Our third daily Comments Competition winner is rick gregory, for his comment on our post Facebook Makes it Easier to Delete Your Account, Sort Of. Congratulations rick, you’ve won a $30 Amazon voucher, courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their Amazon WishList Widget. rick claimed that despite all the talk of data portability from bigcos like Facebook, it is merely lip service. He wrote:
“Of course there should be a simple Delete button. It should do the typical “Are you sure? YOu can use Deactivate if you think you might come back?” confirmation process. But it is NOT Facebook’s place to babysit users. If someone deletes their info and regrets it… well, that’s life.
I despair of companies ever learning this though. Remember the horror stories about canceling AOL accounts? Everyone agreed that AOL should make it easy and yet here we are with not only Facebook but a bunch of other social media sites making it hard to control my data.
For all of the lip service given to data portability and that it’s my data, most companies don’t really believe it. Oh, they’ll make it easy to import your data from other services… but export? Delete? Not so much.”
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)