Calling all Facebookers, if deleting your account at the end of your college years was your plan, think again.

A Feb. 11 article in The New York Times exposed what a growing number of fed up Facebook users are slowly learning – personal information is still available on Facebook’s servers even after a user has deleted an account.

The article, written by Maria Aspan, referred to Nipon Das, “a director at a biotechnology consulting firm in Manhattan” who spent months trying to permanently remove his account from Facebook. According to the article, it took two months of arguing with Facebook representatives and threats directed to the web site with a lawsuit to have the majority of his information removed. Despite these efforts, Aspan reported that “a reporter was able to find Mr. Das’s empty profile on Facebook” and even managed to send a message to his account.

Amy Sezak, a Facebook spokeswoman, said in the article that accounts are only “deactivated,” leaving the option for a user to resurrect his or her account and have the same information, friends, photos and applications immediately available.

But what if a user knows for sure that he or she wants to be permanently removed from the 64 million-member web site?

Upon registering an account with Facebook, every user agrees to the Terms of Use, that tiny square checkbox that everyone clicks, even though many never bother to read over what it is he or she is actually agreeing to. It is in that mess of legal jargon that you have the option to “remove your User Content from the Site at any time?however, you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content,” according to Facebook’s Terms of Use. For those rebelling against the agreement and wish to remove as much information as possible, Sezak said that “‘users can also have their account completely removed by deleting all of the data associated with their account and then deactivating it,'” and “‘then write to Facebook to request their account be deleted and their e-mail will be completely erased from the database,'” according to the article.

Facebook may simply believe that once users have been bitten by the Facebook bug, they will never truly want to give it up, and by only offering a deactivation feature, allows users to bring back their account quickly without the nuisance of “re-friending” fellow classmates. After all, it is the fifth most visited Web site in the United States and seventh in the world according to statistics compiled by Alexa.com.

According to Facebook’s statistics web page, the site has “more than 64 million active users,” with “an average of 250,000 new registrations per day since January 2007.” Stony Brook University has over 18,000 registered users in their network. A comScore study showed that Facebook is the sixth most trafficked site in the United States, with the “number one photo sharing application” on the Internet, with over 14 million photos uploaded every day.

“‘It’s like Hotel California,'” Das said to the New York Times, referring to the 1977 Eagles hit song, “‘You can check out anytime you like, but can never leave.'”