Law Student Sues Facebook for Not Being Able to Completely DELETE His Account Except to Deactivate
A Chinese law student living in Hong Kong has sued facebook for invasion of privacy and perpetually holding his confidential and private information hostage after he could not totally delete his facebook account.
The man, Lee Sun Yuen, 34, originally from Shanghai, after spending 2 years on facebook failed his law school entrance exams 3 times—and having realizing that he spent more time on facebook than on his law books, he decided to delete his account.
However, he once decided to re-visit facebook and within 30 seconds, his full account was restored through facebook’s re-activation system. Back online, the man was sucked into the addictive world of facebook once again, as if he never left.
After failing his exams for the 4th time, he realized facebook was an accessory in his continuous failure due to the social networking site’s policy of not allowing users to completely delete their accounts.
In his lawsuit, he said “if I am able to completely delete my account, then I will feel lazy the next time I logon facebook to re-add every friend and upload all my photos again. Which means, I will be discouraged to stay on facebook or even open a new account since I am naturally a lazy person.”
Lee Sun Yuen has therefore asked a Hong Kong court to order facebook to completely delete his account so that he can concentrate on his law examination.
His lawyers told CNN that “facebook’s perpetual holding of my client’s data is a violation of his constitutional rights. And the ease with which facebook allows him to re-activate his account to its full old state makes his addiction grow and that’s a gross disregard for the interest of my client.”
Facebook has not yet responded to the lawsuit.