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Comment by AndrewTerry | Hacker News Reader

You may think you've deleted your FB account, but its probably still there...

I "deleted" my FB after they acquired FriendFeed (still the best social network I've ever come across) back in 2009.

I was puzzled, then, to receive an email in November last year asking if I had tried to log in. "Impossible", I thought, "that account was deleted!". So, I visited Facebook, and because my old username/password were still in my password manager, I was able to log in! Imagine my shock to find my old profile, still there with it's old profile pic, my old connections, etc.

When will "delete my account" actually mean my account is deleted?

(The final kick in the nuts to this story is that within 2 minutes of logging in, I get a chirpy, "Welcome back to Facebook!" email. Fuckers.)

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If you live in Europe, you can contact the facebook DPO and request a (legally mandated) hard delete.

They're then allowed to keep data for legal reasons (tax, legal intercept, etc) but not beyond.

"Well you see your account it still up... for legal reasons."

You just deactivated your FB account.

Deleting FB account is slightly more complicated. After you have deleted it, don't try to login for months to check out if it's gone.

To permanently delete your account:

1. From your main profile, click account in the top right of Facebook.

2. Select Settings & Privacy, then click Settings.

3. Click Your Facebook Information in the left column. If you have Facebook access to a page in the new Pages experience: Click Privacy, then click Your Facebook Information.

4. Click Deactivation and Deletion.

6. Choose Delete Account, then click Continue to Account Deletion.

7. Click Delete Account, enter your password and then click Continue.

It was a while ago (2009) so I can't remember the exact process, but I seem to recall that even back then it was quite convoluted, and differentiated between deactivate and delete.

That said, I certainly haven't touched it since 2009 to check if it really was deleted.

Things are quite different post-GDPR (2016).

Maybe you could change your country/nationality to some EU country and delete again.

EU has much stricter rules.

I had the same issue as GP… deleted around 2011 and it was back again with no indication I even deactivated it (let alone deleted it) when my password manager let me log in around 2017.

I can tell you with 100% certainty that I did everything FB allowed you to do to “delete” my account the first time. When I did it the second time, it’s not like it was more complicated or hidden than the first time, but it actually worked.

My conclusion is that, today, FB has a weird split between deactivating and permanently deleting your account (the latter takes more effort), but 10 years ago was nothing of the sort. They just let you think you deleted your account but didn’t actually do anything. Or maybe there was a bug with account deletion back then… or maybe they had an outage where they had to restore some stuff from a backup and my account got “recovered” in the process.

But the important point is that FB didn’t even acknowledge it with a message like “do you want to re-activate your account?” on my login in 2017… it was as if I never deleted it in the first place.

That is important to know but orthogonal to the GP's point.

Removing Facebook from my Browser bookmarks etc. improved my life a lot. However I didn't delete the account as some shops unfortunately update their opening times etc. only there and especially in current pandemic world that sometimes is needed to check ...

> "I was puzzled, then, to receive an email in November last year asking if I had tried to log in."

Happened to me exactly the same, but I don't remember the password and I can't "delete" it again.

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