I wouldn’t have even brought this up, really, unless I hadn’t encountered it in two places at once. I won’t even call it a trend yet. In fact, I hope that this article sparks some public discourse of this potential issue and nips it in the bud. What I’m talking about, if not made clear in the title, is that two sites I know of are offering account deactivation instead of outright account deletion. The two sites are Facebook and Ning. I’m sure you’re familiar with Facebook, but you may not be aware of Ning, a site which offers personalized and private social networks.

I found Ning after getting out of Facebook because I still wanted a social network for my friends. I signed up for Ning only to find out that it will no longer be free starting in July and decided it wasn’t for me. While I was able to delete the single group I had created I found that the only option I have to get rid of my account is to deactivate it. This is worse than Facebook’s method of hiding the Account Deletion page and then making it take 14 days before it actually happens, but not by much.

The rationale here seems to be that once you are a member of the site, its tantamount to self destruction to let that member leave for whatever reason. They must have thought that they would simply fix whatever issues the member is having and that everything would be good. In the case of deactivating your account in Facebook, they assume you simply don’t understand how to use the site, and try to redirect you to the Help Center to educate you.

I don’t see this as acceptable in any way, shape, or form, especially in the context of a social web site where people share their personal information, current location, photos, thoughts, and ideas with their friends. If you are done with a service, you should be done with it, and that service doesn’t have the right to archive your personal belongings when you don’t want them to remain there. I’ve read Facebook’s Terms of Service, and here’s the first and salient section (the links in this section are to pages owned by Facebook):

Date of Last Revision: April 22, 2010

This Statement of Rights and Responsibilities (“Statement”) derives from the Facebook Principles, and governs our relationship with users and others who interact with Facebook. By using or accessing Facebook, you agree to this Statement.

1. Privacy

   Your privacy is very important to us. We designed our Privacy Policy to make important disclosures about how you can use Facebook to share with others and how we collect and can use your content and information.  We encourage you to read the Privacy Policy, and to use it to help make informed decisions.

2. Sharing Your Content and Information

   You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings. In addition:

   1. For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (“IP content”), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (“IP License”). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.
   2. When you delete IP content, it is deleted in a manner similar to emptying the recycle bin on a computer. However, you understand that removed content may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time (but will not be available to others).
   3. When you use an application, your content and information is shared with the application.  We require applications to respect your privacy, and your agreement with that application will control how the application can use, store, and transfer that content and information.  (To learn more about Platform, read our Privacy PolicyAbout Platform page.) and
   4. When you publish content or information using the “everyone” setting, it means that you are allowing everyone, including people off of Facebook, to access and use that information, and to associate it with you (i.e., your name and profile picture).
   5. We always appreciate your feedback or other suggestions about Facebook, but you understand that we may use them without any obligation to compensate you for them (just as you have no obligation to offer them).

All in all, I think that these terms of service are pretty good, as legalese goes. What they fail to cover, however, is anything regarding the deletion of your user account. Indirectly, of course, Facebook claims that you own your content, which suggests you can control the ultimate status of your account. Why, then, can I not delete my account?

That is a question for Facebook to answer, and any other company that chooses to employ this kind of policy.

Purchase this and related items at Amazon now: