Whether you have concerns about Facebook’s privacy policies, or you simply don’t want to keep a profile on the website anymore, Facebook make it extremely difficult to actually close your account. If you follow the ‘Help’ section of Facebook, you’ll eventually be led to ‘Deactivate’ your account – which basically means your data is still on the website, you friends can still see/use/expose your all of your information and your account will become ‘active’ again once you log in. By default you also still receive e-mails from Facebook if someone comments on your profile, so essentially a “deactivated” account means you’re having a break from actively using the website.

If you want to actually delete your account, we found a very useful guide (on Facebook, of all places). But before you do erase your account, you may want to take steps to backup any photographs on the service. For this we found some really useful applications:

Download your albums (and your friends albums too, if you wish) with FacePAD, Firefox addon.

Download any photos ‘of you’ (that you may be tagged in) with PhotoGrabber for Mac/Windows.

How to delete your account (not just de-activate):

Follow this link, click Submit, enter your password and the ‘Captcha’ phrase.

Your account will now be ‘deactivated’ for two weeks, before finally being delete from Facebook’s servers. If you log in at any point during the deactivation stage, your account will be restored to normal and your deletion request will be ignored. So if you plan on leaving Facebook, don’t look back 😉