Every once in awhile I get freaked out about my privacy. By being so well connected with Twitter, especially Facebook and various other social media sites, I feel it isn’t unreasonable to retain the rights to my personal information. Everything I write and or volunteer to these sites, should remain mine. I don’t doubt that the information that I provide can and may be used to benefit the service in some way, financial or otherwise. However, when I am through with the service, I think everything I provided should be immediately deleted from their servers.

An example would be Facebook. I think it’s interesting that it isn’t easy to delete your account, but only to deactivate it. This is how they can claim they have 500 million+ users. Regardless, deleting your Facebook account is a step that shouldn’t be taken lightly. There are so many connections and relationships that have been created and fostered, that to abandon them entirely on a whim would be tantamount to disownment by your family and friends.

Deleting your Facebook account is not easy. You must first submit a request to permanently delete your account. After submitting the request there is nothing else that you have to do. Seems easy, right? Wrong. There is a period in which your deletion request is pending. During this time, about 14 days, your information remains on Facebook’s servers. Any attempt to log back into the service, intentionally or accidentally will undo the deletion request. This means if you click a “Like” button, or login to a site that uses Facebook Connect you will have to start the deletion process all over again.

If you succeed in not logging into Facebook for 2 weeks, most of your content is deleted from Facebook’s servers. I say most, because there are still some things that will remain. Facebook claims it’s for “technical reasons,” but they assure you that the materials they retain cannot be accessed by other Facebook users. Also they claim that they do not use and materials that are associated with accounts that have been deactivated or deleted.

There is no indication of how much material remains on their servers. They claim that all personally identifiable information is deleted, but they never indicate how much of your material remains for technical reasons. They could be talking about all the material that you contributed to the service, all of your photos; all of your notes. Everything.

The fact that they will not use any of that material after you’ve deactivated or deleted your account is still not comforting. My material, my photos, my notes may not be deleted when I delete my account. Even if you manually delete all that material before you delete your account, there is still no guarantee that it is being deleted from their servers. All you have is the hope it’s deleted.

It’s super easy to pick on Facebook. They have, in the past, raised a lot of controversy in regards to their privacy settings. Because of their size, they are targeted by folks, like me, who are wary of their control over the information that users provide them. But that doesn’t preclude other, smaller services from taking advantage of you. It’s important to look at the user agreement and pay close attention to how they will use your information, how easy it is to delete your account and how much of your information is retained once your account is deleted.