Last week we covered the news that Facebook had shut down Seppukoo, a service which enables users to automate the process of deleting their profile. This week Facebook has done it again, by shutting down the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine. The service functions similarly to Seppukoo, and is part of an increasing number of products which enable users to commit digital suicide.
Why would users want to commit digital suicide you ask? As the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine explains in the video below, deleting your Facebook account used to be an extremely cumbersome task. In order to delete your account, you had to individually remove every message, comment, wall post, photo, or other digital artifact from Facebook before being able to shut down your account. Thanks to a complaint filed by the Canadian Privacy Commission, Facebook decided to provide a service which lets users delete their account more easily.
The bigger issue with the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine was that it also deleted information from Facebook’s servers, not just a user’s account. When Facebook users use the delete account form, Facebook continues to archive user data for an unspecified length of time. That means if a user decides to log back in, there data will still be available, whereas deleted information via the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine is permanent. As the developers behind the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine highlighted, over 500 users have already deleted their Facebook accounts with the service:
After more than 50.000 friends being unfriended and more than 500 forever “signed-out” users, Facebook started to block our suicidemachine from their servers without any comment! We are currently looking in ways to circumvent this ungrounded restriction imposed on our service!
My guess is that the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine won’t be coming back anytime soon, and any other service which attempts to automate the systematic deletion of user account data will also be blocked by Facebook.
![[Inside Social Apps 2012]](http://www.allfacebook.com/wordpress/wp-content/themes/allfacebook2/images/ISA2012_336x100_F_RegisterNow.gif)
![[AllFacebook Stats: Facebook Analytics for Your Business]](http://www.allfacebook.com/wordpress/wp-content/themes/allfacebook2/images/stpro_allfacebookstats.gif)
![[How can Facebook change your business?]](http://www.allfacebook.com/wordpress/wp-content/themes/allfacebook2/images/FMB_A_MAY2011_336x100_F.gif)
I need this to rid my pc of leftover AOL programs!
Comment by Paul Frey — January 4, 2010 @ 7:40 am
Facebook is obligated by the Canadian Privacy Commission to provide this permanent delete feature in the near future. According to the local law, if a user requests a purge of all identifiable information within your system, it is their right.
Comment by Facebook User — January 4, 2010 @ 12:12 pm
The video seems interesting. Thanks for sharing about the site.
Comment by Andrew — January 5, 2010 @ 2:33 am
Where are the old days of privacy concern? I remember freaking out because of cookies, and now FB is going to far with this.
Comment by celulares — January 5, 2010 @ 4:45 am
Hi i want to delete this facebook and create another personal file (facebook without deleting all my friends and info.. how can i do that?
Comment by pania — June 21, 2010 @ 1:02 pm