Connection lost: leaving Facebook

I recently decided to close down my Facebook account. I've been a member of the social network since 2006 and since then my attitude towards online privacy has changed. Reasoning aside, shutting down my profile was an interesting experience. But how easy was it to erase myself from Facebook?

I didn't want to loose some of the things on my account; there were certain photos that only existed on Facebook, so first I downloaded my account. The option to download my profile was easy to find and it took about an hour for Facebook to prepare the file and send me an email with a link to download it.

With the 263MB .zip file downloaded, I opened it up to take a look. Facebook creates a folder in which there is a file named index.html; opening this displays a basic-looking version of my Facebook profile.

This is a useful way of keeping an archived record of your profile for future reference. Unfortunately, the HTML file was quite glitchy and crashed on several occasions. The 'wall' was completely off-limits, with my web-browser unable to open the HTML file it was contained within. Still, the downloaded directories of photos and videos were all present and correct.

With a copy of my profile safely downloaded, I was now ready to remove myself from Facebook. This was a pretty painless process.

As I was the administrator of a number of (now redundant) groups I needed to go through and delete each member before finally deleting myself to remove the group from Facebook. This was a bit tiresome and cumbersome, especially if groups still had a large number of members.

Of course, had I wanted the group to remain open I could have selected someone else as an administrator.

Now Facebook attempts to pull on the heart-strings - ‘Sarah will miss you, send her a message' it implores, ‘Luke will miss you, send him a message' it asserts. The fact that I see these two people on a regular basis seems to be quite beyond Facebook.

Having confirmed that I want to deactivate my account, Facebook says that friends can still invite me to events and tag photos of me if I wish. There is then a two week grace period in which I can sign in at any time and immediately reactivate my account.

While I'm no longer on Facebook all the old photographs in which I was tagged will still exist, with my face ominously un-tagged, non-tagged; to Facebook, I'm a non-person. Of course the real clincher is right there: I'm not really gone.

Naturally, the second I deactivated my account, Facebook sent me an email with a link in it - sign in to Facebook and start connecting.