Ask HN: How to gracefully exit Facebook?

Working on it. My suggestion is send your friends some contact info, like email address and or phone number (depending on whether they are really friends) and let them know you're shutting down your facebook account. Don't really need to give any explanation, just say you're closing it down. If pressed, maybe just say it is a distraction, or whatever.

Facebook won't actually close your account, though. That's the hard part. You have to go thru and delete all your information manually. IF you look on your feed / wall, you can see everything you've done, and you can go and click on it, and delete it. It is a long slow tedious process, and it takes me about 2 hours to do a year.

The normal "cancel my facebook account" procedure that facebook does is to just suspend your account. IT is all there and if you ever log in again, it comes right back. While it is suspended you won't show up on your friends lists, etc, but all your activity is still there.

This makes it really easy & tempting--in the days where just about every webpage has a facebook like button that if you accidentally press will cause you to see the facebook login screen-- to bring your account back.

I went around and around with them over a year ago about this, and their policy is that there is no such thing as "canceling" a facebook account. They keep it ready and waiting for you "for when you want to come back." Thus they will only allow you to "suspend" it. (this policy may have changed given all the high profile facebook quitting in the last year.)

I'm deleting all of the info, when that is done, I'm going to change the real name on the account to asdsrqwer sadfvcawer and then the password to something random and then "Suspend it".

My friends already had my contact info. They're my friends, after all.

So I just told them all I was leaving, deleted every post and picture, and removed every friend-link.

It isn't really that hard.

Who cares if fb has "crested?" If you have some reason of privacy, I can understand, however just deleting your account because it's not the cool thing anymore seems rather petty. Clearly if it's how your friends find you, it still serves a function in your life. Delete your friendster account, yes. I don't understand this compulsion to leave facebook.

  * It's boring.
  * It's a waste of time.
  * I don't trust it.

I "parked" my profile for a month and it really helped break my manic feelings of checking it all the time, then stopping for three days out of guilt, etc.

Ultimately those are the feelings I'm trying to rid myself of, but there are pros to having it around. After a month off, I barely cared to login, but I'm glad it still exists for the random PM or funny news feed. I'm back to checking it every couple of days and I'm happy I didn't delete all my friends, etc.

Your experience may vary though, I doubt most people noticed I was gone.

i'd like to understand the thinking behind "fb has crested" and wanting to take down your page and get out. i haven't seen the movie, so maybe i'm missing something.

to the point of still being findable, use http://about.me or http://extendr.com/ to avoid disappearing.

and strangely enough, the SERP for "matt albiniak" on DDG has twitter first, linkedin second, and facebook third.

In Germany, StudiVZ (a German facebook clone) was quite notorious for being privacy-challenged, to the point where people started calling it StasiVZ (after the former secret police of the GDR).

What happened was that people removed all identifying information from their profiles and changed their names to something that was not recognizable for anyone to search (i.e., either you had them already in the contact list, or you couldn't find their profile without asking them).

AFAIK, Facebook wants you to have your real name on your profile (as per TOS), but a friend with a stalker problem didn't have any problem to get it set to something non-namelike.

IMO, a combination of a non-searchable name and restricted privacy settings for things like "who can tag you in pictures" and "who can see my posts" should solve the bulk of the issue.

Extra points for blocking third-party inclusion of facebook.com scripts or images in your ad blocker (which also blocks the "sign in via facebook" javascript code, like-buttons etc. - these are probably the biggest privacy issues outside facebook itself).

Do you have a website? If you do, this would be a lot easier. If not - well you can always message everyone a copy of your email address one week before you disappear.

In my experience it's not that hard to get out of Facebook - the friends who do want to find you will either Google for you or ask people they know are your friends for contact information. And that's for the really urgent stuff. Just make sure you have a Google-able presence (maybe a Google profile?), an email that's easy to find and you're good to go.

Good luck with the move! :)

Just delete the account and move on. If you attempt to make a "Why I'm too cool/smart to use Facebook anymore" sort of post you're just going to come off as an elitist.

I rarely visit the Facebook site, and only then via a different browser than my main browser, which isn't logged in to Facebook, so it doesn't have the cookies etc. It is also ad-blocking the Facebook domains.

To get notified of interesting things happening, I subscribe to Facebook RSS feeds. JWZ made a listing of some of them here: http://jwz.livejournal.com/1144527.html About the only thing it doesn't include is photo updates.

With this setup, I visit Facebook perhaps once a week.

You can't fully leave Facebook. People can still tag you on photos they take even when you don't have an account. (Just a text tag, but it could still be incriminating...)

