Opinion: Facebook the Insidious Spawn That Won’t Let Go?

By Nathan Statz

December 21, 2007: Unless you’ve been living under a rock or shielding your ears in blissful ignorance you’ve no doubt heard about the social networking phenomenon that is Facebook, but what you may not know is that joining the site is much like joining the mafia – once you’re in it’s really hard to get out.

It started off quite innocently – a friend of mine called me up and asked for advice on how to delete a Facebook account. These types of calls aren’t that unusual when you’re a technology journalist, people like to think we have all the answers and I, like most people just assumed that deleting your account would be a simple process of a click or two and you’d be on your way to freedom, not so according to my troubled friend.

So that’s what sparked this most epic adventure into the depths of social networking membership, as I wanted to see for myself how quickly I could sign up and then remove myself from the two major players of the social networking scene: Facebook and Myspace.

Signing Up

Much like every other website on the planet, the moment I clicked “Sign Up” I suddenly get bombarded with a page asking for an assortment of personal details which would be more then enough to steal my identity and rock my pitiful savings account.

Apparently if I was 97 years old Facebook wouldn’t believe I had the ability to use the website because that isn’t my “real” birthday.

Unless the social network has a few shady characters following my every move I’m fairly confident it doesn’t know how old I am, so I attempted to find out what my believable age is.

Things aren’t going too well for Captain Awesome and his quest to even sign up for the social networking site. That’s ok though, I imagine that joining the mafia isn’t overwhelmingly simple either so I obviously needed to assume an even more covert identity to actually get myself an account.

Apparently my believable age is 92 years young and thankfully the name Allyo Urbase gets through the sophisticated naming filter, so it’s back to the real quest.

The first thing that’s readily apparent is there’s no delete function being advertised, can’t blame them for this as you’d expect that kind of thing to be in account management or a similarly titled section.

Foolishly thinking this streak of genius would lead me to the pot of gold, I found the “deactivate” option in the account screen. Now it really wasn’t too difficult to get to this part, and I must admit that I believed my friend was way off the mark and deleting a Facebook account was dead simple – wrong again.

I’ll give Facebook credit here for labeling this insidious option as a ‘deactivation’ and not a ‘delete’ because quite simply it wasn’t much more then that. I particularly liked the opt-out gem: “Even after you deactivate, your friends can still invite you to events, tag you in photos, or ask you to join groups.”

Wait a minute, my so called deactivated account by default (unless you read the small print and check a box) will still be active enough for me to receive annoying email invitations to overpriced social functions, have other people stamp my name on photos and spam me with invitations to earth-shatteringly important hives of social discussion like the “Oversized Sunglasses Appreciation Group”. Forgive me for being cynical but this doesn’t seem to be making my account very inactive at all, coupled with the fact that my account magically reactivates itself to full status if I login, I don’t think this option is all that wondrous.

To Facebook’s credit it has the de-facto internet standard of an S.O.S call built into its website that being the search function. Unfortunately this search option doesn’t extend past looking through the database of users and groups, though apparently this problem has come up before as one of the top searches was a “How to permanently delete your Facebook account” group with 2,199 members.

Paydirt!

Thanks to this user-established group there is a set of guidelines to permanently deleting your account that involves deleting everything you’ve uploaded such as pictures and profile information and then emailing the Facebook staff and having them manually delete your account – apparently this can take up to a week according to the group.

While I’m yet to receive a reply other then an automated “we should be back with you soon” it seems mildly ridiculous that in order to remove myself from the network I have to go out of my way to find a user created help group, and then send in an email request to the support section who will get back to me sometime within the next week. In fairness I’m relying purely on the Facebook group’s information on the week long response time figure, and considering how badly Captain Awesome has been treated throughout this whole experience I’m not expecting a prompt reply to my email.

The group also identifies another somewhat shadier way of deleting your Facebook account through trickery which I didn’t attempt.

Another link that arises from that site is Steve Mansour’s blog post about his adventures trying to have his Facebook account closed, the fact that this occurred in July of this year and still hasn’t been rectified is nothing short of outrageous.

Myspace

At this point in time I’m really not holding high hopes for Myspace, as I equate the two networks at about the same level of audacity when it comes to maintaining their member levels. The idea of social networks being somewhat deceitful isn’t that surprising when you consider both Myspace and Facebook are heavily entranced in a war for the most activity.

The first thing I noticed about Myspace is that apparently it’s ok to be named Captain Awesome and to have been born on January 1st, 1907. So while I’m as yet unsure whether or not Myspace is as insidious as its rival, at least it doesn’t discriminate against 100 year old internet champions.

Shock!

Much like their rival, Myspace had their account destroying tools in the most intuitive location, that being “Settings” which I found on my first click. Unlike its Zuckerberg-inspired competitor though, Myspace actually labels their feature as a “cancellation” so hopefully it will do exactly that.

The only bad thing about Myspace’s cancellation feature is how many times it asked me if I was really, completely, certifiably sure about getting rid of my account.

After this Myspace then sends you an email to confirm that you’re absolutely sure and to go through a few more steps, so while this is becoming incredibly annoying at least the cancellation is permanent.

What is interesting though is that when you go through the signup process the confirmation email is practically instant, yet when you ask for the confirmation email to be sent through to cancel your Myspace account, the email takes a lot longer so assumedly isn’t automated and relies on a human being at the Myspace office giving the cancellation the ok. The delay could also just be a Gmail related problem but that seems somewhat unlikely.

Final Thoughts

Facebook obviously comes up the big loser here, there’s no valid reason for not allowing users the ability to cancel their accounts in a straight forward fashion. Deactivation shouldn’t have a fine-printed option that defaults to allowing Facebook to continue your participation in third party applications and email contact through the site.

Myspace has the major advantage of actually having an account cancellation option that does exactly what the title implies. While they aren’t a saint in the way you have to go through several confirmations then a delayed email confirmation, it’s substantially better then what Facebook offers.

It’s understandable that social networks want to retain their users, but that doesn’t mean its ok to make it incredibly difficult for users to leave, particularly considering the quantity of personal data that is regularly fed into the networks.

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