How to permanently delete your Facebook account: violate the terms of service

( Give us a Digg, eh? )

It looks like even the New York Times is now getting concerned about the permanence of people’s profile data on Facebook.

To me, it’s always been a bit of a head-scratch. This isn’t your private rolodex. You’re creating an online profile. Thanks to the wonders of caches and things like the Way Back Machine, practically everything you ever put on the internet, anywhere, is likely to survive in some way or another.

You should be aware of that when you sign up for Facebook.

But regardless, the fact of the matter is that when you “delete” your Facebook account, not much really happens. They keep all of your friends, preferences, apps, discussion posts, messages…everything. You just can access it by logging in with your e-mail and password. Yes, I said can. Yes, you can. Try it.

So the only difference between a “deleted” facebook account and an active one is that you’re not logged in, and your friends can’t visit your profile anymore (but they can still tag you and invite you to groups and events). Seriously.

In the end, I really think it’s not that big of a deal. There are legit ways of getting rid of your account, and I think it’s unlikely that anything is going to stick around and haunt you, especially as more and more people use and understand online social networks.

Still want out? Simple: violate the terms of service.

Remember all those complaints about disabled Facebook Accounts? Facebook goes through and pulls your discussion posts, takes down your profile and everything.

So here are a few tricks that are likely to get your account deleted for real:

1. Post a lot of identical messages to a lot of discussion boards, REALLY QUICKLY.
2. Suck in your Blog & your Twitter Account, and post a whole bunch to both of them REALLY QUICKLY
3. Switch your name to something obviously fake, like “Buy Viagra”
4. If you’re feeling particularly rebellious, import some porn. Post some lude and lascivious content to their servers, and send an e-mail to support@facebook.com telling them you did it

Or you can hunt through the terms of service and break any number of other rules you find.

I think you get the idea. My one suggestion might be, though, make sure you’re really done with Facebook before you do it.

[ Update:

I just got an e-mail with a quote from Brandee Barker at Facebook:

There are two different ways to remove your information from Facebook. The first is to deactivate an account. Once a user deactivates the account, his or her profile becomes inaccessible on the main Facebook service, and the data is kept by Facebook only to allow easy reactivation. The second option is to delete the profile altogether. When a user deletes his or her profile, personal information -- such as name and all email addresses associated with the account -- is deleted from Facebook servers.

If a user decides to join Facebook again, he or she would need to create a new profile. We are working to better explain the simple deactivation process, and to ease the deletion process for those who want their personal information removed from our servers. Additional information can be found on the Facebook help page at http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=5

The relevant portion of that Facebook help page is the following:

If you do not think you will use Facebook again and would like your account deleted, we can take care of this for you. Keep in mind that you will not be able to reactivate your account or retrieve any of the content or information you have added. If you would like your account deleted, please contact us using the form at the bottom of the page and confirm your request in the text box.

Needless to say, it's a bit of a quieter way to go

They also point at Google for an example of "data delete" requests from other services. Here's a snipped from the Gmail TOS:

You may organize or delete your messages through your Gmail account or terminate your account through the Google Account section of Gmail settings. Such deletions or terminations will take immediate effect in your account view. Residual copies of deleted messages and accounts may take up to 60 days to be deleted from our active servers and may remain in our offline backup systems.

I guess the difference is that you don't hear many stories about people trying to delete their Gmail accounts and failing to do so.

It's also a different story because Gmail doesn't have the same kind of social networking functionality built in...it's harder for your friends to stumble across old emails from your Gmail account than it is for friends to accidentally discover old profile data buried in Facebook.

It's also interesting to note that I don't normally get these kinds of follow up emails on my posts, so it's possible they're doing some damage control from today's NYT article...

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