9 ms·

How to permanently delete a Facebook account

209 points by chemcoder 13y ago

codesuela 13y ago
pretty sure this is not a real full delete. Probably just switches around the profile_status field: 0 - visible/default/active 1 - deactivated 2 - it is gone, really! I swear! crosses fingers 3 - suspended for tos abuse (we don't like you but your data might be valuable at some point) edit: also to be fair: 4 - memorial mode
- koralatov 13y ago
  I `deleted' my Facebook account a couple of years ago, but I have no doubt that all that old information is still floating around in a database on one of their servers.
- Peroni 13y ago
  Coincidentally, Adam Hupp from FB spoke at HN London last night and he made a comment that when you permanently delete your facebook account, they do actually wipe all the data stored on you. In Europe at least, there are significant due diligence processes that they are legally required to follow in this regard.
  - codesuela 13y ago
    I have zero trust in Facebook and probably would not even believe them if Mark swore on his mother that they perform a proper wipe of your private data. With that in mind you shouldn't have a hard time understanding why it sounds to me as if they delete all copies on servers in the EU but US mirrors of your profile remain untouched. How else could their algorithm deduct that your ladyfriend used to be a man without analyzing old conversations from deleted profiles. Could you live in a world where facebook sells birth controll pills to former biological males. Ok I admit it's a hyperbole/edge case but I know that you know what I mean ;)
    - rwmj 13y ago
      You can be pretty certain the NSA's copy isn't wiped.
  - philjackson 13y ago
    Interesting. I know they use HDFS in bits of the infrastructure from which it's not particularly easy to delete stuff as it's append-only.
  - antocv 13y ago
    Yes, FB wipes data they have stored on you, but not NSA/GHCQ/FRA and any other letter-combination agency they have copied the data to.
  - stefanix 13y ago
    The possibility that Facebook actually deletes "all the data stored on you" is negligible! I give it 0.00000000000000000001% likelihood. This is against anything Facebook has ever done. Empty words!
  - a3_nm 13y ago
    Hum -- so assuming Facebook is making offline backup copies (which they should), are they really going to retreive their offline backups and remove your info if you want to delete your Facebook account?
rlu 13y ago
At least I have the option to delete my FB account. On the other hand, Google has lately been aggressively pushing me to convert my YouTube account into a G+ account. Once this is actually forced upon me, is there any way to 'delete' my Google+ account without deleting my YouTube one?
- martinml 13y ago
  It seems so: https://plus.google.com/u/0/downgrade/ https://plus.google.com/u/0/downgrade/
  - officemonkey 13y ago
    Thank you. I never use Google+ and I was so irritated by their youtube migration attempts recently that I didn't look back.
    - martinml 13y ago
      That's weird. I got asked _once_ if I wanted to migrate my YouTube account to G+, I said no, and never got asked again.
      - ajanuary 13y ago
        I've seen stories both from people who continually got pestered (like myself) and from people who didn't (such as yourself). I dunno why though.
        raspo 13y ago
        I get all those messages too. I think it's because I'm using an old youtube account that I later connected to the google one.
        officemonkey 13y ago
        That's what happened to me too.
skrebbel 13y ago
To all the skeptics in threads like these: asking that Facebook actually, entirely, erase all your data isn't a reasonable demand. Unless, if course, you're also OK with Facebook's walled-garden, Facebook-is-the-Internet, Compuserve-wasn't-so-bad strategy. Anyone who ever tried to delete content from the internet knows this: The Internet Archive has long since made a copy of what you're trying to delete. Anything you post on the internet, the real, open internet, is forever. If you don't want that, then you'll need to accept that a single entity has full control over what happens with your content, locks it behind a log in so that it can't be easily mined, and does with it what it pleases. I'm not willing to accept that. I'd rather that my content belongs to everybody than that it belongs to Facebook. But you can't have it both ways.
- kryten 13y ago
  It's perfectly possible and reasonable to delete all of your data. It's just hard. We have to do this with our clients if they shift off our platform and believe me, it's not much fun deleting 20-100Gb datasets from a shared database with over 2000 tables in it on production kit. But we do it, because we are honest. Facebook are dishonest. Simple as.
  - skrebbel 13y ago
    Hmm, I'm not sure what you mean by "our platform", but if I post a youtube video, it gets popular, but I get ashamed of it and decide to delete it again, the video will have spread far and wide to other video sites again. Some for public web pages and the internet archive, for stackoverflow answers/wikipedia entries and SEO rats, and so on. How is "your platform" going to help me delete my embarrassing drunk student video from the internet's video sites? The only way "your platform" can do this, is by actively working to block public access to that video in the first place. Then you can have fun (or not) deleting those 20-100Gb datasets. My point is that that means accepting that you're posting stuff to a walled garden.
    - dave5104 13y ago
      It sounds like his platform is perhaps a private enterprise platform? In other words, it doesn't sound like Facebook or Youtube where information can easily spread, which is probably a prerequisite for having control over your data. The company I work for deals with background checks and screening information on behalf of our clients' clients. I could definitely see us safely removing all of that personal information from our system and not being able to recover it. But at the same time, we're a much much much smaller organization compared to Facebook.
paulannesley 13y ago
Worth adding, because it's not mentioned on the linked page: When I deleted my account in 2010, there was a one month cooling off period, during which any sign-in would cancel the deletion request. Perhaps that's sensible to catch malicious/accidental deletions, but I imagine it also makes it hard for Facebook addicts to leave.
- restlessmedia 13y ago
  This is very true. I can't bear the deafening sound of trumpets blowing on FB so rarely visit it. On occasions though, it's service as a 'Friends Reunited v2' works well for me.
  - officemonkey 13y ago
    That's exactly what I used Linkedin for. Don't use the service, but it's a handy way to keep up with my extended business network.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - k-mcgrady 13y ago
      Isn't that one of the main features of LinkedIn? Maybe I'm misunderstanding but aren't you essentially saying the equivalent of "I don't use Google's services but it's a handy way to help me find websites"?
      - officemonkey 13y ago
        Somebody "friends" me on LinkedIn, I accept. If I need to contact that person and I don't have their email, I go into LinkedIn and send them a message. So it's essentially a backup in case my address book fails. I'll pop in there maybe a dozen times a year. That's not exactly using their service.
- zalew 13y ago
kybernetyk 13y ago
> Your account has been deactivated from the site and will be permanently deleted within 14 days. If you log into your account within the next 14 days, you will have the option to cancel your request. I guess I better delete all cookies before I accidentally get logged in back. Why can't they just delete it?
- thejosh 13y ago
  What if someone knew your password and requested it to be deleted? Wouldn't you be "Why can't they just not delete it after a period of days?"?
  - kybernetyk 13y ago
    Ah, the old security vs freedom debate. I would know whom to blame if I had used a weak password that got cracked in order to delete my account. And I think you should expect the same from every reasonable adult. But yeah, FB should add a stronger auth for that dialog - more than a password and a captcha field.
    - enneff 13y ago
      > And I think you should expect the same from every reasonable adult. FYI: Facebook is not primarily populated by reasonable adults.
      - kybernetyk 13y ago
        Can minors legally accept a contract like the Facebook TOS in the US? (Real question, I'm not an US citizen and not a lawyer).
        pseut 13y ago
        I think the emphasis was on "reasonable"
        rlu 13y ago
alan_cx 13y ago
In the UK there are laws requiring businesses to retain certain data for several years, so that the authorities can get at it if they need it for evidence in the future. Yeah, I know... So, is facebook bound by the same sort of laws? If not in the US, what about the UK and other counties? Are there different policies per country, or does FB only do what US law says, if it says anything at all. If they are bound by such laws, then we cant really blame FB for keeping the data. They may have no choice. Also, by then, the likes of the NSA/GCHQ could already have a copy of such data. I went through this delete procedure a while ago. I don't know how I try to find out if my data was deleted or not. No way do I want to try to login as I am worried it will reactivate my account and data. So, I'm just left with some one's say so. I wonder if in the UK a freedom of information act application would reveal it? Added: How do you even contact facebook? Looked at their site and I see nothing. Of course in order to ask on a FB forum you need to sign up. Is there a simple email address?
EzGraphs 13y ago
If a user deletes their account using one of these forms, can a new account be created with the same username ?
- k-mcgrady 13y ago
  I doubt it because your username is linked with your Facebook email address (username@facebook.com). It would probably lead to other people getting your emails if they reassigned the username. I was actually surprised when I found out Twitter reassigns usernames. After I closed my account it wasn't long before someone took mine.
tomgirl1 13y ago
I gather this link points to facebook.com. Funny, I deleted my facebook account years ago, but Im sure as heck not going to click on a facebook.com link and find out if I really did! (subtitle, I react to facebook.com links as if they were phishing links and what would be the difference? scraping my contacts, selling my personal data, rewriting my TOS at every opportunity. I view the home page of facebook even without logging in as a phishing site. Sorry Mark. :()
- k-mcgrady 13y ago
