Katie Geminder, Facebook’s director for user experience and design, said internal adjustments to the tool used to delete accounts had created a technical snag that affected “a small percent” of Facebook users. “None of their information was exposed, but the empty account continued to exist even though all of its data had been removed,” she said by e-mail. The bug was fixed within 24 hours, she said.

One such partially deleted user was Matt Dauphin, a 22-year-old office manager for an interior design firm in Tempe, Ariz., who tried to delete his account after reading about the new form last week. He received confirmation by e-mail of the deletion from Facebook’s technical support team.

But even after he received that confirmation, a working link to his empty Facebook profile was the first result in a Google search for his name. While his name, photo and profile information had been deleted from the Facebook page, his friends who still used the service could see his lists of friends and the external applications he had added to his profile.

“It’s a little disturbing that you can see people that I used to talk to  that’s not right,” Mr. Dauphin said Friday. He said he was annoyed at Facebook’s refusal to create a one-step “delete account” button instead of the form.

By Saturday, Facebook had removed the remaining traces of his account from the site.

Still, such experiences have done little to quiet the jitters of many users, who see Facebook’s adjusted policy as an inadequate response to their demand for an easy opt-out button and to their larger concerns over the network’s efforts to profit from the private information they volunteer to the site.