If you've reached the end of your tether with being poked, bitten by vampires, asked to take endless quizzes or are simply concerned about privacy issues, then completely deleting your Facebook account is the nuclear option. When you delete your account, Facebook promises to discard all "personally identifiable information" associated with that account from its databases – that's things like names, email addresses, phone numbers, postal addresses, instant-messenger screen names etc etc. However, Facebook says that copies of some material, such as photos, may remain on its servers for "technical reasons", but that the material is "completely inaccessible" to other Facebook users, and is completely disassociated from any information that makes it possible to link that piece of content back to an individual user. If you deactivate or delete your account, says Facebook, it will no longer use any content associated with it, either.

Committing Facebook suicide, though, takes a little effort – it's not quite as simple as clicking a few buttons to exorcise your social networking presence. Instead, you need to send a message to Facebook, requesting the permanent deletion of your account. Log on to Facebook, then paste the following address in to your browser window: http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=12271. It will take you through to a Help page that describes the difference between deactivating and deleting an account. At the bottom of the second paragraph is a link, which takes you through to a page where you submit your deletion request. Click on the link, read the warning entitled "Delete my account", and then click Submit. The account is deleted immediately, but it can take up to a fortnight for Facebook to clear your information from its cache.

(This article I copied from the Daily Telegraph UK website) Gordon Wheeler, Opotiki... Bay of Plenty...