Many people are suggesting that we delete our profiles. Don't, if you ask me. I will explain.

1) Because, certain information can be considered valuable - For example old comments from friends/family on relevant photos, semi-private get-togethers/events, etc. Because all these can be considered as good memory/archives of your personal life and the stuff that reminds people of their relationship with you. For me I consider, these valuable, so it's a no no to delete my profile as I will end up losing these. I can technically take a back up if I want, but who opens their backed up index.html once a week, if not daily?

However, leaving your profile undeleted means you lose a lot of privacy. So how am I going to hide my profile if it's publicly searchable?

First, understand that your live profile is not only searchable, but also indexable by google.

Facebook ALSO hands over the stuff you 'like' to search engines. So, you now like a famous pornstar's fan page/even her post? Well, good luck getting it removed from Google!

All I need to do to find out what you've liked on facebook is search for your name in quotes:

"<insert your name here>"

or even:

site:http://facebook.com "<insert name here>"

While this heavily depends on the uniqueness of your name, it also means that it sucks if you are a professional seeking a job or in a similar situation and all Google returns for querying your name is a list of pornstars you've liked on Facebook. Pornstars are probably an over-rated example, but in many cases it could really be awkward - your views against a particular ideology (feminism/masculism/atheism, for example) and sensitive stuff like that. Because if you like something, it means you "support it". That's how it's perceived, atleast.

2) So, back to my point. Deleting is too extreme. Why? Because deleting also makes you lose control of what's out there. If I am correct, I've observed in the past that even deleted profiles are not actually deleted, but are assigned an empty profile with just your name and the default profile picture and this stuff is still sent to search engines. So, if you delete your profile, you lose control over this.

What I may suggest doing is temporarily deactivate your profile (There's an option for this.). This will actually make your profile totally invisible (from search and indexing) and also from my observations, temporarily un-index you from search engines. This is good because you still have control over your profile, you own your data and search engine visibility.

So, what I technically do is, login into Facebook to check what my friends are upto, say once or twice a month, and then deactivate it. For example, I like to keep additional family and friends separate and hence I maintain multiple additional profiles for them, distinctive from my main profile, instead of using Facebook's unreliably stupid privacy system (circles). Now, I wouldn't want my friends to discover my family profile and vice versa. Then, there's the list of dudes whom I will never want to add me, ever. So, maintaining multiple profiles also, helps me maintain a fake presence on Facebook, while also masking my search engine visibility of my real profile with the fake profiles. This works well for me, ymmv. So, just think twice before deleting your profile.

Cheers.