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Comment by palerdot | Hacker News Reader

A related personal experience. I deleted my facebook account few years ago. Much Later (actually around 2 years later), when I wanted to check something related to facebook sdk, I created a fake account but gave my original mobile number.

Surprise! Surprise! Facebook was recommending all the people from my deleted account magically to my newly created account which has nothing in common with my old account except for the mobile number.

For all those sharing content in FB, worrying about your privacy is pointless and a total waste of time.

My personal opinion is that, Google somehow values people privacy more than Facebook, that why its social networking attempts are failing. On the other hand, Facebook is just ruthless when it comes to handling people's data and that is why it is having much success as a social networking platform.

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Surprise! Surprise! Facebook was recommending all the people from my deleted account magically to my newly created account which has nothing in common with my old account except for the mobile number.

Do bear in mind that many of those people likely have your phone number, and will have integrated Facebook with their smartphone's contacts list; they could easily find loads of people just from that.

I'm not saying that they have deleted your old account, but it is possible that there are other explanations.

It is possible. So, if we want to completely get out of FB, we need to ditch our other online persona like email, phone number? In any case, recommending the people from old account does not make sense. What if that mobile number was now owned by different person?

In any case, recommending the people from old account does not make sense. What if that mobile number was now owned by different person?

Yes, it makes sense. FB wants you to connect to your network of friends and they already have a graph with a you-sized hole in it from all of the data your friends have provided. When your phone number shows up again it is far more likely that you have changed your mind and want to re-join than to assume that someone else has received the number of someone who deleted their account, so they optimize for that expected outcome. If it was a new person with your number then that person would simply ignore all of the friend suggestions.

In that case, tracking a re-joining user with email makes more sense than mobile phone, since emails cannot be transferred. As far as my thinking goes, as soon as I delete my account, Facebook's ability to track me with that mobile number should go. There is no point in digging my phone number from the networked people's data and try to connect with me again. For me, it reconfirms my point that to quit facebook, we need to sacrifice all online persona related to it.

> that why its social networking attempts are failing

IMHO the real names policy killed their projects even before release. I would've loved to use Google+ as a less invasive alternative to FB but the policy killed the deal for me (and generally everyone around me, both tech-savvy and not... who wants another Facebook?)

AFAICT they relaxed on the policy but it was way too late.

Facebook exists with that policy, though.

Which is why you can't beat it. You need to offer something in better to win, you can't just offer the same service.

Just add that last time I checked adding multiple personas (in the form of pages) to your single account was even streamlined it seemed to me.

Its bazar to me that the ruthless company usually wins, why does this happen so consistently?

In my opinion, the most likely answer is that the ruthless company will be more profitable, and most customers either don't care or don't understand (don't care to understand?) the implications of the ruthless policies.

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