

Calacanis is having trouble deleting his facebook account - budu3
http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/11/calacanis-facebook-profile/

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kordless
I deleted my Facebook page about a month ago, and verified it was deleted a
few weeks ago. Even though I'm no fan of FB, I'm going to have to call BS on
this post.

First off, figuring out how to delete your account is as simple as doing a
Google search: <http://tinyurl.com/ycl9der>. The FB group page has the link
for the delete page in the left column. This took me all of 10 seconds to
find, so I think it's crappy to try to indicate it's hard to locate how to
delete your account. While I agree it should be at least somewhat 'findable'
via FB navigation, it's an edge use case and as such shouldn't require
prominent featuring. Figure it out.

Facebook tells you that it'll wait 14 days to delete your account. Frankly, I
like the idea of waiting to delete it. My son said his friends occasionally
pull up their accounts when visiting a friend's house on the other's
computers. If you left yourself logged in, and then your buddy thought it
would be funny to delete your account, it would really suck to try to get all
that data back. Leaving the account intact, and emailing you that it's going
to be deleted is smart. All it takes is a login to kill the process of
cancelation.

Second, AFAIK, third party authenticated/connected apps use an alternate
authentication method to access your account. This is usually done using
tokens for the service, plus an account issued token. If you revoke these
(which is obviously an option) then those apps can't access your account. I
can't imagine that the devs at FB would think it was OK to cancel your
cancelation based on access by one of these third party app tokens.

Obviously if you run a local app (Adium comes to mind) that has your user/pass
stored in it, and it logs you into your FB account to function, it's going to
cause a true 'login' to Facebook. I was smart enough to disable Adium and
delete the FB app from my iPhone based on the assumption a true 'login' would
trigger a cancel of the cancelation. I'm not sure what FB could do to
alleviate any confusion to others around this, but maybe they could be more
clear about what might 'log you in'.

I found the process fairly straightforward, and the only thing I'd change
would be an email that said my account had been deleted when they actually did
it. I was a bit nervous about trying to log back in a few days after the
deadline because I thought it might cause me to have to wait a few more weeks,
but it worked out just fine at the end of the day.

The only thing that I regret is that everyone trying to message me over the
past week or so thinks I unfriended them. In a way they are right - it's just
that I did it en masse and it really wasn't a personal grudge against them! ;)

------
pier0
Who is more ridiculous: Techcrunch writing a non-news or people on HN upvoting
it?

------
natrius
He clearly would have preferred it if his account were deleted instantly,
which would've prevented him from signing into whatever service he had used
Connect for. His account was kept because he might end up needing it. He ended
up needing it.

> _paradoxically, they are the most talented product team in the internet
> space and yet they don’t add export features or data portability or open
> standards_

This seems pretty portable to me: <http://graph.facebook.com>

