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February 15, 2008
Quitting Facebook - Why Did It Take the NYT?
I passed on linking to an NYTimes article on how hard it is to unregister from Facebook because, well, I've already linked to people complaining about that, and I didn't feel like linking to what I suppose would be considered The Complaining of Record on the matter.
The thing is, it took an entity like the New York Times, apparently, to get Facebook to stop being so obnoxious:
"On Monday, Facebook modified its help pages to tell people that if they wanted to remove their accounts entirely, they can direct the company by e-mail to have it done. But on Tuesday, representatives of Facebook stopped short of saying the company would introduce a one-step delete account option.
"'We're always working to improve the user experience,' Katie Geminder, director for user experience and design at Facebook, said in a statement sent by e-mail.
'We are measuring the effects of the change we made yesterday, and if we think more needs to be done to improve the user experience for deleting an account, we'll test different implementations and measure them accordingly,' she added.
"The updated Facebook help page now includes the question 'How do I delete my account?' The answer: 'If you do not think you will use Facebook again and would like your account deleted, we can take care of this for you. Keep in mind that you will not be able to reactivate your account or retrieve any of the content or information you have added.'"
(link)
Mark Hachman at AppScout suggests that Facebook isn't being transparent enough, since the site help doesn't bother to mention "deletion" in its "deactivation" entry. But searching for either "deactivate my account" or "delete my account" yields both the deletion and deactivation entries. On the other hand, they reference "the form at the bottom of the page," which doesn't exist unless they mean the "Write us a message" link.
Either way, it was stupid of Facebook to wait so long to make the process anything approaching "simple," and the company's essentially grasping, clingy refusal to delete any accounts except those scoured of every single bit of personal data was obnoxious. Clearly the management would prefer to give only incremental ground on the issue until enough people are satisfied to make sure that anyone who's not looks like a bitter crank.
(Thanks to Michael B. for passing along the link.)
Posted by mhall at 7:11 PM | Add Comment
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