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Comment by xerophtye | Hacker News Reader

Uh wait, FB lets you actually delete your stuff? Since when? From what i understand, the best they do is make it invisible to u and to ppl u know.

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You could always permanently delete your account on Facebook.

https://www.facebook.com/help/www/224562897555674

My understanding was that despite "permanently deleting" if you go back and sign up it'll all magically restore.

No, that's only if you "delete" your account through the settings menu. If you fill out the form in the link it's permanent.

I believe he is referring to that if you delete your account, it will appear deleted. However, you can sign in again during some specified "grace" period to undelete it.

Deletion actually works, and in pretty much the way you’d expect of any site. Graph relationships that touch users are required to be deletable. Once deleted, there may be a record that an item existed and what type it had (post, comment, etc.) but the actual content is gone. Try downloading your data sometime from Account Settings—it’s fun to play around with.

I would not expect any site to actually delete much. Maybe deactivate or delink.

Do you mean you don’t honestly expect a site to delete content, or do you mean you would honestly expect them to delete it, but cynically expect them to violate that expectation? The difference is important.

I haven't played with the downloaded data yet, but I did this experiment once:

1) Copy Url of one of ur pics and save it somewhere.

2) Delete that Picture. (Now it doesn't show up in your photo album)

3) Access through saved link.

When i tried it, the image was still accessible, so FB didn't REALLY delete it. They just told me they did. I dont think it would show up in downloaded data (i am pretty sure they are smart enough), but they still have it. So...

Disclaimer: It maybe that for some optimization stuff, they use a deferred delete mechanism where they REALLY delete it from the system at a later date. But even if the saved link doesn't work, there's the possibility that they just changed the link.

Pictures can take weeks to be purged from their CDN, but when deleted, they are removed from the origin.

No, it's permanently deleted.

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