14 DAY TRIAL // Social media continues to grow and more people are finding themselves spending an increasing amount of time on places like Twitter or Facebook. So much time in fact that some are worrying if this isn't affecting other aspects of their lives. Thankfully, if you're one of those wanting to leave it all behind for good, a number of sites have popped up which offer 'virtual suicide', a means of deleting your online identities. Unfortunately, Facebook doesn't like these kind of sites too much and has been fighting to block them starting with Sepukoo and now moving on to "Web 2.0 Suicide Machine," a website offering a similar way of deleting your accounts and data from Facebook and other sites.
"After more than 50.000 friends being unfriended and more than 500 forever 'signed-out' users, Facebook started to block our suicidemachine from their servers without any comment! We are currently looking in ways to circumvent this ungrounded restriction imposed on our service!," the site now informs its visitors in a popup overlay.
It's obvious why Facebook doesn't like the site very much but, like with Sepukoo before, it does have a legitimate claim in blocking it as it clearly violates at least a couple of Facebook's policies. The social network's terms of service specifically prohibit users from handing out their account credentials to third parties. It also prevents other users than the account's owner from accessing the site using the acquired credentials. Finally, Facebook doesn't allow automated means of accessing the site and gathering information.
The site offers a pretty clever service saving its users quite a bit of work. The Suicide Machine enables users to get out of sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn. After users select the site from where they want to be removed, they have to provide it with their account credentials.
The service then uses a script to delete all of the users' status updates and other entries, but also to unfriend all of their friends one at a time. Finally, it changes the account's password so that the users can't log in again. The account itself remains on the social networks, but it is completely void of content.