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Comment by jb1991 | Hacker News Reader

jb1991·

I did a full closure of my account. I have not received any emails in about 18 months, when I closed it. I'm scared to even attempt to login to verify that it is actually closed, for fear that FB will somehow interpret that as a desire for the account to reopen, and do so, despite that I did close it fully (and did not merely "deactivate" it or whatever they call the other option that does not really close it).

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You're lucky. I deactivated back in January and I think I did a "log in with facebook" button once and now facebook seems to have re-activated my account implicitly.

Also they send me click-baity emails like "John Doe has posted a status update!"

Heck, they've even started TEXTING me to lure me back.

I'm dreading having to log back in to try to figure out how to get them to stop trying to contact me.

You say “deactivate“ but Facebook does differentiate between deactivation and actual closing of an account. So if you merely deactivated it, then that would explain why your account was not actually deleted and it reactivated it for you.

> The biggest difference between deactivating and deleting a Facebook account is that deactivating your Facebook account gives you the flexibility to return whenever you wish, while deleting your account is a permanent action.

From what I remember, reactivation of a deactivated account merely requires logging back in. Which sounds like you did exactly that.

I wonder if deactivating, deleting etc means different things depending on local laws. Like I would expect them to have to allow full deletion in EU?

They do allow full deletion everywhere. But you must explicitly select it. If you choose to “deactivate” that is not actually closing the account. It is a dark pattern.

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