Facebook Deleted Your Account? Good Luck Retrieving Your Data
Fair enough, she thought at first. “Private company. You have a right to kick me off. You have a right to ban me. It’s not a constitutional right to have a Facebook account.”
She was even sanguine about the fact Facebook deleted the group’s administrators, too. But then Estante discovered she was blocked from 13 years worth of photos she posted on Facebook — many of them her only copies.
“I want my grandmothers’ photos, actually. I didn’t have certain photos of her that were on my account on the anniversary of her death,” she said, adding she’s also lost access to photos of her dead German Shepherd/Doberman mix, Benji. “That dog was my companion everywhere. I’m pretty heartbroken.”
She’s also upset on behalf of fellow administrators, some of them grandmothers and great-grandmothers, who lost years of family photos as well as personal contact information for friends and family members. “I honestly just wanted my mom’s pictures, as she is gone and I can’t get those memories back,” wrote one friend of Estante’s, Tiffanie Skibicki of Minnesota.
It’s not that hard to download your profile data on Facebook, and even move your photos to competing platforms — if your account hasn’t been deleted.
Estante is a health care events producer now, but she’s worked in public relations before and figures she’s fairly savvy about advocating for herself as a consumer. She contacted Facebook customer support. She looked up Facebook executives on LinkedIn and contacted them directly. She opened a dispute with TrustArc, a privacy compliance company that contracts with Facebook. She sent both companies copies of her driver’s license and passport, repeatedly.
“This has been going on since, you know, mid-August. It should not be this herculean task. Literally, let me just download it, and buh-bye,” Estante said.
She feels the same way about her Instagram account, deleted one week after the election, though she says she sticks to New York Times links on Instagram during election years.
Estante even tried to line up a lawyer, but according to the state attorney general’s office, neither the California Consumer Privacy Act or the Privacy Rights Act voters just approved would prohibit a company from deleting data or disabling accounts.
Perhaps more to the point, neither law provides consumers with a private right of action if a business does not comply with a consumer’s requests, wrote a spokesperson for the office, adding, “We encourage any Californian who believes they have been wronged to file a complaint with our office.” That said, there is no promise to follow up on any individual complaint, and no threshold number of complaints that will trigger an investigation.
