First things first, when i delete any account i have i make sure to delete everything inside the account first, convos, posts, stories or any type of activity.
I’m in process of deleting my instagram and i already cleaned everything up except the final boss, my story archive, i have never toggled the archiving option off so the archive has accumulated stories for around 8 years, and of course meta won’t let you bulk delete the archive.
my question is, does it really matter doing all of that before deleting when it comes to privacy?
or can i just simply ignore the fact that the story archive is still there and delete the account anyway?
I’m not even sure about all the steps that i do but i just do it so everthing feels clean when i arrive to the deletion button.
Theoretically - It doesn’t matter. They flag all your data with a “user asked for it to be deleted” flag. It’s still data that their statisticians can play with. If it was public then internet archive grabbed a screenshot.
Practically - Deleting it is almost always sufficient. They probably take a month to get rid of it. Nobody want’s to explain to a future compliance officer why data is just sitting around waiting to be subpoenaed in a privacy lawsuit. If it’s fake deleted then it’s probably pseudo anonymized for internal research. Almost all search engines will forget the data existed over time.