I think my favorite departure comes from Half Baked: "Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, you're cool, and fuck you, I'm out!"

That said, you can keep an account without ever visiting the site, for those not-that-close friends.

Facebook is an excellent tool, despite its many privacy concerns.

I hear people talking about leaving facebook entirely and that seems a bit short-sighted and draconian in measure. Little do I hear discussed changing the way that we use Facebook.

Last month, I went from 250+ friends to 40. Instead of using Facebook as a mean to accumulate every acquaintance I've ever made, I decided to only keep the friends to which I am close and comfortable sharing parts of my life. I changed most of my privacy settings to the most restrictive possible.

Yes, Facebook may change its privacy settings again. If the privacy becomes such an issue to warrant me leaving, I will leave. However, keeping up with the privacy changes and settings is a price I am willing to pay. Facebook is not free.

Being an entrepreneur, I do want an easy way to announce things I do. I want a way to keep in touch with those closest to me. That number of people is 40 right now, and still seems a bit high. Still, since I have cut most of my friends I have found myself more open and willing to use Facebook.

I deleted my account. They still store your data and your photos on their server for 14 days. They say 'in case you reactivate it'. Just tell your CORE friends/family you are leaving for greener pastures. Just leave a status for everyone else, if they care, they care. If they don't, who cares.

Just as Google has gone into markets that are far beyond search engines (like phones), Facebook will. I think there is a high likelyhood that five years from now people will look back at this time and realize now was just the beginning for Facebook.

Do you have to completely delete your account right away? Why don't you try gradually reducing your Facebook presence by following these steps:

1. Stop posting any content yourself. Stop using/playing all apps/games. If you need to contact someone, do it via phone, email, or some other non-Facebook medium. Disable Facebook chat so they can't message you on there, and reply to their messages/wall posts in person or over the phone (replying with another internet-based medium might raise some red flags, but using an entirely different form of communication won't).

2. Delete content you've posted in the past. Remove apps/games you have installed and remove yourself from the groups you're in. Remove information from your profile. Untag yourself from pictures others have posted.

3. Delete friends that you haven't talked to in a long time.

4. Contact your remaining friends and give them your contact info.

5. Delete your account.

I try to keep only 50 friends max. I use to have like 300+ friends which was totally useless and definitely not good for me because I was always checking every pages, answering comments, chatting etc. but I wasn't "that" connected to my true friends.

Tell your actual friends you're leaving Facebook.

As for your "Facebook Friends", remove all of your content, lock down your privacy settings, and leave a note on your profile page that says the account is no longer being used. That way, when people find you on Facebook they will know what's going on.

Many of the 'friends' you have on Facebook are anything but. They're all superficial and mainly virtual relationships you have with others you will most likely never meet let alone contact offline. I quit Facebook several months ago and haven't felt a thing. You'll soon realize that those you really cared for and whose relationships mean anything were those who you already kept in contact with outside of the service. I didn't bother leaving a going away message. Unless your friends are part of very small circles, your absence will go unnoticed. Facebook is great at making people think they're getting a lot more attention than they really are, and so people tend to think that leaving will create a void that friends will cry over. While the reason to quit here isn't really a valid one, I really would recommend deleting your Facebook page to anyone, unless the survival of your circle depends on it or you need it for familial purposes. It's a huge time sink and for something so shallow.

In short, if you really want to leave, just do it. Don't bother with being graceful; no one will notice or care for more than a minute.

it's easy.

post "i'm deleting my facebook account"

deactivate your account

stop using it for 14 days

you're gone.

I think while you're definitely free to leave, just keep in mind that the movie is very exaggerated and the truth is really not anywhere as bad as it seems. I think Lawrence Lessig had some great commentary on this the other day:

http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/78081/sorkin-zucke...

Aaron Sorkin is a great writer, but he's writing for dramatic effect, not truth. Don't let the film factor in to your escape.

Yes, please. If you are not social, the rest of us on Facebook would appreciate it if you left. The best way to do it is to de-activate your account and move on.

The rest of use love sharing our lives with our friends and family on facebook. Maybe it's time to take a look at your life?

I haven't deleted my account, but I just post status & a message board message saying I don't log in often and where to contact me - which is my web page. You could just leave an email address there.

For me, Facebook is a giant phone book. It is a way to look people up and for people to find you. I like it for that, beyond that - email me.

It seems pretty simple. Just put your desired contact info in your FB profile, stop going there, and stay logged out.

I feel like this is just another thinly disguised "Look at me, I'm deleting Facebook!" post. Do you really need our advice on how to remove yourself from a website? Just delete it, or delete all your data.