Recycle Bin by Facebook

Facebook likes to collect as much data as possible, and they will try to retain your data as long as possible. This is why you can’t delete your Facebook or Instagram account for one month. They are slowly opening up WhatsApp so the data you communicate with businesses are available for Facebook. Because at the end of the day the data on what you communicate, how you interact with a business, and what businesses you are interested in communicating is more valuable than what you communicate with your friends,

I have deleted my Facebook account, but still I have to use Facebook in a separate account, which I keep to manage my business pages.

Recently I was working on how to create an increasing textbox or input area such as Facebook and Twitter because the regular textarea does not increase in size. You can read more about what I did there on here.

So I posted a dummy status on the Facebook account, and then I went on to delete the status. Usually when I clicked the dropdown menu, I get the button to delete the post/status etc.

However, this time it was different, move the status to recycle bin, wow this was new. And there was no delete option. So I went ahead and clicked on it. And I got this message.

So instead of permanently deleting your status, Facebook now moves them to a “Recycle bin” and your posts are kept their for 30 more days before they gets deleted.

If you want to permanently delete the status or post, you will have to do an extra step by navigating to the activity log, which I think people rarely use, and again delete it from the activity log to permanently delete your Facebook status or post.

This is another dark pattern by Facebook IMO designed to retain your data as much as possible on their servers. If not why would they not allow to delete your status or posts on one go?

Maybe this is still a rolling out feature and may not be available in certain areas of the world. But I’m interested to know what you think about this new Recycle bin feature by Facebook.