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Comment by phatbyte | Hacker News Reader

Last week I permanently deleted my FaceBook account. All my data since 2007 (10 years) and friends gone. Well...apparently my data is still somewhere to be used as metadata...

Still, I must say, this was a liberating experience. I don't go there anymore to see another cat/new born/fake news posts. I don't get get angry with dumb comments. I don't have to see at my friends are eating, selfies, etc..

My closest friends and family are reachable one whatsapp/imessage/phone call away. The other hundreds "friends" I had on FB, I don't even remember their names anymore...

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Facebook provides an option to download an archive of your data, you should have downloaded it before deleting your account. Apart from having all your data, it would have been the final nail in your Facebook coffin. To say the least, the data scared the f*ck out of me : they knew me better than any of my family or friends. The ad tracking data was...bang on target, they had facial recognition data, all the locations I signed in from. I sometimes joke that Fb knows more about people than the Government of the user. It's true!

To my knowledge, your account is never actually gone but instead deactivated. Not sure if there is a grace period to that, but as anondon said you can get an archive of all your data (which is what I did before deleting my account).

Facebook provides a real delete option. It's hidden but it's there.

https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account

Does this delete your data too? I spent about 2 days the other day running a script to delete all my data way back to 2010.

I'm pretty sure it's a genuine delete button.

No way do they actually delete your information

It's replicated all over the planet many times over and they share it with other businesses and agencies

Even if they did, your friends and family talk about you and they're not going to censor all that information too

It gets deleted. Facebook Ireland Audit Report.

This was the exact option I used.

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