

There are two things one can do, neither of which helps.





You can deactivate your account. Which still allows people to find your profile and people can still send requests to be friends. Deactivated Facebook accounts don't really mean anything. You can request to cancel and completely remove your account data. But this is very tricky and difficult to achieve.



Here is what my experience has been with both of these cases…



At first I could not find any option to delete my profile. All I found was a way to deactivate the account. So I did that. I use Google alerts to monitor my name on the Internet and months later Google sent me an alert indicating that I was still being listed on Facebook. So I tried logging back in, only to discover a bunch of friend requests that were accumulating. That proved that people were still seeing my profile.



Logging back in had reactivated my account, so I deactivated it again. But that only put me back in the useless stage I was in before, with Facebook including me with their “active” accounts.



I wonder if they are doing this just to make themselves look bigger than they are in order to get a bigger sales price should they ever go public. Google and Yahoo both tried to buy Facebook. But Facebook didn’t sell. Are they holding out for more? Are they buying time to build an even bigger false image, fooling anyone who may still want to buy them out?



I had posted notices to Facebook requested to remove all my profile data and waited and waited. I even tried logging back in to search for a link that might allow complete removal. But every time I logged in, I found more friend requests. I even found some requests from people I knew. That bothered me because these people should be emailing me direct if they want to be in touch. After all, they knew me. How silly!



I tried changing all my profile info so that it would not match up if anyone tried to find me on Facebook. I didn’t think it was fair to let people request to be my friend if I wasn’t looking at it and responding anyway. Those who really know me can just email me. They have my email address.



When I tried to change the data, a notice indicated that the changes would take effect after a few days. But after many months, the changes I made to my city, state and other info all remained the same as I first entered it.



Okay, I realize that the Facebook privacy policy does say that any information you enter remains. But this is stupid. What if someone moves? Or did they refuse to allow my changes because they knew I was doing it to try to negate my profile? I wonder.



After many more months, I spent hours on Internet searches for help from other people in blogs and news columns. I discovered that this is a widespread problem. I tried going into the Facebook help section and entered the query “I want to permanently delete my account”. Aha! I found the following in the Help Center on Facebook's website.…