I deleted my Facebook account 10 years ago and I definitely regret it. I got another account later and I tried to get my original back, but it wasn't possible. Unfortunately it was a time right after I transferred colleges and moved away from my home town, so I lost a lot of my old connections. You could say they must not have been that important, but I enjoy keeping up with people. It's weird to send out a friend request now to someone I don't know very well any more or haven't talked to in 10 years, assuming I remember their name. Facebook has certainly gone downhill but I guess I'd rather not use it for a while than totally delete my account at this point.
Alternatively, you could have emailed with them if you really wanted to stay in contact after deleting your Facebook account. Email has hardly changed (for bettor or worse) in the last 2+ decades..
Email hasn't changed but emails have. People switched from hotmail to AOL, AOL to Gmail, Gmail to a college email, college email to professional email. I've got a piece of paper with everyone's phone number on it from the days I used to walk around and use a pay phone to call people, but I don't think I have anyone's email.
Part of that is probably because I started on social media at the same time it was first coming out. When I first started being more social in middle and high school, there were a few years where I primarily used Xanga and AIM to talk to friends. Xanga was replaced by MySpace and Facebook shortly after. I tended to use their built-in messaging capabilities instead of email. Maybe it's time to switch back.
It's very hard to believe anything in this space is going to comply other than complete deletion at time of request or some shorter (90 days? please. 3.) period. The hint of NSA complicity is a bit of a red herring: they don't need government snooping requests to motivate this retention.
Before the news about misuse of data, I would have said "nothing will change here" but for the bad PR outcome risk, Its possible FB will make some change for european users, to comply, and the rest of us can suck it up.
Under GDPR the period allowed before deletion is 1 month, but can be extended 2 months (for a total of three months) if there exists special grounds for delaying it.
As soon as the GDPR takes effect I'll send them a request to get all my info and then delete it, it'll be interesting to see the response.
