[Infowarrior] - How Sticky Is Membership on Facebook? Just Try Breaking Free

[Richard Forno]

February 11, 2008
How Sticky Is Membership on Facebook? Just Try Breaking Free
By MARIA ASPAN

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/11/technology/11facebook.html


Are you a member of Facebook.com? You may have a lifetime contract.

Some users have discovered that it is nearly impossible to remove themselves
entirely from Facebook, setting off a fresh round of concern over the
popular social network¹s use of personal data.

While the Web site offers users the option to deactivate their accounts,
Facebook servers keep copies of the information in those accounts
indefinitely. Indeed, many users who have contacted Facebook to request that
their accounts be deleted have not succeeded in erasing their records from
the network.

³It¹s like the Hotel California,² said Nipon Das, 34, a director at a
biotechnology consulting firm in Manhattan, who tried unsuccessfully to
delete his account this fall. ³You can check out any time you like, but you
can never leave.²

It took Mr. Das about two months and several e-mail exchanges with
Facebook¹s customer service representatives to erase most of his information
from the site, which finally occurred after he sent an e-mail threatening
legal action. But even after that, a reporter was able to find Mr. Das¹s
empty profile on Facebook and successfully sent him an e-mail message
through the network.

In response to difficulties faced by ex-Facebook members, a cottage industry
of unofficial help pages devoted to escaping Facebook has sprung up online ‹
both outside and inside the network.

³I thought it was kind of strange that they save your information without
telling you in a really clear way,² said Magnus Wallin, a 26-year-old patent
examiner in Stockholm who founded a Facebook group, ³How to permanently
delete your facebook account.² The group has almost 4,300 members and is
steadily growing.

The technological hurdles set by Facebook have a business rationale: they
allow ex-Facebookers who choose to return the ability to resurrect their
accounts effortlessly. According to an e-mail message from Amy Sezak, a
spokeswoman for Facebook, ³Deactivated accounts mean that a user can
reactivate at any time and their information will be available again just as
they left it.²

But it also means that disenchanted users cannot disappear from the site
without leaving footprints. Facebook¹s terms of use state that ³you may
remove your user content from the site at any time,² but also that ³you
acknowledge that the company may retain archived copies of your user
content.²

Its privacy policy says that after someone deactivates an account, ³removed
information may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time.²

Facebook¹s Web site does not inform departing users that they must delete
information from their account in order to close it fully ‹ meaning that
they may unwittingly leave anything from e-mail addresses to credit card
numbers sitting on Facebook servers.

Only people who contact Facebook¹s customer service department are informed
that they must painstakingly delete, line by line, all of the profile
information, ³wall² messages and group memberships they may have created
within Facebook.

³Users can also have their account completely removed by deleting all of the
data associated with their account and then deactivating it,² Ms. Sezak said
in her message. ³Users can then write to Facebook to request their account
be deleted and their e-mail will be completely erased from the database.²

But even users who try to delete every piece of information they have ever
written, sent or received via the network have found their efforts to
permanently leave stymied. Other social networking sites like MySpace and
Friendster, as well as online dating sites like eHarmony.com, may require
departing users to confirm their wishes several times ‹ but in the end they
offer a delete option.

³Most sites, even online dating sites, will give you an option to wipe your
slate clean,² Mr. Das said.

Mr. Das, who joined Facebook on a whim after receiving invitations from
friends, tried to leave after realizing that most of his co-workers were
also on the site. ³I work in a small office,² he said. ³The last thing I
want is people going on there and checking out my private life.²

³I did not want to be on it after junior associates at work whom I have to
manage saw my stuff,² he added.

Facebook¹s quiet archiving of information from deactivated accounts has
increased concerns about the network¹s potential abuse of private data,
especially in the wake of its fumbled Beacon advertising feature.

That application, which tracks and publishes the items bought by Facebook
members on outside Web sites, was introduced in November without a
transparent, one-step opt-out feature. After a public backlash, including
more than 50,000 Facebook users¹ signatures on a MoveOn.org protest
petition, Facebook executives apologized and allowed such an opt-out option
on the program.

Tensions remain between making a profit and alienating Facebook¹s users, who
the company says total about 64 million worldwide (MySpace has an estimated
110 million monthly active users).

The network is still trying to find a way to monetize its popularity, mostly
by allowing marketers access to its wealth of demographic and behavioral
information. The retention of old accounts on Facebook¹s servers seems like
another effort to hold onto ‹ and provide its ad partners with ‹ as much
demographic information as possible.

³The thing they offer advertisers is that they can connect to groups of
people. I can see why they wouldn¹t want to throw away anyone¹s information,
but there¹s a conflict with privacy,² said Alan Burlison, 46, a British
software engineer who succeeded in deleting his account only after he
complained in the British press, to the country¹s Information Commissioner¹s
Office and to the TRUSTe organization, an online privacy network that has
certified Facebook.

Mr. Burlison¹s complaint spurred the Information Commissioner¹s Office, a
privacy watchdog organization, to investigate Facebook¹s data-protection
practices, the BBC reported last month. In response, Facebook issued a
statement saying that its policy was in ³full compliance with U.K. data
protection law.²

A spokeswoman for TRUSTe, which is based in San Francisco, said its account
deletion process was ³inconvenient,² but that Facebook was ³being responsive
to us and they currently meet our requirements.²

³I kept getting the same answer and really felt that I was being given the
runaround,² Mr. Burlison said of Facebook¹s customer service
representatives. ³It was quite obvious that no amount of prodding from me on
a personal level was going to make a difference.²

Only after he sent a link to the video of his interview with Britain¹s
Channel 4 News to the customer service representatives ‹ and Facebook
executives ‹ was his account finally deleted.

Steven Mansour, 28, a Canadian online community developer, spent two weeks
in July trying to fully delete his account from Facebook. He later wrote a
blog entry ‹ including e-mail messages, diagrams and many exclamations of
frustration ‹ in a post entitled ³2504 Steps to closing your Facebook
account² (www.stevenmansour.com).

Mr. Mansour, who said he is ³really skeptical of social networking sites,²
decided to leave after a few months on Facebook. ³I was getting tired of
always getting alerts and e-mails,² he said. ³I found it very invasive.²

³It¹s part of a much bigger picture of social networking sites on the
Internet harvesting private data, whether for marketing or for more sinister
purposes,² he said. His post, which wound up on the link-aggregator
Digg.com, has been viewed more than 87,000 times, Mr. Mansour said, adding
that the traffic was so high it crashed his server.

And his post became the touchstone for Mr. Wallin, who was inspired to
create his group, ³How to permanently delete your Facebook account,² after
joining, leaving and then rejoining Facebook, only to find that all of his
information from his first account was still available.

³I wanted the information to be available inside Facebook for all the users
who wanted to leave, and quite a few people have found it just by using
internal search,² said Mr. Wallin. Facebook has never contacted Mr. Wallin
about the group.

Mr. Wallin said he has heard through members that some people have
successfully used his steps to leave Facebook. But he is not yet ready to
leave himself.

³I don¹t want to leave yet; I actually find it really convenient,² he said.
³But someday when I want to leave, I want it to be simple.²