Deleting My Accounts

After several months of being a non-user, I finally bit the bullet and deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts recently. What follows is not an essay trying to convince the reader to do the same, or a guide to a life without social-media, or anything of that sort, but a rant about how convoluted it is to actually delete your accounts.

So, I logged into both Facebook and Instagram today (for deletion) after many months, and saw the designed-to-catch-your-eye notification buttons, popups, “like” symbols and other things after a long time. Having grown immune to this, and feeling a slight sense of superiority, I proceeded straight to the settings menus to find some “Delete my account” button. What surprised me was the extents to which these apps go to dissuade the user from actually deleting their account.

First, the option to delete account itself was buried deep into the settings page and was in a very non-obvious submenu. For Instagram specifically, I had to duck-duck-go how exactly to delete the account – that option isn’t even part of the main web-app, but seems to be in some sort of legacy, old looking webpage.

Second, these apps encourage the user to “Download a copy” of their account data before deleting the account. While the intent behind encouraging users to do so seems suspicious (it’s probably to make it easy for the user to re-open their account sometime later, import that data and start using Facebook again like before), what was surprising to me was that you actually need to “Request” a copy of your data from Facebook. OK, so I need to request my data from Facebook? How silly is that?

And not just that, it takes an absurdly long time for the data fetch request to actually get completed. I refuse to believe that, in 2022, it takes more than 2 whole minutes (yes, that’s how long I waited before realizing that I was being made a fool out of) for a massive company like Facebook with all sorts of high-performance servers to collect ~18 photos from 7 posts of mine and create a JSON/HTML out of it and make it available to me for download. They actually made a new tab in their settings page to show such “pending” data requests, which is just ridiculous. Facebook probably thought that I would wait for that pending request and hopefully forget about it (and consequentially about deleting my account) in a few days.

Thirdly, even if you manage to get around all these loop holes and finally click on the big red¹ “Delete account” button … your account isn’t deleted. Well, isn’t deleted yet. It will get deleted 30 days later. While it is understandable that account deletion will definitely be more expensive than “requesting data” because of the large number of cross linked likes/tags/etc to be deleted, there’s definitely a hope on their part that, sometime in the next 30 days, loyal users may come back to their website with drooling tongues and wagging tails, looking to be patted on their heads.