Deleting a Facebook account

There is a bit of a rumour that it is impossible to delete a Facebook™ account. I believed this myself. It is true that you may struggle to completely erase all records of an account’s existence (every message, comment, post, etc made). However, what you can do is delete all the information on your profile and as much evidence as you can find - plus your pictures etc.

1. Delete your photos
2. Delete Comments and messages you wrote
3. Delete your friends from your friends list.
4. Leave all your networks and groups you have joined.
5. Delete all your photo albums.

You can then send an email to privacy@facebook.com and ask that they delete your account. I did this and they sent me the following email:

If you deactivate your account, your profile and all information associated with it are immediately made inaccessible to other Facebook users. However, in case you want to reactivate your account in the future, we do save your profile content (friends, photos, interests, etc.), so your account will look just the way it did when you deactivated. Many users deactivate their accounts for temporary reasons and expect their information to be there when they return to the service.

Since the information and content you upload is often stored in many different places within the Facebook file system, there’s no easy way for Facebook to remove it all at once. Keep in mind that Facebook does not use deactivated account information, and profile information ceases to be available to general users of the service immediately upon deactivation.

The permanent deletion of this information from all our systems is hastened by your efforts in removing content from the account before deactivation. If you intend to permanently delete all information from your account, you may log in and delete any content or information you don’t want stored before deactivating. Please let me know once you’ve done this, and we’ll remove your login email from our system.

Thanks for contacting Facebook

So, Deactivate your account and then email them back, confirming you would like it deleted. And voila!

We have deleted your profile information and removed your email address from our login database. Please let me know if you have further questions or concerns.

UK Facebook users are entitled to demand that Facebook complies with the UK Data Protection Act (1998). Until a few days ago you could not. Now you can.