How to Remove Phone Contacts From Facebook
The terrible, terrible, bad, very bad week for Facebook continues . Although the “import contacts” feature has been around for a long, long time on social networking sites, you’ve probably forgotten about it. And if you want Facebook not to fill in the blanks by collecting your friends’ data from you – or worse, your call records – it’s easy to shut down your devices.
What have you already told Facebook?
To view the contacts you’ve already uploaded to Facebook, you need to visit the Facebook “Manage Invitations and Imported Contacts” page. You may be mildly shocked to see that open invitations from many, many years ago are still active – this is just a small hint of the viral aspects of the social network when it was just starting to develop (and more like a collective collection than anything else. ). Feel free to delete them; Who even needs a Facebook invite now?
The bottom section of the page shows all of the contacts that Facebook imported from you – which sounds ominous, but this is a practice you’ve probably given the service permission to execute at some point in your Facebook history. Hope remains .
You can browse these contacts by name if you like, but it’s probably best to just delete them all in one fell swoop. Click the Delete All Contacts link, confirm the deletion by clicking Delete, and take some time for yourself while Facebook clears this data – again, hopefully.
While your bulk deletion will make Facebook’s friend suggestion tool less useful, it’s a small price to pay to help your friends not share information about them that they themselves choose not to share with Facebook. Finding Facebook friends is easy; Becoming a good data steward is a little tricky, but achievable.
You can also do the same trick with contacts that you downloaded through the Facebook Messenger app. Just click on this link to see the data dump.
As before, you can delete all contacts, which will make Facebook friends’ recommendations less useful and also help the social giant not learn more about your friends than they wanted – at least from you.
Don’t restart contacts automatically
One small feature of Facebook is that if you’ve already turned on the setting that allows your device to automatically import your Facebook friends’ contact information, deleting that information won’t do any good – it will just re-sync next time. once you are using the application. Let’s fix this.
In the Facebook app, click on the hamburger icon. On Android, you will need to look for the App Settings option. On iOS, you’ll need to tap Settings at the bottom of the screen, then Account Settings and then General.
Then, in any of the versions of the app, you’ll look for an option to download contacts – probably with the subheading “Automatically download new and updated contacts.” Click on it and turn it over to prevent Facebook from automatically updating newly deleted contacts.
And since Facebook makes this process as easy as possible, you’ll also have to open the separate Messenger app and toggle a similar switch there. Once you’re signed in to Messenger, click on your profile picture in the upper left corner of the app. Find the People option on the Me screen, tap it, and then uncheck the Sync Contacts checkbox.