Earlier today, I read a story over on TechCrunch where MG Siegler wondered why Jason Calacanis’ profile still showed up on Facebook. As you can see in the embedded video, Jason deleted his Facebook page back on May 22nd, 2010. He has publicly bashed Zuckerberg and company for their “shady privacy practices,” lack of ability to export content and not having an easy way to delete a profile completely.
Siegler reported earlier that more than the two weeks have gone by, and Jason’s page remained visible. When called on this, Calacanis appeared to be angry. In an email to Zuck, COO Sheryl Sandberg and TechCrunch, he blasted the company. Jason claimed that his page must have been reactivated by a third-party service or app. The site complied and immediately shut down his page, and the ordeal seemed to be finished.
Not quite.
TechCrunch just published a post with a headline that claims Jason is lying. After reading the original article today, Facebook engineer Mike Vernal left a comment stating in part: “In this situation, we’ve investigated and concluded that all of our policies were followed. We don’t get into specifics about individual users but in theory, the only way someone would be able to log back in to Facebook or another website with their Facebook information is if they had canceled their deletion request before the 14 day window expired.”
In a later email exchange with Facebook VP of Communications Elliot Schrage, Siegler learned that there is no way possible that the page stayed active for the reasons Calacanis listed. Either Jason – or someone acting on his behalf – told the site not to cancel his account. In the updated posted by MG on the TechCrunch site, he concludes:
Facebook is effectively saying that Calacanis is lying. They’re saying that there’s no way a third-party site could have kept his account active. And there’s no way he could have kept it active by logging into a third-party site (through Connect) without him explicitly canceling his deletion request first.
Sure sounds fishy to me. Perhaps Jason wanted to keep his Facebook account after all, but didn’t have the guts to say so after the public whining he’s done?
I don’t know this gentleman but in my honest opinon he shows his iggnorence on camera. If you don’t like facebook then delete it. It does not have to be dragged out like this. This only reminds me of a child from my chatroom, who every day screamed that he was done with our IRC chatroom and or community. My response was “go for it buddy” we do not need to be publicly told you are leaving our chatroom or facebook.com it just shows childish behavior. I assume that this man then missed or relized Facebook was something he needed,just as the specific IRC fellow. If you don’t like something that’s nice but there is no need to bash it. Me myself have a Facebook account to manage a page I have and that’s about it. But I have no issue with anyone that is a hardcore Facebook user. I respect Facebook because look at there sucess, My responce to this man is We don’t care that you deleted your account, I bet in the mins you took to this at least 100 people signed up!