Unless, if course, you're also OK with Facebook's walled-garden, Facebook-is-the-Internet, Compuserve-wasn't-so-bad strategy.
Anyone who ever tried to delete content from the internet knows this: The Internet Archive has long since made a copy of what you're trying to delete. Anything you post on the internet, the real, open internet, is forever.
If you don't want that, then you'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't be easily mined, and does with it what it pleases.
I'm not willing to accept that. I'd rather that my content belongs to everybody than that it belongs to Facebook. But you can't have it both ways.
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't, they won't display them. I was vey impressed with them when I learned this.
It's just hard.
We have to do this with our clients if they shift off our platform and believe me, it's not much fun deleting 20-100Gb datasets from a shared database with over 2000 tables in it on production kit.
But we do it, because we are honest.
Facebook are dishonest. Simple as.
Some for public web pages and the internet archive, for stackoverflow answers/wikipedia entries and SEO rats, and so on.
How is "your platform" going to help me delete my embarrassing drunk student video from the internet's video sites?
The only way "your platform" can do this, is by actively working to block public access to that video in the first place. Then you can have fun (or not) deleting those 20-100Gb datasets. My point is that that means accepting that you're posting stuff to a walled garden.
*Anything you post on the internet, the real, open internet, is forever*
Apparently the crawls of the site only went a couple/few layers deep, as well as crawls not being conducted daily, and some years had only 2 or 3 crawls for the entire year.
I haven't tried searching my old facebook posts yet though, maybe some sites are more thoroughly catalogued than others.
Perhaps some other entity is storing my old posts, but I doubt that the NSA will allow me to access my own data.
Edit: Of course there's nothing they can do if somebody's screenshotted your post or stored its contents in their brain, but that's not what we're talking about.
You can publish your stuff on Facebook or G+ as "public"... I saw some people are doing that, using it as a blogging platform. Then it belongs to everybody but you are also taking advantage of the social elements on those networks.
The only way to "own" your content is to publish it on your own domain on a host you just pay for storage. You might then link to the content via your (so called) social playground of choice. But you will own the content in a "normal" use of the word.
You can even explicitly state a copyright-info and lay out your terms, that tell everybody that this is your creation, your belonging...
Posting it publicly on any platform that you do not own, will end in you loosing rights to your creation.
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://facebook.com https://www.facebook.com/robots.txt
Each time you want to sign out of Google, there's an ever present, huge bright button - "Join Google+". I suppose more than one person clicked it by accident or out of frustration :) On rare occasions when I use Chrome, it never forgets to remind me how I'm missing out and should totally sign-in to Chrome.
Staying relevant is hard work :)
http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/16774/how-do-i-le...
Also, I mentioned why account deletion is a non-trivial problem in this comment thread last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5976947.
Many sites use a CDN (Akamai, Limelight, Amazon's Cloudfront, etc.). The whole idea of a CDN is that it distributes content. Even if the origin goes away (your copy), the CDN may continue serving it for a long time. If someone has a specific item URL within that network, they can still access it. Working with CDN APIs to delete content (especially if, say, that content has various instances based on sizes, previews, etc.,) can be ... interesting.
And if third parties are presenting your content, they might also persist it, say as a Google preview or cache, or Archive.org, or other tools.
Even within your own systems, data can be replicated in ways which are difficult to access fully. Backups can exist which cannot be easily accessed for wiping. There are war stories of magically re-appearing data resulting from data recovery operations.
So, while it's possible to flag content as "don't present" pretty easily, actually rooting all of it out thoroughly can be a much more involved task.
Un-seeing is difficult.
You know, THIS facebook: http://pleasedeletefacebook.com (list of most of their history up through 2012)
So I visited my Linkedin profile earlier this week. They had automagically added a long disconnected telephone number to my profile - as in disconnected for over five years. I suspect it came either from extended internet data mining or more likely an obsolete contact in some acquaintance's uploaded address book.
A Facebook profile is mostly a Collection of Pointers. Deleting the pointer doesn't delete the values at the other end. Until garbage collection, they will persist. In other words, unless my friends and family and groups to whom I have sent information delete their accounts, data about me will persist.
Accounts are not zombies. They are vampires, never having died in the first place.
0 - visible/default/active
1 - deactivated
2 - it is gone, really! I swear! crosses fingers
3 - suspended for tos abuse (we don't like you but your data might be valuable at some point)
edit: also to be fair:
4 - memorial mode
With that in mind you shouldn't have a hard time understanding why it sounds to me as if they delete all copies on servers in the EU but US mirrors of your profile remain untouched. How else could their algorithm deduct that your ladyfriend used to be a man without analyzing old conversations from deleted profiles. Could you live in a world where facebook sells birth controll pills to former biological males.
Ok I admit it's a hyperbole/edge case but I know that you know what I mean ;)
So, is facebook bound by the same sort of laws? If not in the US, what about the UK and other counties? Are there different policies per country, or does FB only do what US law says, if it says anything at all.
If they are bound by such laws, then we cant really blame FB for keeping the data. They may have no choice. Also, by then, the likes of the NSA/GCHQ could already have a copy of such data.
I went through this delete procedure a while ago. I don't know how I try to find out if my data was deleted or not. No way do I want to try to login as I am worried it will reactivate my account and data. So, I'm just left with some one's say so.
I wonder if in the UK a freedom of information act application would reveal it?
Added: How do you even contact facebook? Looked at their site and I see nothing. Of course in order to ask on a FB forum you need to sign up. Is there a simple email address?
Six months later I signed up with a different email address, and Facebook forced me to confirm my account with my phone number. Javascript Error - that phone number is associated with another Facebook account. I click OK, and I'm redirected to my "new" account with all my old Facebook friends (on the opposite side of the country) showing up as "people I may know."
Nothing is deleted from Facebook, ever.
The thing is you can never know with certainly when a piece of data has changed from "not leaked" to "leaked", so effectively you have to act as if all data is leaked in all circumstances as soon as you put it on the network.
When I deleted my account in 2010, there was a one month cooling off period, during which any sign-in would cancel the deletion request.
Perhaps that's sensible to catch malicious/accidental deletions, but I imagine it also makes it hard for Facebook addicts to leave.
Especially when during those few weeks you get constantly bothered by emails like 'your friends are missing you', 'look what they posted this week', etc. and when you click on anything - bam, you're logged back.
You can do this by changing your password right before you delete your FB account, as that is supposed to revoke OAuth tokens.
I guess I better delete all cookies before I accidentally get logged in back.
Why can't they just delete it?
I would know whom to blame if I had used a weak password that got cracked in order to delete my account. And I think you should expect the same from every reasonable adult.
But yeah, FB should add a stronger auth for that dialog - more than a password and a captcha field.
They certainly track you even if you're not logged in so who knows what javascript trickery they're up to to make logging in 'easier'.
(subtitle, I react to facebook.com links as if they were phishing links and what would be the difference? scraping my contacts, selling my personal data, rewriting my TOS at every opportunity. I view the home page of facebook even without logging in as a phishing site. Sorry Mark. :()
So although you don't want a Facebook account, if you have one you forgot about you'd rather not know about it??