<story><title>How to permanently delete a Facebook account</title><url>http://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>skrebbel</author><text>To all the skeptics in threads like these: asking that Facebook actually, entirely, erase all your data isn&amp;#x27;t a reasonable demand.&lt;p&gt;Unless, if course, you&amp;#x27;re also OK with Facebook&amp;#x27;s walled-garden, Facebook-is-the-Internet, Compuserve-wasn&amp;#x27;t-so-bad strategy.&lt;p&gt;Anyone who ever tried to delete content from the internet knows this: The Internet Archive has long since made a copy of what you&amp;#x27;re trying to delete. Anything you post on the internet, the real, open internet, is forever.&lt;p&gt;If you don&amp;#x27;t want that, then you&amp;#x27;ll need to accept that a single entity has full control over what happens with your content, locks it behind a log in so that it can&amp;#x27;t be easily mined, and does with it what it pleases.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not willing to accept that. I&amp;#x27;d rather that my content belongs to everybody than that it belongs to Facebook. But you can&amp;#x27;t have it both ways.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>300bps</author><text>I agree with your general point but your example is not correct&lt;p&gt;The Internet Archive makes it very easy to remove content from their site.  I had a family web site accessible to the public for 12 years with about 25,000 pictures on it.  For various reasons I took the site down but archive.org still showed the pictures.  A quick change to robots.txt stopped that though.  Basically, even if the archive grabbed the files at a point in time they periodically check to make sure they still have the right to those files in robots.txt.  If they don&amp;#x27;t, they won&amp;#x27;t display them.  I was vey impressed with them when I learned this.</text></comment>
<story><title>How to permanently delete a Facebook account</title><url>http://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>skrebbel</author><text>To all the skeptics in threads like these: asking that Facebook actually, entirely, erase all your data isn&amp;#x27;t a reasonable demand.&lt;p&gt;Unless, if course, you&amp;#x27;re also OK with Facebook&amp;#x27;s walled-garden, Facebook-is-the-Internet, Compuserve-wasn&amp;#x27;t-so-bad strategy.&lt;p&gt;Anyone who ever tried to delete content from the internet knows this: The Internet Archive has long since made a copy of what you&amp;#x27;re trying to delete. Anything you post on the internet, the real, open internet, is forever.&lt;p&gt;If you don&amp;#x27;t want that, then you&amp;#x27;ll need to accept that a single entity has full control over what happens with your content, locks it behind a log in so that it can&amp;#x27;t be easily mined, and does with it what it pleases.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not willing to accept that. I&amp;#x27;d rather that my content belongs to everybody than that it belongs to Facebook. But you can&amp;#x27;t have it both ways.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Joeboy</author><text>Not sure I understand. If Facebook were federated, it would not be reasonable to expect it to delete your data for the practical reasons you mention. Facebook is not federated, so they presumably are able to delete your data. Maybe it&amp;#x27;s naive to expect them to behave in an honest or considerate manner, but not it&amp;#x27;s not unreasonable to ask it as far as I can see.&lt;p&gt;Edit: Of course there&amp;#x27;s nothing they can do if somebody&amp;#x27;s screenshotted your post or stored its contents in their brain, but that&amp;#x27;s not what we&amp;#x27;re talking about.</text></comment>