How to permanently delete a Facebook account
Here is the shortcut link to the official Facebook account deletion page.
A deceased member's account can be memorialized or removed.
Can't escape Facebook? Use it via a web browser. Delete the apps.
Free yourself from the Doomsday Machine that leaks your personal data.
Facebook launders toxicity
The social network profits from polarization as it ‘validates and exploits our biases’.
It's divisive and exploitative to the point of being complicit in genocide.
‘Social media is a marketplace that trades exclusively in human futures’
- Shoshana Zuboff.
Facebook is the ‘sociocultural equivalent of a fossil-fuel company’
.
Before you delete your account
- Backup your data if you'd like a copy.
- Revoke app permissions.
- Delete Facebook's apps from your devices.
- Consider a deletion epitaph to notify friends of your departure.
Revoking permissions makes it easy to spot which apps rely on your Facebook account. These can then be fixed to avoid future access issues.
The Facebook account deletion process
Your account will be ‘deactivated’ for one month (it was two weeks). After this period it will be permanently deleted. You have plenty of time to change your mind.
Do not sign in to your account during this time unless you wish to cancel the deletion request.
Don't be fooled into a deactivation request. Deactivation is not deletion.
What happens to your data?
In theory, deleting your account removes all Facebook data related to you. In reality it's more complicated, taking about 90 days.
Allegations of complicity with National Security Agency surveillance and repeated breaches suggest that your data may never truly be deleted.
Backup your data before deletion if you'd like a copy.
You can still cleanse your Facebook presence for everyone else,
- Delete any sensitive content that you have posted.
- Contact friends about content that you would like deleted.
Leaving social data behind
As hard as you try, some personally identifiable information may remain. This could be something as simple as your name on a message, unless you're Mark Zuckerberg.
You have little control over this or what others share about you in future. The most you can realistically do is ask your friends to respect your privacy.
Data shared with apps and advertisers is with them forever. As a Facebook user you are leaving behind a valuable personal data footprint.
What to do next?
Facebook can track non-users via the ‘like’ button and other similar means. You can minimise this and protect your privacy.
- Switch to a privacy focused browser like Brave or try a tracking blocker in your favourite.
- Use a non-tracking search engine like DuckDuckGo.
- Try a secure messaging app. Signal is a great choice.
You should rethink your relationship with Google and Twitter.
Meta owns social
Meta owns Facebook, Instagram, Oculus, WhatsApp and can share data between these assets.
Keep this in mind when using their apps.
Enjoy your freedom
Facebook was founded in 2004. Their leadership has had well over a decade to learn from their privacy blunders. They have consistently failed to reign in their greed.
‘Demanding privacy from surveillance capitalists … is like asking … a giraffe to shorten its neck, or a cow to give up chewing. These demands are existential threats that violate the basic mechanisms of the entity's survival.’
- Shoshana Zuboff.
Explore Facebook's problematic history
- How Facebook profits from polarization (Yael Eisenstat).
- Facebook: The Inside Story (Steven Levy).
- The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Shoshana Zuboff).
- Zucked (Roger McNamee).
Free speech and paid political ads
Whatever your opinion on Facebook's policies, the company's choices impact society worldwide.
Free speech is not the same as paid speech.
Paid political ads and similar topics need immediate discussion and regulation. These systems are broken and open to abuse by malicious actors with sufficient funds.
All power corrupts;
Facebook continues to dominate. It's important to consider their future.
‘And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that. All power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely’
- Sir John Dalberg-Acton.
Web/app developers
If you produce content on the web, you can make a massive difference.
- Remove Facebook trackers e.g.‘like’ buttons. Use the Web Share API or a share link.
- Avoid Facebook Connect for sign in.
- Reduce Facebook technology dependency.
Sites could be liable for helping Facebook secretly track your web browsing.
This ethical approach would make it difficult for Facebook to track users around the web. App developers, you can help too.
On a lighter note
The following links are to amusing fake stories… obviously?
- Mark Zuckerberg - Dead At 36.
‘You're Deleting Your Account? We'll be sad to see you go,’
says Facebook prompt showing user photo of own dead body.- Mark Zuckerberg announces virtual roundtable with American hate groups to better understand how they work.
- As a Facebook employee, I was ordered to bury thousands of stories about Mark Zuckerberg's human zoo.
- Mark Zuckerberg recalls coming up with idea for Facebook after seeing Dopamine-addicted lab rat starve to death.