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Comment on Facebook privacy fuckup reveals who has your number in their phoneparent

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I deleted my facebook account ~6 years ago, but before I completely deleted it I changed my name to "DLC Text".

About a year ago I started getting emails from facebook recruiters, and guess what my name was resolving to in their system? Yep, that's right -- "DLC Text".

For 6 years they have kept my information even though it was deleted.

Silly semantic question - when you 'delete' your facebook account, do they use the word 'delete' or just 'disable' or 'shut off' or something similar?

A friend of mine ragequit facebook a little less than a year ago, came back, and it allowed him to reactivate his profile. I don't think it ever said 'delete' though.

I first "disabled" it, and then I continuously pestered them with emails until they told me they had deleted my login and my account.

From what I understand, many websites now use "soft deletes", where they cut out the ability for users to see/modify data. It remains intact on their servers though.

I really don't agree with this, but I can't deny that there's value in this data. It's unscrupulous to hold onto it, though.

In my opinion, there should be some way to hard-delete information like this, even if the user has to go through some two-key-nuclear-launch confirmation process to prevent accidental deletes.

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