How to Delete Your Facebook Account: a Checklist
In the good old days, we encouraged you to consider deleting your Facebook account due to privacy breaches that made your personal information vulnerable to nefarious attackers around the world. And we can still agree that this is not very good. But the recent new years have given us a lot more reasons to want to wash our hands of the most ubiquitous social network on the Internet, not least of which was the whistleblower’s recent accusation that the company was particularly incentivized to spread disinformation on its platform because it was more profitable to do so. … Data hacking is bad, but fueling the flames of hatred and bigotry and encouraging distrust of fact-based science during a pandemic is perhaps even worse. So delete Facebook already. This checklist will tell you how to do it.
How can I quickly delete my Facebook account?
Removing your Facebook account is easy – too easy. But I’m not sure if this process really does what you want it to do. Yes, your account is being deleted and people can no longer tag you on anything. Yes, Facebook must delete all data associated with your account. But is it really so? Really ? I am cautiously optimistic.
According to Facebook, deleting your account means:
“You will not be able to reactivate your account.
Your profile, photos, messages, videos and anything else you add will be permanently deleted. You won’t be able to get everything you added.
You will no longer be able to use Facebook Messenger.
You will not be able to use Facebook login for other apps that you may have signed up with with your Facebook account, such as Spotify or Pinterest. You may need to contact apps and websites to recover these accounts.
Some information, such as messages you sent to friends, may be visible to them after they delete your account. Copies of messages you send are stored in your friends’ mailboxes. “
To get started, all you have to do is click that link , select the “Delete Account” option and allow the rip. Do not sign in to your account while Facebook deletes all of your data from its servers, which can take up to 90 days . After that, your account will disappear forever, like all your data, as we would like it to be.
How can I be sure that my Facebook account is indeed deleted?
As I said, it is easy to block your account from orbit, but you have no way to be sure that Facebook is not saving some of the data you provided to it. Or worse, your friends aren’t helping the service create some kind of shadow profile about you – some hidden chunk of related information that Facebook can easily associate with your personal information should you ever decide to join the service again.
I realize this sounds a little silly, and there is no way to know that Facebook does not archive every single data point you ever send to the service, so any attempt to hide or delete it is somewhat pointless. But I think in today’s digital world, being more skeptical than adjusting is okay. If I were deleting my Facebook today, I would do it like this:
- I would download all my Facebook data because you never know when you’ll need it again (and you might need memories too)
- I would uninstall any third party apps or services that I used to log into my Facebook account (or otherwise associated with my Facebook account).
- I would make sure that I log out on all devices that have access to Facebook.
- I would remove all authorized devices that can log into Facebook without a specific login code.
- I would remove any custom app passwords I created.
- I would consider using an extension to batch delete my Facebook timeline (just for added peace of mind), although it might take a long time.
- I would delete my location history (the three dots icon in the upper right corner).
- I would delete all contacts that I have uploaded to Facebook.
- I would disable facial recognition (just in case).
- I would delete any payment information (including credit cards) stored on Facebook. I would also delete all associated email addresses.
- I would start hiding my information. This is a little “theater of safety” because there is no way to tell if Facebook is storing the data you have changed. (I bet it is.) However, it doesn’t take long to switch your Facebook email address to something new and temporary, delete your phone number, delete your address, and delete (or change) any other important information that others may know about you – information that Facebook can potentially extract from them in order to maintain a secondary profile of your remote self, as I mentioned earlier.
Uf. It’s nothing you can do. Am I missing something? Are we feeling better now? This article was originally published on October 2, 2018, and has been updated on October 14, 2021 to bring the latest context to the ladder and update related locations that have changed during this time.