We think user control, user trust, is an essential part of the Facebook experience, and it's an issue that we spend a lot of time thinking about. We understand that people won't feel comfortable using our site if they don't trust us, so we want to do everything we can to be transparent about how Facebook works and how people can have control over their data.
So when you use the deletion function, whether it's the account deletion function or just the function to delete a particular piece of content, that starts what we call an “active deletion” process, where it removes it immediately from accessibility on the site from our active servers. It then goes to the various places and backups and things like that in alternative servers, where we keep the information, and sends the command to those servers that indicates that the information should be deleted.
That process takes a bit of time, because we do have backups and so on, but we do try to have a process in place to make sure that information is deleted in a way that's reasonable and consistent with the instructions we receive from users.
You mentioned deactivation, and I do want to distinguish between deactivation and deletion. Deactivation is not a situation in which a user requests deletion of their information. We actually just suspend their account, but maintain it.