There are two different processes that we allow people to use in addition to downloading their information, which is the process that allows them to gain access to their information. You can do that without deleting your Facebook account. But assuming you've decided to sign off of Facebook, we provide two options. One is called deactivation and one is called deletion. We describe those together and give people the choice.
Deactivation is when you may want temporarily to suspend your Facebook account, but you may want to leave it intact so that you can come back to it later, have access to all of your content, and have access to all of your friends. That's one option that we provide.
The second option is deletion, which is what it sounds like. People can come to us and say, “I don't want to be on Facebook anymore and I want you to get rid of my account”. When that happens we tell them that there's a 14-day period during which they can change their mind. We instituted that because a lot of people started to delete their accounts and then came back later and said they'd changed their mind, and we weren't able to recover their data. So we now have a waiting period that we tell people about.
After that period, we begin the process. I should say, on the date that you delete your account, it's deactivated, so it no longer appears on the Facebook service. Fourteen days later we begin the process of deleting your data or anonymizing it in every place it exists on Facebook.