The tide is turning against Facebook - last month, more than 100,000 Britons deleted their accounts on the social networking site.

Facebook潮流正在发生逆转——上个月10万余英国人删除了自己在社交网站上的账号。

But committing ‘Facebook suicide’ is not as easy as you might think.

If you are truly determined¹ to do the deed there are two options: you can deactivate³ or delete.

Deactivation⁴ is the soft option. You can do this by chosing ‘account settings’ and clicking the ‘deactivate’ button.

But, in a stroke of evil genius, Facebook then confronts（面对，遭遇） you with pictures of your friends and messages saying how much they will ‘miss you’.

Swallowing the lump in your throat, you then have to opt² out of（决定退出） Facebook emails - or the site will continue to taunt⁵（奚落，逗弄） you with messages about parties and events you are now missing.

Even then, deactivation does not actually get rid of your account but leaves it ‘hanging in a cloud’, waiting for you to scurry⁶（急跑） back.

Deletion is more terminal and the social networking site doesn’t make it easy. You have to search Facebook’s servers for how to do it and then send in a request which has to be confirmed by email.

Facebook insists that within two weeks every single trace of you will be gone from its servers, with no chance of getting it back.

But even then you will still have a presence on the website if any of your Facebook friends continue to put up photos of you.

So there would be nothing to stop your friends uploading photos of you on your stag do, skinny-dipping, or at graduation celebrations.

And nothing to stop your boss finding them.