Do you want to delete your Facebook or Google+ account? Chances are that you're not going to do it right.

For whatever reason people are always asking me if your Facebook account can really be deleted. It's well known that Facebook or Google actually wouldn't remove all of your data from their storage if you request to be removed from their service. Essentially there's no deletion, it's only a deactivation of your account.

From the Facebook Help pages, Facebook actually say that you CAN delete your account now, and they distinguish it from being merely deactivated. Whether you trust their word on this or not is another thing:

Google+ probably doesn't permit you to do it at all, that's my guess, I don't use Google+. Or if they do it'll probably be stated as a "Beta" service, ouch. As this is what Google stand for - incomplete products.

The big social networks aren't the only ones to be cautious of. Many mobile apps are now making a trend of storing your personal data, sometimes sneakily without your permission. San Francisco start-up Path is the latest foray into private data intrusion, and have been highly criticised in the past week for having a purposely lax privacy policy as a devious marketing ploy to gain exposure. Which in my opinion is a shame because the UI is highly unique, intuitive, and polished.

Data stealing hmm, scary. It's out there in many friendly presentable incarnations right now. For the record I'm not one of the usual anti-private-data fanatics living down Paranoia Lane. I really don't care if Facebook or anyone else know that my favourite comedy is Dodgeball, or that I'm into running, or that I've recently gone on holiday to Whistler. I don't care. The only reason my profile is set to private is that I care about credit card identity fraud.

So this isn't some blog on why Facebook or Google+ is evil and why you should delete it. I assume you've already reached that conclusion yourself. This is just a blog post on how to do it properly, with a dose of how to screw them in the same way that they're screwing you...I don't care about them having my data, I care about them having it for FREE! We're all being massively undervalued here, but that's another tangent.

Construct The Lie:

Data is only valuable if it's accurate. This isn't only applicable to the context of social network sites providing your personal data to advertisers, but everything. Be it the material taught in a university degree, a house you're about to purchase, or even mindless opinions on the interwebs such as this one. All of this information is useless if it's not credible, if it doesn't have some kind of factual grounding.

You're doing Facebook and Google a disservice by not being truthful in the FREE data that you provide them. Good! Because they're doing a disservice to you by not deleting your profile. Deleting your profile is what you asked them to right? But they can't do it, what asses. They set the rules, now it's up to you to play by them. So this is what you should do...

Simply alter your profile with fake data. Likes and article links etc are less necessary, and there are apps that exist out there that can bulk delete these if you really want. But primarly, go to your profile setting and change your most valuable information, ie address, name, phone number, email, age, etc, to bogus information. This is what you need to do BEFORE you delete your account!

That's for Facebook or Google+. If it's an iOS app and they want to use your data (see the Path app digression above), I'd do the following BEFORE creating your account! Create a fake group in your Address Book. Then sync that group into your iPhone or iPad Contacts and populate it with restricted or fake contact data from there.

By restricted data I mean in the instance that you CAN see the value in the app using your address book, but you don't want them to gain all contact information. For example, you could restrict this to email addresses only, and 10 friends only. Then this fake address book group can be the standard contacts list you provide to any app that wants this information.

What The Future Should Be:

I asked influential and generally entertaining VC James Altucher what he thought of this in one of his Twitter Q&A sessions. But I don't think he really understood what I was getting at.

Let me clarify, there should be 2 business models that any social network based site should comform to:

1. App provides a service for FREE. But App gains unlimited use of your data for ad related revenue, and Pays you a small monthly subscription for this.
2. App provides a service at a Subscription cost. But App is prohibited from using any of your data for ad related revenue.

Facebook and Google+ currently have none of the above. They use a 3rd model, which is an incarnation of the 1st model minus the subscription payments to YOU.

I would rather pay for their service than have them get my data for FREE. I'm worth more than FREE. Are you?