My daughter recently (about a month ago) started a Facebook page without consulting me or her mother. When I found out, my first inclination was to simply delete it, so I asked the folks at Yahoo! how to do that (they haven’t yet responded). While I was waiting for a response I talked it over with a friend, and decided that perhaps I should see if I could manage her access to the site, and manage the site’s access to her. I’ve been pruning her contacts list this evening, but she raises a fuss about every person she met at church camp over the summer, so I only got about ten people off the list.
Then I went to her home page, and saw a buttload of people having conversations that that she’s not involved in. I figured out how to hide access to updates from certain individuals, and started in on that. Right now I’m having a difficult time finding a conversation that she has been involved in (she’s been grounded from the site for the past week).
The problem is that I don’t really understand social networking sites. I’m not completely against the notion of her maintaining contact with actual friends and acquaintances, but if she is going to do that I prefer that the conversations be specific to her and her interlocutor, and to the point. I’m not comfortable with conversations that she hasn’t joined being on her facebook page, or with the idea of uninvolved people reading the conversations that she is participating in.
So, I’ve made a new command decision: I aim to remove her Facebook account from existence. When and if I ever learn what social networking sites are good for, I will consider allowing her to set up a new account, under my supervision.
Does anyone know how to annihilate a Facebook account? The folks at Yahoo! have not kept their promise to contact me with information on the subject.
(Interestingly doing a Google search on “How do you delete a Facebook account” I got to “How do you delete a” and Google figured out what I wanted to do and auto completed the search for me. Apparently you are not the first person to ask this.)
LOL No wonder Yahoo hasn’t replied-- they have nothing to do with Facebook! LOL
Facebook has its own help file. Go to any Facebook page and click on the word “help” in the bottom right corner. In the search box, type “delete account” and hit enter. Et voilà.
That being said, how old is Kayla? Firstly, it’s going to be difficult to keep her from having a Facebook account if she really wants one, and secondly, as a teenager myself who doesn’t use Facebook, it’s difficult. So many social events are planned with Facebook, that it’s almost analogous to not having, say, a phone.
“Hey, why weren’t you at [whereever]? It was great!”
“I… didn’t know about it.”
“I told everyone on Facebook.”
“I don’t have one…”
“Oh. You should get one.”
I also have to ask how old she is. Just about every kid has a Facebook nowadays to the point that she could potentially be seen as a social outcast if she doesn’t have one. Instead of downright deleting it, I’d suggest going into the Privacy settings and setting it up so that she’s safer (only letting confirmed friends see her profile, no revealing information like address or phone number, etc.). That way, she gets to keep in contact with her friends and you have less to worry about.
I also think you’re overreacting about the whole “public conversations” issue too. They’re just wall postings. Consider them like public chats between friends. Chances are she’s aware they’re not private. And the whole fun of Facebook is getting to see what people are saying to one another. If they have something truly private, well, that’s what private messages are for.
So in summary, don’t condemn technology you don’t get or don’t understand… Learn it instead! Talk to your daughter and go over the ground rules for participating in a social networking site (only be friends with people you know in real life, don’t give out personal info, etc.) and she’ll be fine.
Michaela is thirteen. If she had had a conversation with me before setting the account up, deleting it wouldn’t be an issue today. As it is, I wouldn’t even have known the account existed if I hadn’t gotten an email from Yahoo! stating that the Facebook account had been linked with her Yahoo! contacts list. That was what made me think Yahoo! was involved somehow.
I expect to be having a talk with her regarding ground rules before she sets up another account. But the talk won’t be particularly useful if I’m approaching the subject from a position of ignorance instead of knowledge. I fully expect to be up to the task of adequately educating myself about it. I didn’t particularly want to learn about it, but it appears that the decision has been taken out of my hands. If it comes to that I didn’t particularly want to learn Windows, and give up using DOS for everything, but I managed to make the switch.
If Michaela’s friends really want her at a function, they can tell her via email, or telephone call, or face-to-face. After all, she needs my (and kaylasmom’s) permission to go anyway.
Perhaps you should get yourself a Facebook account and see how it works. Not having a Facebook and/or iChat/MSN account is pretty rare in the developed world these days.
When I was 12, my mom let me go to Hawaii by myself (with my 9 year-old brother) for 3 days so not allowing a 13 year-old to have a Facebook page seems rather draconian.
Old person rant: I am so glad I am not a kid these days. At 13, she’s too young. Every interaction that doesn’t involve her is likely to hurt her feelings.
