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A test of patience: Facebook doubles grace period for account deletions

This year has seen Facebook attempting to get on the front foot with respect to a number of issues, including the Cambridge Analytica scandal and a significant security issue involving its "view as" functionality that leaked account access tokens. The latter issue saw the company reset access tokens for a total of 90 million accounts and revoke access to the "view as" feature while it conducted a security review.

While such news may have further heightened peoples' concerns about the security and access to their data, some may be considering exiting the social media platform altogether, a concept that was highly publicized after Elon Musk deleted Tesla's and SpaceX's Facebook pages earlier this year. However, those looking to go down this path will have to exercise some extra patience after a change was made to the grace period for account deletions.

In a comment made to The Verge, a Facebook spokesperson said:

“We recently increased the grace period when you choose to delete your Facebook account from 14 days to 30 days. We’ve seen people try to log in to accounts they’ve opted to delete after the 14-day period. The increase gives people more time to make a fully informed choice.”

While the change itself primarily entails waiting patiently for an extra 16 days before an account will meet its demise, logging back into the social networking platform will no longer automatically restore your account. However, users will instead have the option to revert the deletion request.

Of course, it remains to be seen if Facebook makes any further changes, particularly if there is an uptick in successful account deletions. In fact, back in 2009, the company went to the extent of including a caution message on the account deletion page after it had changed and reverted alterations to its terms of service to claim all posted content as its own.

Source: The Verge

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