Goodbye Facebook

In a recent post I said goodbye to Twitter as I deleted my account over there, now it's Facebook's turn.  Before I deleted my facebook account I used the download a copy of my data feature which you can find at the bottom of the page in Account Settings.  I noticed a link to download an "expanded archive" which included meta-data for my profile, so this was data facebook had collected.  In amongst the data was a collection of IP Addresses.  These are the IP Addresses my Facebook Account has been accessed from.  There were 30 in all.  Over the 6 years I had my facebook account I am not able to tell where and when each IP address accessed my account however I have been able through the use of WHOIS domain tools, to determine which ISP the IP addresses belong to and which countries.

I have never left the UK or Ireland except for visiting France so you'll appreciate my surprise when I discovered among the 23 IP addresses that weren't my own, countries such as the British Virgin Islands, Jamaica, Australia, Malta, Philippines, USA, and Canada among others.  Those 23 IP Addresses are not mine, they never could have been and the WHOIS records for those IP addresses are quite clear as to which ISPs they have been assigned to etc.

In the 6 years of my time on facebook I can remember at least 2 times I could not access my account and had to recover it through the security steps facebook introduced.  I had facebook since 2006 though and the early versions of the site didn't have the layers of security it has today.

I think everything I said about Twitter pretty much applies to facebook too so there's not much point repeating myself.

I considered deactivating my profile on facebook but for me deactivating wouldn't be enough.  I found out that it is actually possible to delete your facebook account so that's the option I took.

If you visit:
facebook.com/help/delete_account

You will see a prompt that will allow you to delete your account.  Your profile is deactivated for 14 days after which it is deleted permanently.  I am not sure if everything is removed or not such as posts etc but as far as I am concerned since January I have been deleting a lot from my timeline - I mentioned in a previous post about a purging mentality that getting rid of excess baggage etc is a necessary process I go through every now and then - so little by little my timeline was cleansed of everything.  So regardless of whether facebook removes everything when an account is deleted, I have already made sure there is nothing left behind, at least nothing visible.