  >> "I gather this link points to facebook.com. Funny, I deleted my facebook account years ago, but Im sure as heck not going to click on a facebook.com link and find out if I really did!" So although you don't want a Facebook account, if you have one you forgot about you'd rather not know about it??
  - tomgirl1 13y ago
    No i dont go to phishing sites
brudgers 13y ago
Saved to favorites - Right next to Lucy's Instructions for kicking a football. So I visited my Linkedin profile earlier this week. They had automagically added a long disconnected telephone number to my profile - as in disconnected for over five years. I suspect it came either from extended internet data mining or more likely an obsolete contact in some acquaintance's uploaded address book. A Facebook profile is mostly a Collection of Pointers. Deleting the pointer doesn't delete the values at the other end. Until garbage collection, they will persist. In other words, unless my friends and family and groups to whom I have sent information delete their accounts, data about me will persist. Accounts are not zombies. They are vampires, never having died in the first place.
chemcoder 13y ago
FYI it takes 14 days to permanently delete the account. They wait for 14 days, if signed in before that you are given an option.
ErikAugust 13y ago
UPDATE user_perception SET deleted = 1 WHERE user_id = ?;
normalocity 13y ago
In terms of privacy I see two categories of data on a network: (1) data that leaked/has been copied to other people and (2) data that hasn't yet leaked. The thing is you can never know with certainly when a piece of data has changed from "not leaked" to "leaked", so effectively you have to act as if all data is leaked in all circumstances as soon as you put it on the network.
ssw1n 13y ago
Good try Facebook, good try ....
dangerlibrary 13y ago
I deleted my Facebook account a few years ago through this process. I was very careful not to log back in, and when I tried a few months later I was rejected - no account linked with that email address. Six months later I signed up with a different email address, and Facebook forced me to confirm my account with my phone number. Javascript Error - that phone number is associated with another Facebook account. I click OK, and I'm redirected to my "new" account with all my old Facebook friends (on the opposite side of the country) showing up as "people I may know." Nothing is deleted from Facebook, ever.
- temp453463343 13y ago
  The other possibility is that it's people that have looked up your name on Facebook before you had an account. So HQ logged it as X wanting to find Y. When Y makes an account, we'll let him know X was trying to find them.
GruppeC956 13y ago
THANK YOU! I just needed to erase a FB account today and after struggling for a while I came across this. Made my life so much easier. Thanks again!
GruppeC956 13y ago
I just needed to erase a FB account today and came across this. Made my life so much easier. Thanks you!
sgrenfro 13y ago
I work on this at Facebook and we do permanently delete your content when you delete your account. It's an interesting distributed systems problem, and we're happy with the framework we've developed for this. We're working on a blog post with more details and hope to publish that soon. Also, I mentioned why account deletion is a non-trivial problem in this comment thread last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5976947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5976947.
- brymaster 13y ago
  You really expect us to believe this, that data would permanently be deleted, coming from facebook? You know, THIS facebook: http://pleasedeletefacebook.com http://pleasedeletefacebook.com (list of most of their history up through 2012)
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  Just to vouch, though not in Facebook's case, it is complicated. Many sites use a CDN (Akamai, Limelight, Amazon's Cloudfront, etc.). The whole idea of a CDN is that it distributes content. Even if the origin goes away (your copy), the CDN may continue serving it for a long time. If someone has a specific item URL within that network, they can still access it. Working with CDN APIs to delete content (especially if, say, that content has various instances based on sizes, previews, etc.,) can be ... interesting. And if third parties are presenting your content, they might also persist it, say as a Google preview or cache, or Archive.org, or other tools. Even within your own systems, data can be replicated in ways which are difficult to access fully. Backups can exist which cannot be easily accessed for wiping. There are war stories of magically re-appearing data resulting from data recovery operations. So, while it's possible to flag content as "don't present" pretty easily, actually rooting all of it out thoroughly can be a much more involved task. Un-seeing is difficult.
  - webvictim 13y ago
    Facebook uses CDNs; how is it not complicated in the way you describe for them too?
djweber 13y ago
Careful - if you even attempt to log in during the two week window, they will reset the timer for deletion (it can be easy to almost unconsciously log in if you're a heavy user). They even do it before you confirm or deny that you're reactivating your account. Seems like one of those psychological games: "come on, do you really want to leave? Now you have to wait even longer for your account to be deleted! Just come back to the fold!"

