Who Do I Delete My Facebook Account

Who Do I Delete My Facebook Account

How to completely delete Facebook from your life
Buh-bye, Facebook. It's been real.

So you've had it with endless scrolling through the News Feed, notifications that wake you up in the middle of the night, memories that remind you how little your life has changed over the years, and groups that are just too big and you don't even know why you joined in the first place.

In short, you want to delete Facebook from your life.

It's a big decision, and it can be pretty scary, but we assure you: It can be done.

Before you start, though, think long and hard on whether you want to delete or merely deactivate your Facebook account.

Deactivating Facebook is fairly easy and painless. If you do it, your Timeline and other info will disappear from Facebook — but only until you reactivate your account. Yes, this means all your data will remain stored somewhere on Facebook's servers.

Deleting Facebook means you can never access your account again or retrieve any of your content or data. That means you need to take additional steps to remove traces of your Facebook data (as well as preserve it for yourself) before you delete your account.
Deactivating your Facebook account

How to deactivate your Facebook account

Image: STAN SCHROEDER/MASHABLE
To deactivate your account, follow these steps:

Click on the down arrow in the upper right corner of Facebook and click on Settings

Click on General

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Click on Manage Account

Click on Deactivate your account

Enter your Facebook password and confirm deactivation

Yup, it's that easy. You're now gone from Facebook, but as we said, it's just a temporary measure that doesn't really delete your data on the service. You've just deactivated your Facebook account. To permanently erase yourself from Facebook, you'll need to delete your account altogether.

But, before you do that, it's prudent to take a few additional steps.
Backing up your Facebook data

Image: STAN SCHROEDER/MASHABLE

You may be done with Facebook, but you probably want to keep the data you've amassed on the service. Think about it: Posts, photos, videos, messages, likes, list of friends — it's all potentially valuable, and it really doesn't hurt to preserve it. To back up your data, do the following:

Open Facebook settings

Click on Your Facebook Information

Click on Download Your Information

Here, you'll be able to choose the date range, what types of data you'd like to backup, and media quality. Our advice: Just keep it all, and leave the media quality on high.


You can also choose between a HTML format, which will make the file easier to view, and JSON format, which will make it easier to import the data into another service (yes, it's quite possible that there will be another popular social network after Facebook one day). Now, click on "Create File," and store the resulting file safely.
Making sure you've deleted all your Facebook data

This may sound a little paranoid, but getting rid of any trace of your existence on Facebook is harder than you think and requires more steps than just hitting that delete button. So before you do so, we suggest you do the following three steps, and an optional fourth step:

Remove associations between third party apps and Facebook

Turn off Facebook platform

Check how much of your data is held by third party apps

Clear your Facebook history

Parts 1) and 2) are easy, and consist of the following:

Go to Settings

Click Apps and Websites,

Check all apps and then clicking "Remove."

To turn of Facebook's platform, do this:

Go to Settings

Click on "Edit" under "Apps, Websites and Games"

Click on "Turn Off."

Important: Facebook might be the only way you can log in into some third-party apps (such as Tinder) and websites. Make sure you check those services and switch to a different type of login (email and password, for example) before you cut all ties to Facebook.

Check how much of your data is held by third-party apps

Now comes the tough part. Third-party apps, websites, games, and services might keep your data even if Facebook doesn't have it anymore. Unfortunately, there's no simple way to delete all of this Facebook data at once. You'll have to contact the app maker directly — here are Facebook's instructions on how to do that — and ask them to remove the data. Luckily, companies that operate on Facebook's platform are required by Facebook's terms and services to delete your data if you ask them to do so.

To contact the individual apps, games and websites, you should visit their privacy policy pages. It's impossible to list them all, but here they are for some of the most popular ones:

Note that Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, is tightly integrated with Facebook, the social network, and some of your Facebook data might be preserved on Instagram even after you delete your Facebook account. Fully deleting your Instagram account is similar to deleting your Facebook account; for instructions, go here.

Clear your Facebook history (optional)

Now for the last bit, which is only for the extra, extra cautious among us. Deleting your Facebook account should remove all traces you from the social network, but you can actually scroll back through your Facebook history and undo it, one like at a time. (This is different from the upcoming feature, Clear History, that Facebook announced at its 2018 f8 developers conference.)

To do so, do this:

Click on down arrow in the upper right corner of Facebook

Click on Activity log

Click on the pencil icon next to any item you want to remove and click Delete/Unlike.