How Sticky Is Membership on Facebook? Just Try Breaking Free

[didymus]

** How Sticky Is Membership on Facebook? Just Try Breaking Free**

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Are you a member of Facebook.com? You may have a lifetime contract.
Some users have discovered that it is nearly impossible to remove themselves entirely from Facebook, setting off a fresh round of concern over the popular social network’s use of personal data.

While the Web site offers users the option to deactivate their accounts, Facebook servers keep copies of the information in those accounts indefinitely. Indeed, many users who have contacted Facebook to request that their accounts be deleted have not succeeded in erasing their records from the network.

“It’s like the Hotel California,” said Nipon Das, 34, a director at a biotechnology consulting firm in Manhattan, who tried unsuccessfully to delete his account this fall. “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

It took Mr. Das about two months and several e-mail exchanges with Facebook’s customer service representatives to erase most of his information from the site, which finally occurred after he sent an e-mail threatening legal action. But even after that, a reporter was able to find Mr. Das’s empty profile on Facebook and successfully sent him an e-mail message through the network.

So you sign up when you’re a teenager or college student and put up all the most embarrassing stuff you possibly can (thinking it’s “cool”)-- and then it follows you for life.

 

[JimG]

Yes. But that’s pretty much true for everything on the Internet. Stuff that people post here at CAF while in their teens or twenties or thirties or whatever, will still be there (and be able to be Googled) when they are 50 or 60 or 70 and have changed their views. *

Idiotic stuff that one might post to youtube will be there for a potential employer to revew after grad school, or for a future mother in law, or a lawyer, to search out.

Not only that, Google, and I believe Yahoo and other search engines retain records of all searches, so if one did a lot of porn surfing in one’s youth or later, those searches can still be attributed to your computer IP address decades later. There is no privacy.*

 

[ribozyme]

Don’t have an account there or on myspace. I don’t have any real friends, but I do know the friends there aren’t really your friends.

Have better things to do such as reading public policy papers or read about topics on biochem that interest me. Those hobbies really consume a great deal of your free time.

 

[Digitonomy]

Yes. But that’s pretty much true for everything on the Internet. Stuff that people post here at CAF while in their teens or twenties or thirties or whatever, will still be there (and be able to be Googled) when they are 50 or 60 or 70 and have changed their views. **I will be very surprised if what we post today at CAF is still available in 10 or 20 years, much less 60 or 70. Some message boards have a culture of “search the forums before asking a question,” and often leave offending material in place and simply ban the offender, lest overzealous cleanup erase posters’ hard work and research. CAF is more “of the moment”: posters routinely ask the exact same questions week after week, and several old forums have been deleted when problems arose. So while some websites may make rickety old threads available for decades to come, I don’t foresee CAF doing so.

 

[Digitonomy]

Quitting Facebook Gets Easier

On Monday, Facebook modified its help pages to tell people that if they wanted to remove their accounts entirely, they can direct the company by e-mail to have it done. But on Tuesday, representatives of Facebook stopped short of saying the company would introduce a one-step delete account option.