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

Robert Stribley
4 min readJan 12, 2025
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…

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Robert Stribley
Robert Stribley

Written by Robert Stribley

Writer. Photographer. UXer. Creative Director. Interests: immigration, privacy, human rights, design. UX: Technique. Teach: SVA. Aussie/American. He/him.

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