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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
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.
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 to convince you to just deactivate (again), asks you to confirm, enter your password again, and so on.
Almost certainly in the future, this experience will be illegal, as emerging privacy laws require experiences continue to insist that companies like Facebook and Amazon make it just as easy to leave their experiences as to sign up. In fact, the FTC has already announced a rule which likely makes what you see above illegal in the United States, though it hasn’t come into effect yet. (We’ll see if that happens under the Trump administration, I suppose.) Additionally, Meta has already paid billions of dollars for privacy violations/GDPR breaches in the European Union to the point that Zuckerberg recently stated on Joe Rogan’s podcast that he hopes Trump will pressure the EU to put an end to these record fines. (One fine alone originating in Ireland cost Facebook 1.2 billion Euros.)
Consider the diagram above a *rough draft* of the most straight-forward or “happy path” flow for deleting your Facebook account. All ~20+ steps. It’s rough because I could add more detail to show how this works and you could conceivably create a version that details the potential forking if you decide to deactivate instead, additional places where you have to scroll before you find a “continue” button, make additional selections not even depicted here (e.g. download your information, transfer your information, plus several other options), etcetera.
Anyway, I do understand why many people continue to use Facebook for now. A whole separate piece could be devoted to discussing how Facebook has created a walled garden, making it difficult for people with specific use cases to leave the platform. Indeed, much has been written about that. Still, I also applaud those who are willing to leave Facebook. The time is ripe for a Facebook replacement and I hope we see it soon.
Postscript
A short time after deleting my test account (named for Max Rockatansky from the Mad Max films), I received an email from Facebook telling me that my account was “scheduled for deletion.” Facebook would “start deleting” my account in 30 days. (Emphasis mine.) In other words, my account still has not been deleted, and it is impossible to immediately delete your account.
I’m writing on a book on the topic of privacy by design, which I hope to hold in my hands before the end of 2025. If you’re interested in this topic, you can learn more about the book over at Rosenfeld Media and sign up to be alerted when it’s due to arrive.
Robert Stribley is a user experience designer and educator who is writing a book on privacy by design. He has presented on “Designing for Privacy in an Increasingly Public World” at the Brooklyn Product Design Meetup, Design Museum Week, and 2600 Magazine’s A New HOPE 2022 conference.
You can find him on Mastodon and Bluesky. You can support his writing by becoming a Medium member and subscribing to his posts. You can even leave him a tip if you like or simply click the clapper at below left a few times to show your support.