Facebook ‘deactivation’ does not equal ‘cancellation’

If you value your privacy, you may have decided to cancel your Facebook account. You may even think you’ve already done that by deactivating your account. If so, you’d be mistaken.

It’s fairly easy to go to Facebook and “deactivate” your account. Probably because doing so doesn’t actually delete your information. It only removes your page from public view. All your info is still there, waiting to be reactivated and still accessible to Facebook for their use or abuse. To actually remove your information, you must “cancel” your account.  (Beats me why anyone would want to deactivate an account; I’ll bet everyone who’s done so thought they were deleting/canceling their account.)

For obvious reasons, Facebook doesn’t make the cancellation option obvious. In fact, I was unable to find it when I decided to cancel my rarely used account. It can be done though, as explained at WikiHow. Thought you might like to know.

Thanks to Adrian Perez over at Primevector for the tip.

5 thoughts on “Facebook ‘deactivation’ does not equal ‘cancellation’

  1. Worth knowing. I’ve never had a Facebook account, and have no desire to get one, but my 15 year old does, and sometimes I feel like deleting her whole account! The whole concept of sharing every tiny detail with a group of strangers seems dangerous to me.
    ___________
    The only reason I opened an account was to be able to see a page from a popular nature webcam I’ve been following. With yet another flap about Facebook and privacy, I decided it just wasn’t worth the risk.

  2. I’m still okay with FB but may be looking to ‘cancel’ in the near future.
    Great idea but the amount of info shared scares me.
    ~m
    ____________
    Yep, both FB and Twitter stopped being “just between friends” a long time ago.

... and that's my two cents