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How to commit Facebook suicide

Posted on 15 Mar 2010 at 13:55

Davey Winder details the difficulties of deleting all trace of your Facebook account

Ah, “maximum privacy” – I love the feel of that phrase as it rolls around my mouth (which is just as well, since it does so pretty regularly). I seriously doubt whether the same can be said for The Powers That Be over at Facebook Towers, who seem to equate “making some changes to give you more control” with “allowing the entire online world to see your profile, friends list, photos and comments”, which just makes no sense to me at all.

One of the big selling points of Facebook for me had been the ability to control who saw this stuff by creating private networks of friends, or have I missed something here? Facebook to me was the equivalent of hiring a private room over a pub, so that only those folk who had a key could come in and talk to each other and share their personal experiences.

The new Facebook concept appears to be rather more like running naked into a pub and confessing all your sins to everyone in there

The new Facebook concept appears to be rather more like running naked into a pub and confessing all your sins to everyone in there. I might admit to having done something like that in the past after a few too many beers, but most people I know would be horrified to imagine their personal information being available to everyone and not just the closed networks of friends (admittedly, often not that carefully selected) that they thought could see it.

Now you’re probably thinking, hold on, he just said he uses Twitter in preference to Facebook, and that’s public by default anyway – so what’s his problem? The problem is that Facebook was never that way inclined but has become so overnight, without warning, and in what I perceive to be a particularly underhand way. I’ve always known that everything I say on Twitter is in the public domain, and hopefully have tempered the information content accordingly.

If I had a Facebook account that consisted only of family members and to which we all posted family photos and exchanged private family information, I wouldn’t expect all of it to suddenly become public property. There’s the difference.

Killing off an account

This is the reason why I’ve been seriously considering killing off my Facebook account, committing virtual social-network suicide, no less. Needless to say, I haven’t actually done it yet, because as so often in real life, talking about the intention is actually a cry for help rather than a real desire to end it all.

That said, I’ve been investigating how to wipe all traces of my Facebook ID off the face of the internet should that time come. You can request your account to be scheduled for deactivation by selecting an option on your Settings page, and this gives you a two-week period of grace to change your mind about leaving Facebook before switching off the account. This is where things often go wrong for people, because they log in during that period to check whether the account has been deactivated yet, and that very action reactivates it. Doh!

If you really do want out, just go through the motions as instructed and then leave Facebook alone. One of the reasons I haven’t yet deactivated my account is that there are Facebook groups covering pretty much anything you can imagine, and these can actually be rather handy ways of getting some interactive input on a subject. It should come as no surprise to discover that there’s a group called How to permanently delete your Facebook account, which explains precisely how to do it.

Not just to deactivate, but also to permanently delete an account complete with all postings, photos and the rest. Obviously, I haven’t tried it myself yet so I can’t vouch for it, but if you hit the Delete button, your account is apparently deleted rather than simply deactivated after two weeks.

When doing this research I did come across an interesting third-party alternative called Seppukoo.com, which offered to perform the equivalent of ancient Japanese ritual suicide on your Facebook account. As the name suggests, this would be Seppukoo, where a Samurai warrior disembowelled himself with his own sword.

This site enables you to die in spectacular glory by leaving a memorial page for friends to comment upon your “death”, and even notifying them all that you’ve committed virtual suicide.

Unfortunately, it fell foul of the Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities regarding asking for login credentials, scrapping of member pages and spamming members, and as such was quickly blocked by Facebook. As I write, the site says that Facebook has threatened legal action. A Seppukoo.com spokesman declared: “Curiously, Facebook lawyers appeal to the users’ right to privacy to annihilate our Facebook unsubscribe service.” Now you have to appreciate the irony in that…

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