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Comment by jeffreymcmanus | Hacker News Reader

Safe to say the cow is out of the barn here; if Google wanted to have an impact they'd have done this two years ago. How many people in industrialized countries don't yet have Facebook accounts? Like four?

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I guess I'm one of that four than. I had one briefly, but I never grew sympathetic of them. I deleted it a few weeks later, Facebook is just too creepy in their way of data handling.

I don't think you can actually delete a Facebook account. It still exists somewhere...

you can post nsfw images and get reported, i heard it works better.

Well u can, you have to contact them! See settings.

You have no way of verifying they've completely removed your data from their servers. All you can tell is they no longer let anybody see it through the website. They've publicly stated your data may be retained in "backups" indefinitely.

If you had one, you had one, and it's in their heap somewhere waiting to be mined. All they did was turn off the visibility flags. The only way is to never have an account... lucky me.

I did not say that I fed it with any real information about me. About the only thing they got was my e-mail address, and they could have gotten that with a better webcrawler.

Did you friend any of your IRL friends? Because if you did, that would probably be enough for them to cross-reference enough data to figure out who you are. It occurred to me that even when people tag pictures with unlinked text (as they sometimes do to be funny or if the content is sensitive), Facebook could probably use some fuzzy matching and heuristics to map those faces to real identities elsewhere in their database.

...if you think about it, that's probably an easy way to get a lot of photos of people that they don't want to be seen.

I agree. But I also think this action has to do with the launching of the Google Me (Google's competitor to Facebook).

Me.

So far we have 3 of the 4 people post here. Can the last one own up? Or did someone underestimate how many people don't have a facebook account...

Then I guess I'd be the lucky #4. Incidentally, my brother was a hold-out, too, until last month or so.

I make it 5. Never created an account with them.

I make it 6 :)

I think it's more about sending a message here.

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