Facebook does not let me delete my account
I did not use facebook for ages, i always thought i need it for my international contacts, but now this new pay or say yes to ads window showed up I realised I did not use it for a long time. So I was like, tech is like clothes, if you don't use it for a year it's time to let it go.
So i tried to delete my acc.
After some research (wtf????) I finally found this page
https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account
where I can click my through a menu, until I can enter my password to delete my account, and it just does not let me.
""Sorry, this feature isn't available right now""
wtf? how is deleting my acc not available????
fuck this, fuck them. this is one of the "leading" tech enterprises. this is one of the biggest fucking companies in the world.
I don't know how that is even legal.
I'm so fucking angry. Fuck this fucking fuckers!
does somebody know what i can do? can i send them an angry real life letter? do i need a lawyer?
I'm not really in the EU, but the GDPR still applicates to me. so what do I do now to get rid of this fucking fuckers?
ps. looking in the internet does not help nothing, it's just 100s of links to facebook help center. fuck the fucking modern web as well.
I'd like to recommend justdeleteme.xyz for sites that are unnecessarily obtuse in deleting accounts. It's a directory of direct links to account deletion pages for various websites, and also describes steps for those that don't have any easy account deletion process. It also has a browser extension, but I don't really use that.
This doesn't really solve OP's current problem, but hopefully it saves someone some time in the future.
how did I not know this. this is perfect, thank you.
(its true, it does not solve my problem. but if I had known this, I would have saved a lot of time/energy and nerves.)
Thanks for the link! Just skimming the ones marked "Impossible" was fascinating. It was disturbing to see one mention you couldn't close your account but could get it suspended alongside payments. Then another of the sites (Hooked) doesn't let you change your password? I never thought there would be any website that wouldn't let you change your password, that's a security nightmare and a half!
For me the de-activation and delete button weren't where the locations their help website said. I had to hunt in account center and it was under some third location, so if you have the account center on the top I'd hunt around all the options one more time. I'm pretty sure it's intentionally hard to find and that's frustrating.
It was also the case even after deactivating my account, it would be open again 15 days later somehow...i even changed my password to a super complicated one, deactivated my account and 2 weeks later my husband said it was back on....so I feel they are not truly deactivating accts. Definitely leverage anything you have to make them delete your data.
I heard a long time ago that they never deleted accounts because they have shadow accounts of almost every internet user and track you whether you ever log in or not. I've heard that people who deleted their accounts years ago sign up again and it knows all of their old info.
It's also possible that they deactivated their accounts rather than delete, which fb makes much easier than real deletion and will keep your info in case you return. Not that I think they really delete people's info, but if it showed up after a real deletion that would be bad for them if it could be proven.
I certainly remember that perhaps 13 years ago acquaintances of mine could tag me with full name in group photos before I even had an account there. And not only that. Different people could tag me in different photos and that would point to the same database entity (so not just 2 incidentally aligned strings). Thus you could click on my name in a tagged photo and it would open up an empty mock up profile with a reminder that I wasn't on Facebook "yet" with a convenient button to send me an invitation via email. So they could get know my email address (or at least one of them). And the more people tag you and send you that reminder using the same address the more confident Facebook can be that they've got the right guy. The photo meta data itself also provides valuable information. If you frequently get tagged with people from the same city there's a chance you also live there. And if you've been tagged with the same last name as somebody else in the picture you're likely related. And hey if people send you invitations to different addresses they can now cross link any figments they already have in their database.
So basically in such a scenario the site creates a profile for the "missing" person and once that person creates the account it claims the profile. That is how you can sign up and immediately get suggestions for friends, former school mates, venues, employers, interest groups, news tags and so forth.
But remember even if one doesn't sign up knowing a personal email address makes it much easier to track people across the web, integrate relevant information and build a profile for the person; all of that even without even having a real Facebook account.
Now as mentioned that was more than a decade ago but I suspect they have only refined their methods since then European GDPR non withstanding.
So, Swiss or Norwegian?
In any case, I do think you have some legal rights here, but I think the first step you'd need to take before letters and lawyers would be to contact whatever online customer service Facebook has (I don't know how to do this, myself, and it's probably a pain in the ass to get to). GDPR gives them more requirements than just deleting your accpunt though, so if you have a lawyer friend who will give you some free advice, I'd ask them.
I mean, through all my anger, that was acctually kind of my question. how do I get to talk to them? searching for it just gets me back to that useless help center.
That I unfortunately don't actually know. I know getting into a chat with a real human instead of their help center equivalent is a pain on Amazon, but I don't have enough experience with Facebook to know what the route through the maze actually is
I had to sit down, turn on some music and tinker with the settings for a full hour before I managed to find the "delete account" option. It is buried under piles of misdirections and useless menus.
I feel for you, I've been there - even trying to invoke my right to be forgotten. I had the option to delete my account (this is about ten years ago), only to receive a message a while later that it wasn't deleted and I had to do it over. Also, logging into Facebook in any way (including via the invisible pixel) was deemed to be an action to reactivate the account. Discovering that my profile still existed, I tried the legalese way to be forgotten. That's also about the time when I gave up. Recently I got a recovery code from Facebook, so I guess my account is still there, and someone inadvertently tried logging in. So if you find out how to really really delete your account, I'm all ears. But now, I'm past caring.
I kind of suspect it is not on purpose or malicious, but likely they've just let this part of the site fall apart. This did work at one time in the past.
It worked for me as recently as 1-2 months ago.
edit: I just checked and the deactivation still works for me. It's just a tech issue because Facebook is badly written software, remember Hanlon's razor. OP, have you tried the usual debugging steps starting with trying different browsers?
I did not.
I take it as an affront that it is on me to debug code for a multi billion enterprise.
I know this does not help me, but come on.
That's actually good to hear (that is still works, sorta). Do they still have the 30 day cool off period before it actually deletes everything?
Yeah, facebook sucks. This is what being the product feels like.
Alternatively, you can progressively change all info on this account so it doesn't reflect you, then just abandon it! (Drown them in worthless fake data)
I get your idea, but i just want to, you know, delete my account :-)
thank you!