Can People Still See My Profile if I Deactivate My Facebook Account?

When you deactivate your Facebook account, it no longer exists as a page on Facebook. If someone attempts to navigate to it, he'll be met with an error page informing him that nothing is in that location. Search results won't include your timeline or anything else associated with you that was removed when you deactivated.

Even though you've deactivated your account and your timeline isn't visible, some information about you is still available on Facebook. For example, people who have messages from you archived in their inboxes will still be able to open and read the messages. Your profile picture will be replaced with the default silhouette image on those messages.

Even though your timeline isn't visible on Facebook, the information on it is still on Facebook's servers. Since deactivation is designed to be temporary, the information is in stasis and available if you decide to reactivate your Facebook account. All your photos, timeline information, friends, comments and preferences are saved for the day you decide to reactivate your account by logging back in.

When you deactivate your account, your personal information still identifies your Facebook activity on the company's servers. If you want it removed from Facebook's servers, you have to completely delete your account. Even if Facebook retains copies of your notes and images for technical reasons, deletion will remove any personal identifiers associated with them.