Recent issues with the
Facebook terms of service—which would have given Facebook rights to
everything you post there, for the remainder of time—had some users
threatening to pull out. Which is probably why Facebook recanted on the
changes and suddenly embraced democracy for its guidelines. If you're still steamed, you have a couple of ways to leave FB behind. First is simple "deactivation." Visit your Facebook Account page and click the "deactivate" link at the bottom. Facebook will make an
attempt to guilt-trip you into staying by pointing out just how many of
your social-network friends won't be able to keep in touch. It even
displays pictures of people you're in photos with, playing on your emotions with captions such as, "Mark will miss
you" and "Wendy will miss you." Sure they will. Then how come they
never poke me? Once you've cleared the tears from your eyes, you'll notice another
message on-screen, wherein the Facebook Team points out that you
shouldn't deactivate because of that silly old terms of service change.
That "was a mistake we have now corrected." Too much hullaballoo. Soldier on. You have to provide a reason to deactivate, whether you'll be back or not, and you can also opt out of getting e-mails from Facebook while deactivated. That's the trick: Deactivation is not
the same as deletion. Your account simply becomes invisible. Your
friends on Facebook will all think you bailed. However, you have the
option to reactivate it in the future, without losing any photos,
notes, or pokes. True deletion of a Facebook account means losing all of those—so be
sure you have local copies of photos and notes before you take this
step. You can't reactivate. Here's the link to the Delete My Account page.
Remove thy presence
A solid guide for extricating your personal information from the Internet.