Answer
The deletion process takes up to 90 days and can result in account deletion after the 30-day period.
How long after deactivating Facebook does it delete?
If you want to delete your Facebook account permanently, do it now – because deleting your account is going to get a lot more complicated in the future. And Facebook knows this – and wants you to find out the hard way. Thanks to its new Timeline feature, which collects posts from all periods of time, Facebook now has an awful lot of information about us all – including data ranging from our teenage years through marriage to the birth of our children. How would we feel if we could no longer access that information?
As Facebook grows in popularity, the possibility of losing data stored on it is becoming a reality for more and more users. When I asked friends how long they expected to keep their accounts before deleting them, the consensus was: “I’ll probably just leave my account up forever – or delete it when I’m dead.” But Facebook’s new Timeline feature makes those thoughts seem naïve. Timeline, which has been slowly rolling out to US users since January 2011 (the UK version was released this month), allows you to have an ongoing record of events in your life. It’s intended to be a time-line style history of your status updates, comments, photos, and videos from birth until your death. are, it says, but Facebook now wants to collect data pertaining to our formative years and we seem powerless to prevent it.
When I asked friends how long they expected to keep their accounts before deleting them, the consensus was: “I’ll probably just leave my account up forever – or delete it when I’m dead”
How To Permanently Delete Facebook Account 2020
It is a bit like being given a diary on your 18th birthday and told you to have to hand it over after ten years. It’s for your own good, of course – so that you will have a record of who you were and what happened in your life. But the rest of us get to read everything written in there too. The timeline will be an interesting way for relatives and old school friends to see what you have been up to since they left. And, of course, employers or prospective partners might want to investigate your Facebook record for signs that it doesn’t match your CV.
When I asked whether Timeline would put people off deleting their accounts because they wanted to keep their posts safe from prying eyes, a spokesperson for the social network said “No – our goal with Timeline is to provide a low-pressure way for people who want to share more than just their most recent updates about what’s going on in their life.” The feature will let you choose which parts of your history are visible. But there’s no doubt that Timeline does put an increased onus on users to decide if they really want to erase data stored by Facebook – and that is what it’s really about.
The desire to clean up your Facebook account might be strong – but the mechanisms to do so are not immediately obvious, and there does not appear to be a way of ensuring that you leave no trace when you go. When I set out on my quest to delete my own personal Facebook account I went to Privacy Settings first (under settings in the top right-hand corner). Here you can specify that only friends should see your profile and decide who can see each post you make. But Timeline will probably show a lot more than friends-only posts – and Timeline itself appears nowhere on this page. Also, if any important data is not “protected” by default, it’s easy for even an overly trusting user to reveal it.
I decided the easiest way to permanently leave Facebook would be to delete my own Timeline – but this was not immediately clear from anywhere on the site either. Eventually, I found a “Manage Your Account” page under settings that said: “You can pause your timeline on Facebook for up to 90 days.” After following a link, I clicked through and scrolled down past an “about your timeline” section that didn’t explain what I would be pausing or why. Finally, at the bottom of the page, there was a small option: “Pause your timeline”. Clicking it resulted in instructions for how long you could pause for (up to three months). There were two options: whether you wanted friends and search engines to be able to view your timeline while it was paused – and whether you wanted Facebook to delete your friends’ uploads from that period. But, since my aim was to get rid of the whole thing forever I chose “No” on both counts.
The next page asked me which parts of my profile I didn’t want to be posted on my Timeline anymore (photos or videos). Again, this seemed designed so people could remove unwanted content rather than delete their accounts. There is no option that says: “I don’t want a timeline at all”. There is no button marked Delete Account – just lots of reasons not to delete. If you do eventually decide you’ve had enough, there isn’t even a clear way to confirm your decision – just the same two options that you were given before, except this time you can choose to delete your account for good. And, even if you think that’s what you have done, there is no way of being sure that Facebook won’t decide to bring back your data. After I had clicked through the “delete my account” page and scrolled to the end I was asked: “are you sure?” Then a little box popped up: “If you change your mind about deleting it [your profile], we’ll still be able to keep it in order to…” At this point, I’m afraid I lost patience and closed down the window.
Poppy Crum, a researcher at Stanford University who studies social networks, said that the site had “a massive archive of people’s previous interactions, pictures, and videos. All of this is valuable data which is then used for advertising, mining personal relationships and modeling human behavior.” She points out that Facebook does not make it easy to leave – but that doesn’t mean users shouldn’t have the option. “I think people should be able to choose whether or not they want their digital life to persist after death,” she says.
In response to concerns about Timeline, a spokesperson said: “Facebook’s policies prohibit storing content where it would violate applicable law or our own community standards (for example things like violence and hate speech). When we receive such requests, we take them seriously and either remove content or disable it.
The deletion process takes up to 90 days and can result in account deletion after the 30-day period.
To deactivate your account, start at the Privacy Settings section of your Facebook page. Select Deactivation and deletion under Your Facebook Information, then click on Continue to Account Deactivation. Select which day you want to delete your account from (I recommend just deleting all photos you have uploaded) and again click on Continue to Account Deactivation.
For privacy–sensitive users, the best way to delete your Facebook account is by deleting it in stages. The first stage of deletion takes 30 days and requires you to cancel this cancellation request within that time frame before it goes into effect. After another 60 days, the final process of deletion will be complete and your data erased from Facebook’s servers.
While you can deactivate your Facebook account when desired, deletion is permanent. The difference between the two mainly lies in whether or not Facebook maintains the information on its servers after it’s deleted.
If you deactivate your account, it will no longer be visible to those on Facebook and others won’t be able to find you. Nonetheless, some information such as messages sent to friends may still be viewable while any comments made on other people’s profiles remain in tact.