Delete Your Account!

Some personal and professional thoughts on the recent Facebook changes from a privacy by design perspective with a focus on the incredibly difficult experience of attempting to delete your account

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaking at Facebook’s Developer Conference in 2019. He was announcing plans to make Facebook more private. — Original image from Wikimedia Commons. Photoshop by Robert Stribley.

I’ve remained on Facebook for a long time despite having reservations about using the platform because I have so many friends and family there with whom it’s hard to communicate over a great distance otherwise. However, the recent changes Mark Zuckerberg has implemented will make the platform more toxic than ever before, enabling some of the worst actors to harass some of the most at-risk people there. Additionally, after spending almost a quarter century working in the world of user experience design, I would no longer want to work for a company, which does not put an emphasis upon diversity and inclusion as it inevitably leads to poor and even dangerous design decisions. Facebook has just abandoned any such efforts. Consequently, I’m planning to use Facebook even less frequently and also hope that some sort of replacement site comes along in the near future.

It’s Not So Simple to “Delete Your Account”

Related, I’m currently working on a book on the topic of designing for privacy and many of the issues I’ve had with Facebook tie into that. One privacy issue many big platforms like Facebook suffer from is not allowing you to easily delete your account. (Or not really deleting it when they say they have.) I say “suffer” but from Facebook’s perspective, this is clearly a feature, not a bug.

This weekend I researched and determined that it takes approximately 20 steps to delete your Facebook account. I mapped them out in the flow diagram you see below. The first 10 of those ~20 steps involve just drilling down the point in the experience that even allows you the option to delete your account or to just deactivate it.

Note: Although this lists 19 screens, some screens require more than one click; hence the ~20 steps — e.g. Scrolling and clicking or reviewing multiple answers if you choose to, etc. Additional screens, of course, if you review all the responses to common concerns. (Click image for larger version.)

In the remaining steps, Facebook tries to convince you to deactivate your account instead of deleting it, asks why you’re leaving, offers solutions to your issues with the platform, tries…