Forget Deleting: Even Deactivating Your Facebook Account Can Be Difficult

On Thursday night I deactivated my Facebook account. It’s something I’d been considering for a while, as I’ve found using Facebook lately to be less a useful “checking up on friends and family” thing, and more something slightly depressingly monotonous which I continue to do out of sheer force of habit. It just so happened on Thursday there was a trigger which finally led me to push the button.

I admit, for a moment, I did consider deleting the account full-stop. Deleting you Facebook account is notoriously difficult to achieve. It seems to have gotten better and easier over the last couple of years, even before you consider services such as the new JustDelete.me.

For better or worse I decided that in all likelihood I would return to using Facebook one day… that this was just a temporary hiatus to give me space to clear my head. So, as the title of the post indicates, here came the hard part.

The process of deactivating your account in itself is “reasonably” straight-forward: Go to Account Settings > Security, then click the small link under the main list of options. Facebook will first try to emotionally twist your arm into staying, by showing big profile pictures of some of your friends. It’ll ask you why you’re leaving, then ask for your password, and then, just to be sure you really, really, really do want to deactivate, present you with a CAPTCHA image for verification. So far so simple. The difficulty comes in staying deactivated.

Deactivation only lasts so long as you stay logged out of your Facebook account. Log back in for whatever reason and it’s instantly reactivated again. Fine, just stay logged out then? OK, consider how many sites, services, even apps on your phone connect with Facebook, or even use it as their user login mechanism (the “Facebook Platform”). My iPad is logged in and connected to Facebook at the OS level, never mind using an app. Now factor in how many other computers you might be logged into Facebook using – often this could be 2 or more (say, home plus work). In my case I had to unlink iOS on my iPad from Facebook; uninstall the Facebook app from both the iPad and my phone; uninstall the Facebook Messenger app from my phone; logout from Facebook on my work laptop and some browser sessions on my iPad; change my OpenID settings on StackOverflow; and log out/change settings on a few other sites and apps… All so I could be as sure as possible my account wouldn’t spontaneously reactivate itself. There’s probably some that I’ve missed, so chances are I’ll need to deactivate again at some point.

I’m not (entirely) blaming Facebook for this though. Facebook has had to grow, and has done so by spreading itself across the web, to be more than just a profile and social stream. By wanting to opt-out of a profile for a while, I can no longer “like” an interesting blog article; I can’t try out that buzz-worthy new service or app that relies on logging in using Facebook; I can’t click that link to the apparently-hilarious cat meme my workmate just posted… OK, I’m not really going to be bothered by that last one, but you get the idea… there are now certain things – increasingly common things – I can’t do on the web any more, just by wanting out of Facebook for a while.