So after two weeks of shutting off my access to Facebook, I find myself logging back in. It seems to remove your digital fingerprint from the net is almost impossible. If you are an android user like myself, and a Facebook user, chances are, on several apps you have installed, you have logged in with Facebook. This presents a problem once you delete that account. You cannot re-create the account with the same email, as its already registered. And creating a new account also means you have to start everything over.
So now I am back on Facebook, and trying to clean it up. Again, not an easy task. I have 8 years of posts I want to remove. That’s thousands and thousands of posts I want removed from my timeline. I want to start fresh. I don’t want to create a new account, I don’t want to send the time I spent getting all the connections I have all over again. But Facebook makes it near impossible to get everything removed. The purposely make it hard for you. I found posts where originally you used to be check off the messages you wanted to delete and you could delete 25 at a time. Sadly this has gone away, replaced with a few clicks per each posts to removed them individually. It has taken me 2 days to get the last 4 out of 8 years removed. And not without difficulty…
I would delete all the posts from a given year, between 100 to 150 posts, refresh the page and find out there are more posts I didn’t see. This is because Facebook originally shows you only the highlights and not all the posts… I spend all last night deleting all my posts to wake up and find out I had several more to go once I clicked “View all posts”. I now have it down to 2011, which is half way there, I still need to delete all the data from 2011 to 2007…. Not an easy task when they make it very difficult for you.
So the bottom line is I am back on Facebook, for several reason, one being a lot of my applications are logged in using Facebook. Another is a large project I am now working on uses Facebook for its support community. And lets face is… I missed most of my friends.