209 points by chemcoder 13y ago

pretty sure this is not a real full delete. Probably just switches around the profile_status field: 0 - visible/default/active 1 - deactivated 2 - it is gone, really! I swear! crosses fingers 3 - suspended for tos abuse (we don't like you but your data might be valuable at some point) edit: also to be fair: 4 - memorial mode

koralatov 13y ago
I `deleted' my Facebook account a couple of years ago, but I have no doubt that all that old information is still floating around in a database on one of their servers.
Peroni 13y ago
Coincidentally, Adam Hupp from FB spoke at HN London last night and he made a comment that when you permanently delete your facebook account, they do actually wipe all the data stored on you. In Europe at least, there are significant due diligence processes that they are legally required to follow in this regard.
- codesuela 13y ago
  I have zero trust in Facebook and probably would not even believe them if Mark swore on his mother that they perform a proper wipe of your private data. With that in mind you shouldn't have a hard time understanding why it sounds to me as if they delete all copies on servers in the EU but US mirrors of your profile remain untouched. How else could their algorithm deduct that your ladyfriend used to be a man without analyzing old conversations from deleted profiles. Could you live in a world where facebook sells birth controll pills to former biological males. Ok I admit it's a hyperbole/edge case but I know that you know what I mean ;)
  - rwmj 13y ago
    You can be pretty certain the NSA's copy isn't wiped.
- philjackson 13y ago
  Interesting. I know they use HDFS in bits of the infrastructure from which it's not particularly easy to delete stuff as it's append-only.
- antocv 13y ago
  Yes, FB wipes data they have stored on you, but not NSA/GHCQ/FRA and any other letter-combination agency they have copied the data to.
- stefanix 13y ago
  The possibility that Facebook actually deletes "all the data stored on you" is negligible! I give it 0.00000000000000000001% likelihood. This is against anything Facebook has ever done. Empty words!
- a3_nm 13y ago
  Hum -- so assuming Facebook is making offline backup copies (which they should), are they really going to retreive their offline backups and remove your info if you want to delete your Facebook account?

rlu 13y ago

At least I have the option to delete my FB account. On the other hand, Google has lately been aggressively pushing me to convert my YouTube account into a G+ account. Once this is actually forced upon me, is there any way to 'delete' my Google+ account without deleting my YouTube one?

martinml 13y ago
It seems so: https://plus.google.com/u/0/downgrade/ https://plus.google.com/u/0/downgrade/
- officemonkey 13y ago
  Thank you. I never use Google+ and I was so irritated by their youtube migration attempts recently that I didn't look back.
  - martinml 13y ago
    That's weird. I got asked _once_ if I wanted to migrate my YouTube account to G+, I said no, and never got asked again.
    - ajanuary 13y ago
      I've seen stories both from people who continually got pestered (like myself) and from people who didn't (such as yourself). I dunno why though.
      - raspo 13y ago
        I get all those messages too. I think it's because I'm using an old youtube account that I later connected to the google one.
        officemonkey 13y ago
        That's what happened to me too.

skrebbel 13y ago

To all the skeptics in threads like these: asking that Facebook actually, entirely, erase all your data isn't a reasonable demand. Unless, if course, you're also OK with Facebook's walled-garden, Facebook-is-the-Internet, Compuserve-wasn't-so-bad strategy. Anyone who ever tried to delete content from the internet knows this: The Internet Archive has long since made a copy of what you're trying to delete. Anything you post on the internet, the real, open internet, is forever. If you don't want that, then you'll need to accept that a single entity has full control over what happens with your content, locks it behind a log in so that it can't be easily mined, and does with it what it pleases. I'm not willing to accept that. I'd rather that my content belongs to everybody than that it belongs to Facebook. But you can't have it both ways.

kryten 13y ago
It's perfectly possible and reasonable to delete all of your data. It's just hard. We have to do this with our clients if they shift off our platform and believe me, it's not much fun deleting 20-100Gb datasets from a shared database with over 2000 tables in it on production kit. But we do it, because we are honest. Facebook are dishonest. Simple as.
- skrebbel 13y ago
  Hmm, I'm not sure what you mean by "our platform", but if I post a youtube video, it gets popular, but I get ashamed of it and decide to delete it again, the video will have spread far and wide to other video sites again. Some for public web pages and the internet archive, for stackoverflow answers/wikipedia entries and SEO rats, and so on. How is "your platform" going to help me delete my embarrassing drunk student video from the internet's video sites? The only way "your platform" can do this, is by actively working to block public access to that video in the first place. Then you can have fun (or not) deleting those 20-100Gb datasets. My point is that that means accepting that you're posting stuff to a walled garden.
  - dave5104 13y ago
    It sounds like his platform is perhaps a private enterprise platform? In other words, it doesn't sound like Facebook or Youtube where information can easily spread, which is probably a prerequisite for having control over your data. The company I work for deals with background checks and screening information on behalf of our clients' clients. I could definitely see us safely removing all of that personal information from our system and not being able to recover it. But at the same time, we're a much much much smaller organization compared to Facebook.

