Meta has confirmed that the company is working on the ability to permanently delete a Thread account without deleting the associated Instagram account. Earlier this year, Meta had announced Threads to compete with Musk"s X (formerly Twitter). However, the app lacked one major feature which was the ability to delete an account without deleting the associated Instagram account as well.
Now, at Tech Crunch Disrupt, Michel Protti, Meta’s chief privacy officer for product confirmed that the company has been working on the feature. He further noted that Meta is aiming for December to roll it out to Threads users.
Technically, it was extremely challenging to allow deletion of a separate Threads account without also deleting your overall Instagram account out of the gate. So we paid particular attention to ensuring the user could still exercise their deletion rights, by deactivating the account to sort of hide all content, setting it to private, or deleting individual threads.
Protti mentioned that because Threads is tied to Instagram it has been quite challenging for the company to build a system that will separate the two services when someone decides to delete Threads but keep their Instagram account active.
Furthermore, Threads has been exploring the Fediverse integration which will allow Threads users to post content on decentralized platforms like Mastodon. However, that added to the problem as Meta needs to think about how to handle the post on Fediverse if the author deletes it or deactivates their account.
Last week, screenshots of the delete profile showed up on X confirming that Meta has been working on the feature. According to the screenshots, Meta will permanently delete your data 30 days after deleting the profile. Furthermore, you will not be able to open a new account with the same Instagram account for up to 120 days.
The Meta owned Threads app rose to success immediately after its launch in July, reaching two million signups in just a couple of hours. Over the months, Meta has been actively updating the service with new features including the desktop interface, the ability to search for keywords, and more.