Facebook.com, stung last week by the wrath of members who want to sever their relationships, tripped again when it tried to let them do so.
But the company said over the weekend that it had fixed the problems, making it possible — and not too difficult — to delete an account from the site entirely.
The problems, which Facebook described as technical, had to do with a form it introduced last week for users who want to obliterate their accounts. Until then, deleting an account was a fairly cumbersome procedure.
But as a few departing users found out, Facebook — a social networking site that lets people create profiles of themselves and identify other people as “friends” — still had a few bugs left. Some people who used the form discovered that only certain parts of their accounts had disappeared.
Katie Geminder, Facebook’s director for user experience and design, said internal adjustments to the tool used to delete accounts had created a technical snag that affected “a small percent” of Facebook users. “None of their information was exposed, but the empty account continued to exist even though all of its data had been removed,” she said by e-mail. The bug was fixed within 24 hours, she said.
One such partially deleted user was Matt Dauphin, a 22-year-old office manager for an interior design firm in Tempe, Ariz., who tried to delete his account after reading about the new form last week. He received confirmation by e-mail of the deletion from Facebook’s technical support team.
But even after he received that confirmation, a working link to his empty Facebook profile was the first result in a Google search for his name. While his name, photo and profile information had been deleted from the Facebook page, his friends who still used the service could see his lists of friends and the external applications he had added to his profile.
“It’s a little disturbing that you can see people that I used to talk to — that’s not right,” Mr. Dauphin said Friday. He said he was annoyed at Facebook’s refusal to create a one-step “delete account” button instead of the form.
By Saturday, Facebook had removed the remaining traces of his account from the site.
Still, such experiences have done little to quiet the jitters of many users, who see Facebook’s adjusted policy as an inadequate response to their demand for an easy opt-out button and to their larger concerns over the network’s efforts to profit from the private information they volunteer to the site.
In November, Facebook introduced an advertising program called Beacon that tracked its users’ activities on other Web sites and sent reports to their friends. Users complained that it was intrusive, leading Facebook to scale back the program.
Magnus Wallin, the founder of a Facebook group called “How to permanently delete your Facebook account,” posted a warning on Friday.
“Users who have requested to be deleted via the recently introduced form are only partly deleted, even though the deletion is confirmed by Facebook staff,” Mr. Wallin wrote.
On Saturday, after the partially deleted profiles disappeared, Mr. Wallin said in an e-mail message, “Now there seems to be a way to completely remove yourself from Facebook, without having to delete items individually.” But he does not plan to retire from his group.
“It’s pretty obvious that Facebook are scared of losing loads of members if they made the delete option easily available,” Mr. Wallin said.
Mr. Wallin also posted the message that Facebook sends to people to confirm their deletion, which says in part, “We have deleted your profile information and removed your e-mail address from our login database.” But, as Mr. Wallin added, “if you are paying close attention, you can see that they’re actually not saying that they delete your profile, only that its information and your login is removed.”
In response to these concerns, Chris Kelly, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, confirmed that deletion “removes all personal information from the account.”
Many Facebook members use an application called “the wall,” which lets them swap graffiti-like messages with friends in their network; Mr. Kelly said the wall posts of deleted members also disappear, though traces remain.
“After deletion, there may still be a record in Facebook’s archives that a user made a particular wall post in a group on a particular date, but Facebook’s servers no longer contain the information needed to connect that user ID (e.g., name, e-mail address, networks, etc.) to the person associated with that account,” he said in an e-mail statement on Friday.
Some people said they found it much easier to leave Facebook last week. John Keefe, a 52-year-old freelance financial writer in Manhattan, said that he contacted Facebook on Tuesday asking to be deleted “and got back a satisfactory answer in a few hours.”
Nipon Das, a Manhattan business consultant who had gone so far as to threaten legal action in order to quit Facebook, also got some satisfaction: After resubmitting his request to be deleted from Facebook on Wednesday and reconfirming it on Thursday, Mr. Das received a confirmation e-mail from Facebook on Friday.
“This started around October,” he recalled in an e-mail message, adding that now, in mid-February, “we may have closure.”
Mr. Das may be in distinguished company. On Feb. 8, a British newspaper, The Sun, reported that Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, had deleted his Facebook account not out of privacy concerns, but because he got “more than 8,000 friend requests a day and spotted weird fan sites about him.”
A post on a Wall Street Journal blog later reported that Mr. Gates had stopped using the profile instead of fully deleting it; a Microsoft spokeswoman declined to comment.
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