

Facebook doesn't want you to deactivate your account. - pc
http://collison.ie/blog/2009/07/facebook-doesnt-want-you-to-deactivate-your-account

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LargeWu
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.

~~~
chris11
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.

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

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RossM
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.

~~~
erlanger
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.

~~~
zimbabwe
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.

~~~
erlanger
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.

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

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GavinB
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.

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

~~~
tokenadult
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&...](http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=16929680703&ref=share)

~~~
michaelawill
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.

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

~~~
randomwalker
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?

~~~
tlrobinson
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)

~~~
treyp
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.

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

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

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spaghetti
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.

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

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jamesbritt
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.

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michaelfairley
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.

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Eliezer
Evil with style.

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

~~~
Eliezer
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.

~~~
zimbabwe
_"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.

