Want To #DeleteFacebook? Surprise, It’s Designed To Be A Nightmare

As the kids say, if it wasn't for bad user experience they'd have no user experience at all.
Or something.

From the design mavens at Co-Design:

• 03.28.18
• design crime

Facebook’s account deletion process is a master class in bad UX. 

I deleted my Facebook account this weekend. For years I’d had this nagging feeling that the company was trying to hijack my life story, so I had already deactivated it about three years ago. But as the Cambridge Analytica details emerged last week and calls to #deletefacebook spread across the web, I knew that it was time.

Unsurprisingly, Facebook made deleting my account difficult and unpleasant. This inconsiderate UX only confirmed that the dark patterns in Facebook’s business model run deep, and those patterns are part of a culture that enables manipulative design and lack of transparency.
Here’s how it went down:

1. No clear navigation to delete your account
There are a plethora of third-party “how-to” articles about deleting your Facebook account because, for a company that employs hundreds of UX designers and researchers, it’s not a very intuitive process. For starters, you have to understand that deleting your account is different from deactivating it—and those two options are nowhere near each other on the site. You can find the option to deactivate in your settings, but Facebook has no such menu item for deleting your account. You can search “Delete my account” in the Help Center, and the answer has a link to the page you need. Strangely, though, Facebook puts that hyperlink at the end of a long paragraph, in the phrase “let us know.” A better option? A “Delete My Account” button at the top of the page.

2. Ignoring the user’s intent
I finally got to the deletion page. From there, the next few steps I had to take should have been fairly straightforward. Instead, I stumbled through a series of poorly organized steps....MORE

Back on March 20th The Verge, among others, came out with their handy hints but from what I understand there is no way to actually delete the date that's been collected.
How to delete Facebook

Facebook responded by making some changes:

It’s Time to Make Our Privacy Tools Easier to Find

But I couldn't find anyone to bet me that FB is actually deleting everything if you delete your accoutn.