Deleting a Facebook account

Steve explores what it takes to delete your Facebook account (and all the data in there). Says the helpful Lucy of the Facebook Team:

Hi Steven,
If you deactivate, your account is removed from the site. However, we save all your profile content (friends, photos, interests, etc.), so if you want to reactivate sometime, your account will look just the way it did when you deactivated. If you do want your information completely wiped from our servers, we can do this for you. However, you need to remove all profile content before we can do this. Once you have cleared your account, let us know and we’ll take care of the rest.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

Lucy
Customer Support Representative
Facebook

This means there is a function to “deactivate” your account, leaving all info intact… but there is no standard function to delete your account. For that you must a) remove all profile content*, and b) contact Facebook directly.

*Now what Lucy doesn’t explicitly say here, though she informs Steve later in the conversation, is that “removing all your profile content (friends, photos, interests, etc.) means deleting, one-by-one every single thing in on your facebook page (minifeed items, little widgety things like movie reviews, friends, etc). Which, if you’ve been at it for a while, could take hours and hours.

Thanks, Facebook.

Read more about Steve’s adventures with Facebook’s privacy policy.