Facebook frustrates students' efforts to quit

Think you can quit Facebook? Think again.

Jane Dobkin ’10 decided to leave the popular networking site and deactivated her facebook.com account, but she still continued to receive friend requests and e-mails sent through the website, she said.

After receiving a friend request from a long-lost companion she felt that she’d “lost some social connections,” Dobkin said. To her surprise, reactivating her Facebook account was as easy as entering her old username and password: When she signed on, her profile appeared exactly as she’d left it.

While Facebook allows users to deactivate their accounts, their information is not deleted. Rather, all of that user’s information, including wall posts, pictures and credit card numbers, remains on the website’s servers indefinitely. In its Terms of Use agreement, Facebook retains the right to retain information, stating that “you may remove your User Content from the site at any time,” but “you acknowledge that the company may retain archived copies of your User Content.”

Samantha Hyacinth ’09 was forced to settle with deactivating her Facebook account when she could not find a delete option, she said.

The inability to delete an account is “a little strange,” she said. “Part of the reason I wanted to delete [it] was to get that information offline, and now it’s still there floating around somewhere.”

Though it does raise privacy concerns, archiving profiles allows users to effortlessly become a part of the network again should they choose to.

“I guess it’s nice,” Brendan Mahon ’10 said, since “people want to deactivate Facebook for [exams]. It’s nice to be able to get away from it for a while and then ... step back in.”

“It’s pretty convenient,” Tiffany Ko ’09 said. “People [deactivate] it because they don’t want it to be distracting” but can easily rejoin when they have more free time.

Facebook does not explicitly state that information from deactivated profiles will remain on the server, leading many “former” users to believe that they have permanently left the site.

“I didn’t know that they stored all your information,” Mahon said, adding that he assumed that deactivating his profile would delete it.

After leaving Facebook for nine months, Ellen Adams ’10 recently reactivated her account. “It was a little creepy,” she said, because everything was exactly as she left it, “comments, photos, the whole nine yards.”

Adams said she knew there was a period of time during which her information would stay on the Facebook servers. She assumed, though, based on how long she had been off the website, that it would have been erased.

While no delete option is available, some users feel that this is not a violation of their privacy because it’s at the user’s discretion to decide how much information to enter into the site.

“The degree of privacy you have is the degree of personal information you post and how censored you have searches for you on Facebook,” Ko said. “[Facebook] is pretty good about offering you different options.”

Once that information has been entered, however, there is no simple way to permanently delete a Facebook profile. This has led to the creation of a Facebook group called “How to permanently delete your Facebook account.” The group has around 7,300 members and provides instructions on how to erase all the profile information posted on the website and how to contact Facebook staff to lodge a complaint. According to group members’ posts, the profile-purging process can take up to a week.

“It’s like the Hotel California,” Nipon Das, a director at a biotechnology consulting firm in Manhattan, told The New York Times. “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”