Today, the New York Times online posted this intriguing article about the permanence of a Facebook account. Turns out, even if you deactivate your Facebook account, or remove yourself from the Website, your account isn't really gone. Actually, it lies dormant, simply in a sort of "internet hibernation" until--or if --you ever decide to reactive it sometime in the future.
So what? Lots of people decide to deactive their account. Maybe they're in the process of applying for jobs, or law school, or maybe they've decided they're simply "too old" to be Facebooking. On the plus side, if your account is deactivated, your name won't turn up on any Facebook searches, and your profile is inaccessible. However, any footprints you might have left during the span of your Facebook life remain visible; other Facebook users can still view wall posts, messages, and groups you created.
Therein lies the controversial problem. While deactivated, your account is "on pause", not decisively deleted for all time. In theory, I could deactivate my account today, and return to Facebook at the age of 75 and my profile would be the exact same as it is today, a reflection of my current life as a college senior. But what if I never want to see my profile again? What if I wanted to remove all traces of my activities on Facebook? According to the article, completely and irrecovably removing oneself from the Website is an utterly cumbersome procedure that, until several months ago, was virtually impossible. Today, thanks to a number of protests by Facebook users and a petition at MoveOn.org, it is now a feasible--though still complicated--process.
Before permanently deleting a Facebook account, one should remember that it is an irreversible process. By taking the less dramatic route of deactivating your account, you get not only the benefit of increased privacy and knowing your profile can no longer be accessed by other Facebook users, but also the satisfaction of knowing you can resuscitate your latent account at any time.
If you choose to permanently delete your profile, you could in effect erase engraved memories of your life. You would never burn your high school or college yearbooks, so why would you erase all of the your photos, messages, and groups which have catalogued your youth?
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1 comment:
Hi Hillary,
I've never thought about Facebook as a yearbook or scrapbook before, but you've definitely got a point. The thought of permanantly deleting Facebook gives me that sick feeling you get when you lose something of value, like an heirloom peice of jewelry or something! It houses virtually every significant memory of college life...some things we want to remember when we're 30, and some things we might rather forget.
It'll be interesting to see how Facebook evolves over the next few years...career networking, resume posting, blogs? We'll see...
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