My experiment back on May 10, 2010 appears to have finally worked. I deleted my Facebook account. The Earth somehow still manages to rotate. I know you were worried too.
*phew*
But… you see, I opened another account to confirm this happened. There’s no email from Facebook that says “You are dead unto us” or “Your account has been wiped (from places you can see at least) completely. Nope. So, I used my other AUP/ToS violating second account to confirm my previous Facebook account had been “deleted”.
What I used to determine the deletion was attempts to add the old email addresses associated with the account I requested for deletion previously. This was impossible to do until the previous Facebook account was in some state that disassociated those email addresses.
After some time, it just appeared that the 14 day cooling off period was more like a 21 day or 30 day or more period. At any rate, I tried earlier this week and it looks like the other account is truly gone as I was able to add email accounts to the account I used to monitor the deleted account progress (or lack thereof).
But wait… I locked down to “Only Me” for everything on my monitoring account. Or so I thought…
Check this out: (take a closer look)
Oh really? I didn’t ask for that setting. Nice defaults choice Facebook engineering team. Thanks for not setting it to public. I think you are getting better at this stuff.
And so you ask, what is the moral of this boring story?
Simple: It’s still complicated.
