[kenning]

> I don't understand why go through the hassle of actually deleting (particularly since it is so onerous). It changes nothing. There's probably still a shadow account of the data you gave them. Deleting the account doesn't put everything back in pandora's box.

I don't think most facebook users think this way. The big conflict in my experience with the FB scandal is that tech people understand that it's much easier to just keep data around than to track down and delete all of it, whereas users think about it differently.

I believe users conceptualize their access to facebook to be like their access to icloud or dropbox, where they have direct control over their data and when they delete it, it is deleted on the FB servers. (I suppose. Although icloud and dropbox probably keep some records of this data as well.) A coder would be able to intuit that it's much easier to simply flag "deleted" accounts as invisible to other users and keep the data around. Also, using the term "delete" ends up (intentionally or unintentionally) misleading people to think that way, and the 'onerous' nature of deleting leads to a cognitive dissonance where users think that because they worked so hard to 'delete' their account, it was more likely to be actually deleted.

This is part of a culture which is completely pervasive among tech companies of simply keeping all data around forever because until recently there has been zero reason not to, and you might need it later.