The difference is that meta is providing that service world wide. Depending on where the user is located, there are a ton of considerations to be made when deleting a user. The flow should go through all these things before being deleted.

- some countries require saving "the last known address"

- others require keeping logs about "the last known connection point" (IP)

- in some countries, if the user was a paying user, you need to retain payment details / invoices / etc for years

- some countries you can receive subpoenas that mandate what data should be retained

All these things need to be checked before deleting an account. Having a "manual" deletion endpoint would be more troubling.

As an aside, early in the GDPA implementation phase, there was coverage of many companies implementing it poorly at best. There are articles detailing how you could delete a user's account by sending the "required info" (e-mail, ssn) from another e-mail and they'd delete the account / send over data. Would you be comfortable with someone being able to delete your account like that?

> The difference is that meta is providing that service world wide.

So where is the cutoff? My one free user obviously didn't make the cut. But 100 does? 1000?

Normal logs/bookkeeping need to be kept anyway if you are running a business. And special legal letters are special by definition.

I'm still not seeing why google outright couldn't delete a million random free accounts if they wish. It'd be bad for reputation but execs have done similar in the past.

I am not saying I like it. I am not saying I want it to be a certain way.

I am trying to point out that all these free accounts are running on servers provided by a business. They are subject to the whims of the business and the market the business operates in. If the business fails, so do the accounts.

Legally, yes. Technically one always has to assume that companies have the ability to delete your accounts / data, why wouldn't they be able to do that? In larger systems it might be complicated and not every employee would have the permissions to do so, but certainly not impossible. Having your chatbot suggest that this is not the case is just not true.