That said, if you delete her account, she will feel left out from her friends activities. You can set up her account by using the “Settings” link in the upper right hand corner. Notice that once you get the the “accounts” page, you have tabs with different features that you can adjust the settings for. You can also select “privacy” settings to block people who are not selected friends of hers from seeing her page.
Have you thought about creating an account and being her friend? This way you can learn and see what she is up to. Maybe also create a fake account that is not friends with her so that you can make sure that her privacy settings are adequate.
I don’t want to sound like one of ‘those parents’ but my kids have facebook accounts. They’re 12 and 14, boy and girl. Social networking sites are pretty harmless, actually. I know or their mother knows everyone on their friends list. Because I’m on their friends list I can read their walls to see what kind of activity they’re up to.
So stop being an elderly Luddite and get your own Facebook account!
The OP is the mother here, and she gets to set the rules about what her daughter is and isn’t allowed to do. She isn’t asking for advice on whether or not her daughter should be allowed to hold a Facebook account, she’s asking how to delete it.
I know from my own experience that you cannot delete the Facebook profile until you have removed any of the extra Applications that have been installed within Facebook. You also have to remove information from every field in your profile, I believe. It’s an absolute pain in the arse and they really need to make the process easier.
Sorry … I may agree that the whole kids walking to school/doing outdoors activities is overly restricted by helicopter parents BUT:
I do believe that this is not inordinately restrictive. There are pedophiles that cruise online for kids, there are kids that abuse kids online, and there is a lot of overly mature crap online that kids really do not need to be participating in unsupervised.
I have no problem with the idea of restricting the access of others to posting on the kids site, and controlling what is posted on the site by the kid [you do not want to give out lots of personal information online that might lead a pedophile to the house]
That being said, social networking sites are useful to keep friends in contact, but there are aspects about facebook I detest which is why I have decided not to have one. I have a stalker, and I really dont like too much info about me being online. The whole friends of friends thing is annoying. I do not want some random friend of a friend of one of my friends linking to me. If I dont know you, fuck off, I am not adding you to my friends list.
sandra’s right. as much as what I’m sure is a large % of dopers would disagree with kayla’s parents’ decision, it is theirs and this thread isn’t about the decision.
Yahoo was my first frustration trying to delete an account. They told me at the time that I should just “not use” the account for 6 months and it would go away. But the problem was that if my friends should accidentally use the old address the only way to find out was to log on. Even if you tell people your new address they often simply “look it up” by replying to mail you sent them ages ago with the old addrss.
I guess they’ve fixed that now, but it just shows how dense sites are about the need.
You can set up groups on Facebook and then restrict what they can see. Your daughter could add all her church camp friends to a church camp group, all her real life friends to a different group and then set up the appropriate security restrictions for the groups.
If the profile really must go and you can’t figure out how to delete it, how about just changing all the info in it to fictional information and abandoning it? You could even change the email address to a throw away Hotmail address or something. I found “Deactivate Account” under Settings… I assume this is what my brother uses when he periodically deletes his account and disappears from everyone’s friend list.
I understand that you don’t want to condone or reward her for attempting an end-around on you and your wife. (Was she told that she wasn’t allowed to set one up without checking, or did she just make a stupid assumption that it would be okay?)
On the other hand, 13 is, in my opinion (caveat: as someone in her mid-20s with no kids), a good age to have a Facebook profile, assuming that the parents help set it up with a good level of security. (As previously mentioned, this includes making her profile visible only to friends and creating friends groups with various levels of access, so that, e.g., only people she’s friends with at her school can see pictures she uploads.) Given their very ubiquitousness and, to a certain extent, social cachet, it’s entirely possible that she’ll just make another secret profile if you delete this one, but be more careful about hiding it. Which means that she still has a profile, but not one that you can help her set up in a safe, secure way.
You also should definitely make sure she has concrete examples of people on social networking sites who weren’t what they claimed to be, with disastrous results for the teenagers they suckered in. Fakers are by no means a majority, but they do exist, and she needs to be aware that they’re a real possibility and not something you’re just making up because you’re old/clueless/paranoid.
Example 1: 18 year old guy poses as a teenage girl, gets other teenage boys to send him nude photos, and then uses those photos to extort sex acts out of some of them. Example 2: Adult woman poses as a teenage boy and manipulates a teenage girl into suicide.
It’s entirely possible for tweens and teens to be safe on the internet–they just need the background information on how to be careful and why.
No wonder Yahoo hasn’t replied-- they have nothing to do with Facebook! LOL