Stuck on Facebook

Got a Facebook profile? Well, if you decide you want to get rid of it, good luck: the New York Times reports that Facebook makes it very, very difficult to ever remove your information from the site:

Facebook’s Web site does not inform departing users that they must delete information from their account in order to close it fully — meaning that they may unwittingly leave anything from e-mail addresses to credit card numbers sitting on Facebook servers.

Only people who contact Facebook’s customer service department are informed that they must painstakingly delete, line by line, all of the profile information, “wall” messages and group memberships they may have created within Facebook.

“Users can also have their account completely removed by deleting all of the data associated with their account and then deactivating it,” Ms. Sezak said in her message. “Users can then write to Facebook to request their account be deleted and their e-mail will be completely erased from the database.”

But even users who try to delete every piece of information they have ever written, sent or received via the network have found their efforts to permanently leave stymied.

If we were talking about information on Facebook’s servers, but not visible on the site, it would be a different story. I think it’s perfectly reasonable for them to hold on the archived information for some period of time, as long as it’s protected by a good privacy policy.

But the idea that you can’t remove your own data from the visible portions of the site is, frankly, ridiculous. And the lack of a global delete process when people cancel their accounts speaks volumes about how Facebook regards its users. Coming as this does after their Beacon screw-up, I think it’s reasonable for any user to ask, Do I want anything to do with Facebook?

Even with all this fixed, there’s Facebook’s walled garden approach, which locks information onto their site and forces users to come back - a complete contrast to what we find with, for example, Twitter, where your stream of messages is available to be read in a variety of ways, mashed up, searched, and so on from outside the site.

One of the biggest social networks apparently doesn’t understand social networking. The problem now is that even fixing these things is unlikely to make a big difference. Do you trust Facebook after all this? Will most users? I think it’ll take a big mea culpa from its management to repair the ongoing damage that their terrible approach to privacy is doing, and based on what I’ve seen, I do not expect that.

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