As a bit of a follow up to a post I did some weeks ago about controlling the kind of information that gets back to Facebook via Facebook Beacon, it turns out that, in a similar vein, it may in fact be difficult to get Facebook to delete all of your information once you decided you don’t want to *be* in Facebook any more.

That is, with Facebook’s Beacon you can choose not to tell your friends (i.e. “opt out”) about your online purchasing activities — your activities may still be captured and stored by Facebook … just not published.

And so it may be with inactivated accounts.

If you decide to pull the plug on Facebook you can choose to deactivate your account, but there’s no guarantee that your information will be deleted.  In fact, it won’t be.

According to a news report out of the UK, the information commissioner in Britain is looking into Facebook because deleting yourself from Facebook is, practically, for many people, very difficult, bordering on the impossible.  You would have to manually remove all of your friends, your associations, your pages and so on.  And as the article states — for many people this could take days, or weeks.  And if this is the case, it might be a violation of the Data Protection Act.

I suppose that a standard of reasonableness will have to be applied to the situation, but I don’t see how getting accounts deleted in their entirety is all that onerous or complicated, for that matter.

Bottom line?  In addition to owning everything you post on Facebook, Facebook has made it impossible to *remove* said information even after you can’t see it (because you’ve “inactivated it”).

tip: all facebook