Mar 25, 2009 - Comments: 0

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

Posted by Lisa King under Social Media

As I mentioned earlier this year, one of my New Year's resolutions is to remove myself from online communities where I no longer participate – it makes no sense to have a profile that's abandoned and hasn't been updated in months (or even years). So, I'm saying goodbye to Classmates, Friendster and maybe MySpace.

But as we all learned when Facebook recently proposed altering their terms of service, is gone really gone? What happens to your information when you delete your account? While we’ve come a long way since 2504 Steps to Deleting Your Facebook Account, not every service makes it easy or clear. (For example, there’s a difference between deactivating and deleting your account on Facebook)

Classmates

So, let's start with Classmates.com – we've all received those emails about classmates looking for us. We've probably wondered why they aren't looking for us on Facebook. And then we discover that we have to pay to see anything of value. If you're like me, you abandon the profile creation process half way through, never going back enough to make it worth it and never getting annoyed enough with the emails to delete the profile. But I'm living up to my resolution, so I'm back at Classmates.com and successfully remembering which email I used to register. So, where to delete that account? Not under account settings. Every time I change screens I have to kill a pop-up that asks my birthday. After a lot of looking, under Help there's a question "How do I cancel my membership?"

If you're a free member of Classmates.com then you have to visit the Remove Your Registration form, select a reason for leaving, click Remove Registration and then confirm.

If you've paid to be a Gold member, then you have to contact Member Support to revert to the free level and then cancel, but you will lose any membership fees you have paid.

If you've registered more than once, you need to log in under each account and remove each registration invidividually.

Goodbye high school classmates.

Friendster

On to Friendster. Logging in took 2 tries to remember my password since it's been over a year since I've been to the site. I don't even get many emails from them since only a few friends are still using it. A click on Account Settings shows a Cancel Account link at the bottom of the page. This brings you to a form that reminds you of everything you can do on Friendster and what you'll lose if you cancel. Then you have to re-enter your log in and password, check a reason and confirm that you want to cancel.  With that done, just to test, I tried to log back in and happily received an error message saying "The email address you entered is not a valid Friendster login."

MySpace

When I log into MySpace I remember why I never check it and my ambivalence about deleting the account is gone. Click on My Account and then on Account and scroll down to Account Cancellation. After a reminder that you will lose everything you've uploaded and selecting a reason from the list, you will see a pop-up offering to show you how you can enjoy MySpace more, but if you persevere you will have the option to actually cancel. And then they send you an email that you have to confirm that you wish to cancel. (I seriously felt like saying "no means no" in the comments field by the time it was done. Can I just go please?). We'll see if it actually works since I can still log back in to my account.

Facebook

As previously mentioned, there's a difference between deactivating your account and deleting your account on Facebook. If you deactivate you account, all your messages, photos, etc. will still be there waiting for you – like you never left. To actually remove everything you need to either uninstall every application and delete each photo and message individually or delete your account.

To deactivate, just click Settings in the upper right corner and select the Deactivate account option. If you choose to delete your account, you will find a reminder that they were wrong about the change to the terms of service and won’t you please reconsider, but if you’re set on leaving, enter your email address and click.

We'll see if that stops the email reminders from each service or if now they just try to lure me back. Are there any other communities or services you've tried to leave that haven’t made it easy?

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