Jonathan Rogers

Article from the NY Times that talks about how hard it is to try and quit Facebook.

Many social sites like MySpace or Friendster make you go through hoops, like multiple confirmation pages before letting you quit. But when you quit, all your info is deleted. On Facebook, when you quit, they still store your information. They say this is make it available quickly if you decide to change your mind and rejoin.

Privacy experts are concerned because people who search for you can still find your info too often.

While the Web site offers users the option to deactivate their accounts, Facebook servers keep copies of the information in those accounts indefinitely. Indeed, many users who have contacted Facebook to request that their accounts be deleted have not succeeded in erasing their records from the network.

Facebook’s Web site does not inform departing users that they must delete information from their account in order to close it fully — meaning that they may unwittingly leave anything from e-mail addresses to credit card numbers sitting on Facebook servers.

It seems like the only way to really get rid of your information is to manually go through your account and delete everything, then cancel. And you should probably still follow up with a phone call.

Facebook’s Web site does not inform departing users that they must delete information from their account in order to close it fully — meaning that they may unwittingly leave anything from e-mail addresses to credit card numbers sitting on Facebook servers.

Only people who contact Facebook’s customer service department are informed that they must painstakingly delete, line by line, all of the profile information, “wall” messages and group memberships they may have created within Facebook.

“Users can also have their account completely removed by deleting all of the data associated with their account and then deactivating it,” Ms. Sezak said in her message. “Users can then write to Facebook to request their account be deleted and their e-mail will be completely erased from the database.”