I “deleted” my Facebook accounts a year or so ago. (I had two, because I think I drunkenly signed up for one with my phone number and then forgot about it.)
I was recently reminded that someone was able to still see, tag, and otherwise interact with me. “Fuck that,” I said. “What a fucking pile of ass. I don’t want to fucking talk to any of you people. Also, fuck your data lake, get the fuck out of my life.”
So tonight, I finally go there and try to log in. On both:
“You have selected to delete your account. Your data will all be deleted by June 7, 2019. Click [cancel deletion] to avoid this, or [logout] to continue deleting your account.”
This is the same fucking message I saw when I chose to delete them both last year. Except probably not dated to June 7, 2019.
Fuck them. I hope all their investors get a previously unknown, untreatable, and aggressive strain of syphilis and that they all share it with Facebook management without giving them a choice about it.
Not defending Facebook, but if you follow the permanent delete instructions it will happen. I’m kind of a street preacher about it so I’ve been through the process a few times with people.
Still, it’d be cool if you could check a box that says “disable all the ways most people inadvertently interact with their account during the waiting period; I’m very serious about this.”
This is my guess. Somewhere, you authenticated with Facebook (maybe Spotify? Something else similar?) and that site/service is pinging regularly to see if you have any new content germane to their offering.
There’s just no excuse for silently extending the grace period based on automated interactions. The only possible way the grace period should adjust is if you affirmatively answer a “do you want to cancel the account deletion?” question.
That said, I can’t believe that this is intentional, rather than some kind of weird edge-case bug. This is the kind of thing that multi-billion Euro fines are made of, if it were to be intentional and ever accidentally applied to somebody in the EU.
