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Comment by nxc18 | Hacker News Reader

I deleted my Facebook to the best of my ability about a week ago.

Fun facts:

* They switch around button colors to trick you into undoing your actions

* They are very eager to log you back in if you, for example, try to access help. This reactivates your account.

* You cannot delete your account on Messenger. They removed the option. Deleting your Facebook profile does not delete your messenger account

* Their doc for deleting your messenger account lies/is out of date.

* There is no shortage of dark patterns in their account delete process.

I ended up manually deleting all my content, unliking everything, and deleting all my posts.

More fun facts: they don't show you all of your content. If you go back and try to clean up your account, do it multiple times. Keep doing it until Facebook can't find anything more to show you. I assume this is a technical optimization, but it means that there is no reliable to see everything you've posted (from the web UI).

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I'm surprised there wasn't a step that involved a locked file cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard."

Instead of deactivation confirmation message, dialog box contained bobcat. One star.

For those unfamiliar with this classic reference:

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/40705-but-the-plans-were-on...

It was when I clicked cancel because they switched the darker blue colour meaning affirmative on to the cancel button that I knew I was making the right call. Just sneaky.

"Delete my account" (dark blue), "Cancel" (light blue). "OK" (light blue; i.e. yes delete my account), "Cancel" (dark blue)

More dark patterns: when I tried to delete my account, they claimed my password was incorrect. After trying and failing to delete my account for over a week, a tiny comment I saw on a YouTube video turned out to be gold: "if your password has upper and lower case characters, you must enter them all in lower-case or you will be told your password is incorrect."

That were correct.

(Account now deleted.)

That means that they either store the password in plain text, or store an extra hash of the lowercase with the only purpose to mislead and trick people.

People who work there are con artists.

Given their attitude to their users, probably plain text.

Wow, is that true? How do they justify it /even get away with that?

> If you go back and try to clean up your account, do it multiple times. Keep doing it until Facebook can't find anything more to show you. I assume this is a technical optimization, but it means that there is no reliable to see everything you've posted (from the web UI).

I'm surprised nobody has written a (thirdparty) browser plugin for that task yet.

There already is. A Chrome extension called Social Book Post Manager.

For messenger, at least if you're registered just in messenger with a phone number, you can "delete" it by re-installing the app and attempting to re-register with the same number. When it prompts you to use your existing account, say it's not you and then choose a new name.

This seems to reset your contacts and history. No idea what it looks like on the back end, assuming facebook is still rolling history associated with the number.

There used to also be a pathway to promote your messenger account to a full facebook account and then delete it that way, but it's been a while so not sure if that's still possible.

Not sure if you can pull of similar against email based accounts though.

> I ended up manually deleting all my content, unliking everything, and deleting all my posts.

Sounds like its worth waiting a month or two for when they fully implemented GPDR. That probably makes this way easier. (At least for EU residents)

Kudos to your hard work and perseverance though!

Do you know of a way to automatically delete all my likes and posts?

I'd like to not delete my Facebook account because my Spotify account is linked to it.

Spotify will happily unlink your Spotify account from Facebook and has gotten a lot better (and faster) about it in recent days. Several posts on /r/spotify have experience:

https://www.reddit.com/r/spotify/search?q=facebook&restrict_...

I deleted all of my Facebook data about a year ago and I actually had to create a new Spotify account to disconnect it from Facebook. Glad to hear they are improving this process.

Believe me I tried, it doesn't work in my specific case because the account was initialised via Facebook. They gotta make a new account and copy over my old data. That works, and the Spotify helpdesk is excellent.

Problem is, I use Premium via a voucher from my ISP. My ISP no longer gives these vouchers, and its claimed. So for a new account, I cannot get Premium for "free".

I should feel lucky my ISP hasn't disabled the existing vouchers (the main branch of the ISP did).

Try this Chrome extension, Social Book Post Manager. Appears to do exactly that.

Thank you very much, that's exactly what I was looking for (though I'm trying to use Mozilla Firefox). Works very well for this purpose but you gotta recheck and verify.

Also, I found I can't delete anything I posted from before sometime in 2008. I just get an error when I try to.

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