paulannesley 13y ago

Worth adding, because it's not mentioned on the linked page: When I deleted my account in 2010, there was a one month cooling off period, during which any sign-in would cancel the deletion request. Perhaps that's sensible to catch malicious/accidental deletions, but I imagine it also makes it hard for Facebook addicts to leave.

restlessmedia 13y ago
This is very true. I can't bear the deafening sound of trumpets blowing on FB so rarely visit it. On occasions though, it's service as a 'Friends Reunited v2' works well for me.
- officemonkey 13y ago
  That's exactly what I used Linkedin for. Don't use the service, but it's a handy way to keep up with my extended business network.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - k-mcgrady 13y ago
    Isn't that one of the main features of LinkedIn? Maybe I'm misunderstanding but aren't you essentially saying the equivalent of "I don't use Google's services but it's a handy way to help me find websites"?
    - officemonkey 13y ago
      Somebody "friends" me on LinkedIn, I accept. If I need to contact that person and I don't have their email, I go into LinkedIn and send them a message. So it's essentially a backup in case my address book fails. I'll pop in there maybe a dozen times a year. That's not exactly using their service.
zalew 13y ago

kybernetyk 13y ago

> Your account has been deactivated from the site and will be permanently deleted within 14 days. If you log into your account within the next 14 days, you will have the option to cancel your request. I guess I better delete all cookies before I accidentally get logged in back. Why can't they just delete it?

thejosh 13y ago
What if someone knew your password and requested it to be deleted? Wouldn't you be "Why can't they just not delete it after a period of days?"?
- kybernetyk 13y ago
  Ah, the old security vs freedom debate. I would know whom to blame if I had used a weak password that got cracked in order to delete my account. And I think you should expect the same from every reasonable adult. But yeah, FB should add a stronger auth for that dialog - more than a password and a captcha field.
  - enneff 13y ago
    > And I think you should expect the same from every reasonable adult. FYI: Facebook is not primarily populated by reasonable adults.
    - kybernetyk 13y ago
      Can minors legally accept a contract like the Facebook TOS in the US? (Real question, I'm not an US citizen and not a lawyer).
      - pseut 13y ago
        I think the emphasis was on "reasonable"
      - rlu 13y ago

alan_cx 13y ago

In the UK there are laws requiring businesses to retain certain data for several years, so that the authorities can get at it if they need it for evidence in the future. Yeah, I know... So, is facebook bound by the same sort of laws? If not in the US, what about the UK and other counties? Are there different policies per country, or does FB only do what US law says, if it says anything at all. If they are bound by such laws, then we cant really blame FB for keeping the data. They may have no choice. Also, by then, the likes of the NSA/GCHQ could already have a copy of such data. I went through this delete procedure a while ago. I don't know how I try to find out if my data was deleted or not. No way do I want to try to login as I am worried it will reactivate my account and data. So, I'm just left with some one's say so. I wonder if in the UK a freedom of information act application would reveal it? Added: How do you even contact facebook? Looked at their site and I see nothing. Of course in order to ask on a FB forum you need to sign up. Is there a simple email address?

EzGraphs 13y ago

If a user deletes their account using one of these forms, can a new account be created with the same username ?

k-mcgrady 13y ago
I doubt it because your username is linked with your Facebook email address (username@facebook.com). It would probably lead to other people getting your emails if they reassigned the username. I was actually surprised when I found out Twitter reassigns usernames. After I closed my account it wasn't long before someone took mine.

