Leaving Facebook Is Like Leaving the Hotel California
September 3, 2009 by Jason Bean
Filed under Computers
My cousin was recently told that Facebook is no place for anyone over 40. I seriously disagree with that notion, but he’s decided to completely get off of Facebook. It turns out though that leaving is like the last stanza from “Hotel California” by the Eagles.
The last stanza from the song goes like this:
Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before
“relax,” said the night man,
“We are programmed to receive.
You can checkout any time you like,
But you can never leave!”
There doesn’t seem to be any way to completely delete your profile from Facebook of your own request. You can merely deactivate it, which my cousin quickly did.
The only challenge was that last night I got a chat message from him telling me how he was making amazing money online and I should join him by following this. That didn’t quite sound like my cousin and since my wife got the same chat window at the same time, I knew something was weird.
It turns out his account was hacked. He noticed it was hacked because someone had mentioned something to him and he went to check the email he used for the account and saw one thanking him for reactivating his account. He hadn’t.
I ended up helping him deactivate again and am currently looking for a way to completely delete his account. Let me know if you have any tips. I also changed his password to something extraordinarily complicated. What I found interesting in the process is that if you merely sign-in to the site again, you are immediately reactivating your account. You have no choice.
That’s no good. Why is Facebook setup to work this way with accounts. If someone wants to delete their account, delete the sucker. No questions.
Hmmm, reminds me of what a friend told me a couple of months back – that social networking sites like Friendster and Facebook don’t delete photos that you upload even after hitting what’s supposedly the “delete” button.
This is probably one of the reasons why some photographs end up on so many other sites, because they can still be accessed after deletion.
It is working the same way with movies, etc. You are just not able to completely remove them.
We have recently linked a movie from youtube, afterwards wanted to remove it, but facebook doesn’t allow it. The only solution was to set the movie in youtube to privat. Thou this is posible only for your own movies and not movies linked from someone else youtube accounts.
It seems that they have incredible huge storage place for all these data :o)
I know that I am not going to post there any movie or picture anymore.
You can permanently delete your account. Try http://www.facebook.com/account_delete.php or look for “Delete Account” in the help. It’ll deactivate your account, and then it is supposed to delete it after 14 days.