Facebook doesn't want you to deactivate your account. | Hacker News Reader

Facebook doesn't want you to deactivate your account.

collison.ie

50 pointspc39 comments

Of course they don't want you to deactivate your account. It's their business to try to retain their members/customers, just like every other company in the world. Now if they are pretending to deactivate your account but leaving it accessible to others, or other shenanigans, then we've something to talk about. But this? Big deal.

No-one's suggesting they're doing anything untoward. Just that what they're doing is interesting.

I refreshed the deactivate page, and it doesn't seem to be completely random, but it also isn't 100% the same every time. It seems to pick between the same 20 or so friends for me.

Another thing that's interesting is that the deactivate option is exactly where it should be, rather than buried many levels deep in menus. I tried to remove my classmates.com account the other day, and it was a mess.

Not only is it their business to retain customers, I think they are also trying to retain your personal data.

I don't really know what their business plan will be, but I'm sure it won't involve normal users paying any money. So they have to make money off of me somehow, whether it is through targeted advertising or selling information to marketers. The current privacy policy allows them to give information from your profile to third parties as long as you cannot be personally identified.

So while I'm not saying they will do anything unethical, an inactive account is probably worth a lot more than a deactivated account.

They seem to already have a business plan that works pretty well.

>Not only is it their business to retain customers, I think they are also trying to retain your personal data.

No question about it: THEY KEEP YOUR DATA.

Facebook doesn't care about individuals, it only cares about the "social graph". Once you're a node on the graph, then your data "belongs" to it (the graph). For example, if A knows C via B and B deletes their account, FB won't update A and C that they just know each other randomly.

That's a really good way of empathising with your users. I've seen "sitename will miss you!" type messages, getting social connections involved would be a hell of a lot more persuasive.

That is, unless your Facebook "friends" are actual friends with whom you have many channels of communication...it just seems tacky and manipulative to me.

Manipulative? Yes. Tacky? No.

They're reminding you that you have friends on Facebook. Tacky would be them telling your friends to convince you not to abandon your account.

It's tacky because the psychology they're attempting is disingenuous. It attempts to form an association between their self-serving message and your friends' pictures.

But your friends all use their service too. What's to say Facebook doesn't have a good reason to remind you of them?

You can't see the small print on the deactivation screen in the photo, but here it is:

Note: Even after you deactivate, your friends can still invite you to events, tag you in photos, or ask you to join groups. If you opt out, you will NOT receive these email invitations and notifications from your friends.

It's a bit unclear in what sense your account is actually deactivated.

It bothers me that they won't let you actually delete your account.

This URL may only be visible to Facebook users, but please let me know if this helps.

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=16929680703&...

This is the first link on google for "delete facebook account"

It works. They deactivate your account for 2 weeks and then permanently delete it. Worked for me.

They don't let you actually delete your own account, but giving them a "written slip" via e-mail works - they'll remove your account. I'm not sure to what degree they remove stuff though. I think your profile is removed and your tags/links are void.

I've got friends who've mailed to support@facebook.com and gotten their accounts removed following. I'd be interested to hear if other people have had similar encounters.

I once tried to remove my Facebook account. I found a form (via Google) for this purpose and filled it out. However I got an error reply via email which looked like the email sent by the SMTP form was not being accepted by some Facebook server. I complained of this via support, and within one day they removed my account.

I wonder if it wasn't a coincidence that all the people who Facebook says will miss him are girls (well, and one restaurant)

And "cucina" is a feminine noun, right?

Facebook is probably using an algorithm that picks from among the friends that the user has interacted the most with. At least that's what I would do if I were implementing it. They already use such an algorithm internally to detect if your account is compromised (i.e., if the set of friends with whom you communicate changes sharply at some point.)

Given that Facebook might be doing this, it is likely that the top few friends would be of the opposite gender, in a heteronormative context. This intuitive expectation has been confirmed in research studies of social networks. e.g., http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jure/pubs/msn-www08.pdf ("people tend to converse more frequently and with longer durations with the opposite gender").

Perhaps pc can confirm/refute whether this is true in his case?

We can try it ourselves. Just log in and go to http://www.facebook.com/deactivate.php

The 5 that show up for me are people I recently friended (unfortunately all dudes)

It appears to be completely random. I got entirely different selections on two separate clicks.

Random selection of people I've been in pictures with.

edit: they've tagged me in their photo, or i've tagged them in mine. age of picture is all over the place, so not just recent ones.

For me (tried with a few refreshes to get multiple samples), it seems to show pictures of people who I have recently exchanged messages (rather than wall posts, or just about any other form of communication) with.

I just did some testing by refreshing the "http://www.facebook.com/deactivate.php page and I always got two same friends. Next I realized that it was displaying a picture where both of us were tagged. I had untagged myself from a bunch of other albums, so the other 3 friends picked were pretty much random.

So, its definitely giving high priority if you both are tagged in the same picture irrespective of the fact if you are really good friends with them or not. One of the friend tagged in a pic with me was added about 4-5 months ago, whereas my other friend I have know her since 2001, but on facebook since 2004/2005. 70% of my friends added are from the 2004 - 2007 time period.

Weird, I'm not tagged in any of the same photos as the people who show up on mine. But I friended all of them relatively recently.

Claiming "_______ will miss you" is not always a safe assumption...and at worst is a lie:)

World of Warcraft does something similar: http://img17.imageshack.us/img17/6985/wowcancel.jpg

I had my account "deleted" over two years ago. I went through the email back and forth with the customer service representative who confirmed my acount was deleted. Unfortunately I just received a legitimate friend request from a college friend. Looks like it wasn't deleted after all.

You can send friend requests directly to email addresses. My middle school brother just found me on Facebook that way.

I accidentally "disappeared" my first FB account by creating a new account and unwittingly using the same email address as the existing one.

No warning, nothing. But I could no longer sign into the first account.

When I realized what had happened, I went looking for signs of the that first account. I had been the sole admin of a group; now, that group listed no admin at all; I seized admin rights with my new account.

So perhaps that's the best way to deactivate: exploit bad code.

I just tried this, and for me at went as far as selecting pictures that have both me and the other person in them. Really trying hard for that personal touch.

Evil with style.

Connecting people and trying to sell them things they might like is hardly evil.

Business with style.

I'm curious, what about this do you find evil?

Imagine the following more dramatic version:

"If you deactivate your account, we'll kill this kitten."

Same essential principle.

If you want a detailed ethical analysis, it would have something to do with saying that your friends will miss you, as though they're asking you to stay, when they said no such thing.

"If you deactivate your account, we'll kill this kitten."

Actively threatening a life.

"Your friends will no longer be able to keep in touch with you."

Suggesting there might be passive harm caused directly by a user's action.

Yeah, those two are ethically correlated.

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