Help, I want to Cancel Facebook
Not for the first time the difficult issue of how much personal information is available on private citizens has come to the fore. Most recently, of course, it has been the thorny issue of personal data dumped on a CD by idiots at HMRC and then mislaid. But this is possibly the least of many people’s worries. According to experts , we willingly put out vast amounts or personal information about our selves just by using the world wide web – especially social networking sites such as Facebook , Myspace and others.
Of course, this is not new, but the media has just only caught on. Social networking sites have been going since the early nineties. WBS is a case in point. This was a chat service that also had free space for peoples personal websites about themselves, private messaging and much more – just like the so-called web 2.0, but 17 years ago. And even back then it was getting 5 million hits a day. The personal web pages then were full of personal information. And now it is worse, as more and more younger people use the web in this way, they are even more careless about personal details.
But let us say that decide to cancel your membership of Facebook and get rid of the evidence, as it were. Is it easy? No, they will do anything to keep you there. You have to press the right buttons!
Firstly, Facebook does not have a public system to cancel your membership. What they offer is to disable your account. This means that you are no longer searchable, but Facebook retain all your personal data (friends, messages, posts, address, mobile phone number) so that when you feel stupid for cancelling, you can simply switch it back on in seconds.
Except I am not stupid. When I decide to cancel something, I really mean it. So, I started by disabling my account and then sent them an email:
To Facebook
Dear Sirs
Please remove me completely from your database as I no longer wish to use Facebook.
I have already deactivated the account, but I now revoke permission for you to hold any information about me on your database. This includes all contacts, messages, wall, and any other information related to my email address.
Seemed fair enough. Why should they keep data on their database that is personal to me? They replied:
From Facebook
If you deactivate, your account, and any information associated with it, is removed from the site. However, we do save your profile content (friends, photos, interests, etc.), so if you want to reactivate someday, your account will look just the way it did when you deactivated.
If you want your information removed from our servers, we can do this for you. However, you need to first log in and delete all profile content. Once you have cleared your account, let us know, and we’ll take care of the rest. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
Okay, got that. Now I am not a massive user of Facebook and I only have a handful of friends. But even so, to delete everything, one by one, took me about 20 minutes. I know people have have hundreds of contacts and messages – this could take weeks! But I did as they asked, and sent an email as requested and, fair to say, they have completely wiped the account – at least I cannot get to it at all now, so I assume they have.
Facebook and others make it easy for people to use their sites in a stupid way. Oh, yes, they put warnings, but that is all they do. They are a spammers and fraudsters heaven. Getting rid of this data, however, they make as difficult as possible. It is for purely selfish business reasons. They want to have a stuffed database, it makes their company more valuable. The more people are planting data on their records, the more money facebook is going to earn – it is as simple as that.
Yes, they are no stupid, if someone wants to clear data they will let them – but they wont make it easy. Oh, and when you disable, they wont let you do it without giving a reason from a list.
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