Coincidentally, Adam Hupp from FB spoke at HN London last night and he made a comment that when you permanently delete your facebook account, they do actually wipe all the data stored on you. In Europe at least, there are significant due diligence processes that they are legally required to follow in this regard.

I have zero trust in Facebook and probably would not even believe them if Mark swore on his mother that they perform a proper wipe of your private data.

With that in mind you shouldn't have a hard time understanding why it sounds to me as if they delete all copies on servers in the EU but US mirrors of your profile remain untouched. How else could their algorithm deduct that your ladyfriend used to be a man without analyzing old conversations from deleted profiles. Could you live in a world where facebook sells birth controll pills to former biological males.

Ok I admit it's a hyperbole/edge case but I know that you know what I mean ;)

You can be pretty certain the NSA's copy isn't wiped.

The possibility that Facebook actually deletes "all the data stored on you" is negligible! I give it 0.00000000000000000001% likelihood. This is against anything Facebook has ever done. Empty words!

Interesting. I know they use HDFS in bits of the infrastructure from which it's not particularly easy to delete stuff as it's append-only.

Hum -- so assuming Facebook is making offline backup copies (which they should), are they really going to retreive their offline backups and remove your info if you want to delete your Facebook account?

Yes, FB wipes data they have stored on you, but not NSA/GHCQ/FRA and any other letter-combination agency they have copied the data to.

I `deleted' my Facebook account a couple of years ago, but I have no doubt that all that old information is still floating around in a database on one of their servers.