating. I will check again in three or four weeks to see if my account is truly closed. Of course, it could be technically “closed,” but whether my information is actually purged and erased from Facebook’s corporate memory banks is a question which neither you nor I can ever answer. Only someone who actually works inside Facebook could tell us that. And then one would wonder: Is this person telling me the truth? Pardon my cynicism, but as liberties are fading on every side, I can’t help but being cynical and skeptical? How about you?