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

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

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

Deactivation is the soft option. You can do this by chosing ‘a(chǎn)ccount settings’ and clicking the ‘deactivate’ button.

But, in a stroke of evil genius, Facebook then confronts 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 opt out of Facebook emails - or the site will continue to taunt 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 scurry 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.

(Read by Renee Haines. Renee Haines is a journalist at the China Daily Website.)

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(Agencies)