Can you “really” delete yourself from facebook?

A while ago, I decided to remove myself from facebook. I did not agree with FB’s privacy policies and practices and I really didn’t see much value in using FB anyway — I had less than a hundred “friends” and I rarely did anything with said friends on FB anyway (e.g., post on their walls, send them stupid links etc.) You can say that I was a “facebook hermit.”

Anyways, I decided to completely delete myself from facebook but it wasn’t easy. I found a post on groovyPost, aptly entitled “How-To Permanently Delete Your Facebook Account” very useful. The removal process is rather retarded. You have to really, really, really try hard to delete your account — you need to confirm your intent to delete several times during the removal process; you can’t log onto facebook (even accidentally via fbconnect) for 2 weeks, otherwise facebook will “assume” that you don’t want to remove your account and will cancel the deletion process etc. Anyways, after 2 weeks of carefully avoiding any kind of accidental interaction with facebook, I was finally able to delete my account from facebook.com. Or so I thought…

Was I completely off the facebook databases? All of the hoops I had to go through to delete my account seemed to implicitly suggest that this was so. But recently, I had a thought — does facebook still remember me? In other words, did facebook really purge all information about my existence from its databases? So I decided to find out.

Last week, I signed up on Facebook again. I used a different email address this time, but kept my name. I did not include any additional information whatsoever — no networks, no friends, no hobbies (not that I have any interesting ones), no likes or interests, no education… Nothing, zip, zilch, nada. Then as soon as I signed up, I set my privacy settings to UBER-PARANOID — keep everything private and make my info visible to “Only Me”. On a side note, it was reassuring (but probably misleading) to see that facebook put an icon of a locked padlock next to the “Only Me” drop down option implying that it’s somehow more secure.

That very day, soon after signing up with the new account (same name as the purged account, but different email address, and no additional information), I got friend requests from people I actually know. Now how is this possible? Even the recommendations I get for “people I may know” are quite relevant — I really know most of these people. But how is this possible? I gave facebook nothing except a name and an email address it didn’t know before and facebook somehow magically linked my new account to this network of people… Creepy.

Sure I understand that my name is not a common name (it’s even quite uncommon in Korea) but how did these people know about my rebirth on facebook? There are two ways in which this connection could be made. 1) These “friends” could have coincidentally searched for me around the same time (all 5 friends requests around the same time? improbable). 2) I was recommended to these friends and that’s why they clicked on the “add as friend” link. These people may be good friends but I do not think they would be purposefully searching for me on facebook (and all around the same time — too much of a coincidence to be true) so I’m leaning toward the recommendation explanation. But again, how is this possible?

So, here is what I think is happening. I do not think for a moment that facebook actually purges any data even if you permanently delete your account (after going through hoops after hoops). I haven’t read the details of facebook’s privacy practices relating to deletion of accounts but I suspect there is some language there that says facebook owns all information about you (i.e., owns your digital identity) even if you delete your account. I’m even betting that facebook doesn’t actually delete anything even if you delete it (e.g., if you delete a wall post or delete a photo you posted, it’s probably just “not shown”, but safely kept within the facebook databases to haunt you later). So no, I don’t think you can “really” delete yourself from facebook.

How much control do we as users have over our own online identities? There ought to be some serious discussion about online privacy and identity before things get out of hand…

Postscript: I apologize to those friends on facebook who thought I came back and wanted to befriend me again. This was just an experiment out of curiosity and I had no intention of keeping this new account.