tomgirl1 13y ago

I gather this link points to facebook.com. Funny, I deleted my facebook account years ago, but Im sure as heck not going to click on a facebook.com link and find out if I really did! (subtitle, I react to facebook.com links as if they were phishing links and what would be the difference? scraping my contacts, selling my personal data, rewriting my TOS at every opportunity. I view the home page of facebook even without logging in as a phishing site. Sorry Mark. :()

k-mcgrady 13y ago
>> "I gather this link points to facebook.com. Funny, I deleted my facebook account years ago, but Im sure as heck not going to click on a facebook.com link and find out if I really did!" So although you don't want a Facebook account, if you have one you forgot about you'd rather not know about it??
- tomgirl1 13y ago
  No i dont go to phishing sites

brudgers 13y ago

Saved to favorites - Right next to Lucy's Instructions for kicking a football. So I visited my Linkedin profile earlier this week. They had automagically added a long disconnected telephone number to my profile - as in disconnected for over five years. I suspect it came either from extended internet data mining or more likely an obsolete contact in some acquaintance's uploaded address book. A Facebook profile is mostly a Collection of Pointers. Deleting the pointer doesn't delete the values at the other end. Until garbage collection, they will persist. In other words, unless my friends and family and groups to whom I have sent information delete their accounts, data about me will persist. Accounts are not zombies. They are vampires, never having died in the first place.

chemcoder 13y ago

FYI it takes 14 days to permanently delete the account. They wait for 14 days, if signed in before that you are given an option.

ErikAugust 13y ago

UPDATE user_perception SET deleted = 1 WHERE user_id = ?;

normalocity 13y ago

In terms of privacy I see two categories of data on a network: (1) data that leaked/has been copied to other people and (2) data that hasn't yet leaked. The thing is you can never know with certainly when a piece of data has changed from "not leaked" to "leaked", so effectively you have to act as if all data is leaked in all circumstances as soon as you put it on the network.

ssw1n 13y ago

Good try Facebook, good try ....

dangerlibrary 13y ago

I deleted my Facebook account a few years ago through this process. I was very careful not to log back in, and when I tried a few months later I was rejected - no account linked with that email address. Six months later I signed up with a different email address, and Facebook forced me to confirm my account with my phone number. Javascript Error - that phone number is associated with another Facebook account. I click OK, and I'm redirected to my "new" account with all my old Facebook friends (on the opposite side of the country) showing up as "people I may know." Nothing is deleted from Facebook, ever.

temp453463343 13y ago
The other possibility is that it's people that have looked up your name on Facebook before you had an account. So HQ logged it as X wanting to find Y. When Y makes an account, we'll let him know X was trying to find them.

GruppeC956 13y ago

THANK YOU! I just needed to erase a FB account today and after struggling for a while I came across this. Made my life so much easier. Thanks again!

GruppeC956 13y ago

I just needed to erase a FB account today and came across this. Made my life so much easier. Thanks you!

sgrenfro 13y ago

I work on this at Facebook and we do permanently delete your content when you delete your account. It's an interesting distributed systems problem, and we're happy with the framework we've developed for this. We're working on a blog post with more details and hope to publish that soon. Also, I mentioned why account deletion is a non-trivial problem in this comment thread last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5976947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5976947.

brymaster 13y ago
You really expect us to believe this, that data would permanently be deleted, coming from facebook? You know, THIS facebook: http://pleasedeletefacebook.com http://pleasedeletefacebook.com (list of most of their history up through 2012)
dredmorbius 13y ago
Just to vouch, though not in Facebook's case, it is complicated. Many sites use a CDN (Akamai, Limelight, Amazon's Cloudfront, etc.). The whole idea of a CDN is that it distributes content. Even if the origin goes away (your copy), the CDN may continue serving it for a long time. If someone has a specific item URL within that network, they can still access it. Working with CDN APIs to delete content (especially if, say, that content has various instances based on sizes, previews, etc.,) can be ... interesting. And if third parties are presenting your content, they might also persist it, say as a Google preview or cache, or Archive.org, or other tools. Even within your own systems, data can be replicated in ways which are difficult to access fully. Backups can exist which cannot be easily accessed for wiping. There are war stories of magically re-appearing data resulting from data recovery operations. So, while it's possible to flag content as "don't present" pretty easily, actually rooting all of it out thoroughly can be a much more involved task. Un-seeing is difficult.
- webvictim 13y ago
  Facebook uses CDNs; how is it not complicated in the way you describe for them too?

djweber 13y ago

Careful - if you even attempt to log in during the two week window, they will reset the timer for deletion (it can be easy to almost unconsciously log in if you're a heavy user). They even do it before you confirm or deny that you're reactivating your account. Seems like one of those psychological games: "come on, do you really want to leave? Now you have to wait even longer for your account to be deleted! Just come back to the fold!"