Tuesday, August 4, 2015

Facebook profile delete but not entirely it seems ...

In April 2015 I decided to get rid of my Facebook profile. I first downloaded a report to see what they had about me and then deleted the profile. One can assume that the good people that work there keep their promise and delete the profile.

I am currently working on a slides for a presentation about securing your Facebook account and setting up your privacy settings as restrictive as possible. Since I had no account I needed to make a temporary account, with a fake first and last name (I know against the EULA), and used the same e-mail address than the account deleted in April.

One can suppose that the 'old' data is gone but interestingly every friend Facebook proposes was in the friend list I had before.

I can only come to one conclusion and that is that they do not actually delete everything otherwise those friend proposals should have been random strangers (maybe living in the same town).

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Erik,

I don't think that is entirely correct as I made them remove my account.
There are, however, 2 ways to "de-activate or delete" your account.

The first one is simply closing the account on your Facebook account. This will leave the account as is and just puts it on hold for future re-enabling.

For the second procedure, you need to take a lot more steps and one is explicitely emailing them to erase the account entirely.
Doing so- you loose all account info and group member- or group leaderships.

I don't know for sure which one you did, but I guess it was the first.

Regards
Sam

Erik Vanderhasselt said...

Hello Sam,

Thank you for the input, I was not aware about the fact there are two options. I do not remember e-mailing them so I guess it was an account de-activation. Thanks for pointing it out.

Kind regards,
Erik