Why? Having worked on a semi social app last year, deleting a user and all their content was a huge undertaking. Marking them and their content as deleted was simple and had the exact same effect--user and content never get returned from DB queries. Guess which one we implemented?
I guess I'm trying to say sites don't (always) do the deactivate thing because of some nefarious scheme to steal your content/identity at a later date. Sometimes it's just a technical call (or lazy programmers, depending on your point of view).
Why? Having worked on a semi social app last year, deleting a user and all their content was a huge undertaking. Marking them and their content as deleted was simple and had the exact same effect--user and content never get returned from DB queries. Guess which one we implemented?
I guess I'm trying to say sites don't (always) do the deactivate thing because of some nefarious scheme to steal your content/identity at a later date. Sometimes it's just a technical call (or lazy programmers, depending on your point of view).