Hacker News Reader

Comment by rickdale | Hacker News Reader

I deleted my facebook account in March 2010. In November, six months later, the only evidence of my account was that my facebook information was loaded onto my friends telephone. He had my profile photo, plus some random tidbits of information automatically grabbed from facebook by his phone.

View on HN

I deleted my facebook account ~6 years ago, but before I completely deleted it I changed my name to "DLC Text".

About a year ago I started getting emails from facebook recruiters, and guess what my name was resolving to in their system? Yep, that's right -- "DLC Text".

For 6 years they have kept my information even though it was deleted.

Silly semantic question - when you 'delete' your facebook account, do they use the word 'delete' or just 'disable' or 'shut off' or something similar?

A friend of mine ragequit facebook a little less than a year ago, came back, and it allowed him to reactivate his profile. I don't think it ever said 'delete' though.

I first "disabled" it, and then I continuously pestered them with emails until they told me they had deleted my login and my account.

From what I understand, many websites now use "soft deletes", where they cut out the ability for users to see/modify data. It remains intact on their servers though.

I really don't agree with this, but I can't deny that there's value in this data. It's unscrupulous to hold onto it, though.

In my opinion, there should be some way to hard-delete information like this, even if the user has to go through some two-key-nuclear-launch confirmation process to prevent accidental deletes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com