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Comment by zaphar | Hacker News Reader

This should really be as simple as a single button. It wouldn't even significantly reduce their membership since the average person doesn't care. It would however improve their image.

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Can this really be implemented? No system in that size can invalidate any information in every CDN center instantly (or even in bounded time). The fact is, once your information is online, it will never go.

Doesn't myspace do this?

It can be implemented for facebook but not for facebooks apps or for scraped and cached information. However the article wasn't about removing your content from the web completely. It was about removing your content from facebook.

People who accidentally hit that button would not be happy.

Just throw in a couple of 'Are you sure you want proceed?' confirmation messages and it's set.

That is false security of the type much beloved by engineers. It fails for all sorts of cases, such as people who are less literate than you are (ask me about the time our outsourcing team Hit Next To Continue without being able to read the Japanese trac interface they were using -- better yet, don't ask), vindictive ex-girlfriends, dormroom pranks, etc, etc, etc, etc.

The single button can be located somewhere unlikely to be accidentally clicked. You can keep the 14 day timespan so that undoes are possible. Your concern over accidental clicks is valid as is your classification of are you sure dialogs as false security. But an undo alleviates that concern and is the proper way to handle them. Making it difficult to do that task is not the right way to handle it.

It should still be a button not a painful complicated set of steps.

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