How to delete your Facebook account

How to delete your Facebook account? The impact of the social network in our lives is considerable. And the need to disconnect is more and more pressing. We explain how to do this from a computer or a smartphone, but also how to save your data and delete your activity to really disappear from the social network.

Want to get out of Facebook? The social network is in turmoil, particularly since the 2016 American elections which highlighted the perverse effects of the platform. The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica case. The Facebook hack in 2018. The theft of hundreds of millions of phone numbers. The Internet Fake News Problem.

Not to mention the billions of fake accounts that the company was forced to delete (54 billion in 2019). So many cases that prove how much more and more complicated it is to trust the social network. To make matters worse, the average age on the social network is increasing and young people are increasingly deserting the platform in favor of alternative social networks (Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok).

When it does not go on encrypted messengers like Telegram and Signal to replace Messenger. So, isn’t it high time to close your account and join them?

To delete or deactivate a Facebook account:

• First of all, we advise you to save your data and delete your activity on Facebook (see below)

• Go to the “arrow” menu at the top right

• Go to Settings and Privacy > Settings> Your Facebook information

• Click on See at the line Delete your account and information
• Click on Delete my account and confirm with your password

The total and permanent deletion of your account Facebook will take effect after 30 days. Your personal data is kept for 90 days. This process can still be canceled at any time during this time..

Your journal will then no longer be available and your profile will no longer appear in the search results. After this time, all of your data will be lost forever provided you have properly deleted all of your interactions.

A tip: if you are really sure of your choice, we recommend that you log out manually, delete your cookies and the Facebook password in your managers, in order to avoid any accidental connection which would then immediately reactivate your account.

How to delete or deactivate a Facebook account from an Android smartphone

The process on an Android or iOS smartphone is similar. In addition, it is also possible to delete your interactions one by one via your Personal history, but it’s even longer and more laborious, and there’s no smartphone way to automate this task.

• Go to the menu ≡> Settings and Privacy> Settings> Account Properties and Control

From there you can simply deactivate your account. If you are sure you want to delete it:

• Go to Deactivation and deletion
• Touch Delete account and confirm by touching Continue with account deletion
• Touch Delete account and confirm with your password
• Uninstall Facebook on your smartphone and on all devices where the app is installed

You want to disappear from Facebook, either. Having said that, are you sure you won’t want to find a photo or a post that once made you laugh in the next few months? Another argument is that you might need to find information posted a long time ago on your wall.

Thus, it is better

to play it safe by preserving all the information accumulated during your presence on Facebook, before losing all access to it. You can do this manually if you are not really interested in information (texts, photos).

If you have a lot of memories to collect, there is a more convenient option – Upload a copy of your data to Facebook :

• Go to the arrow at the top right on the home page
• Click on Settings and Privacy> Settings> Your Facebook information (in the menu on the left)
• Click on Upload your information
• Select the content that interests you then click on Create an archive

Your password will be requested, and you will receive all the data within a period of up to a few hours in your mailbox.

Even if you close your account, your actions, posts, comments, etc., will remain on the social network. It is therefore necessary to go through an additional step to delete your activity on Facebook. It is a step too often neglected by those who wish to leave the social network.

• Go to your Personal history
• From there, you can delete all of your interactions … but one by one!

You read correctly : Facebook does not allow you to delete everything at once. By hand, deleting your posts will take around 20 to 30 minutes per month of activity. Which can keep you busy for a very long time if you’ve been on Facebook for several years. Fortunately, there are Chrome or Firefox extensions to automate this grotesquely laborious task!

For it :

This is where all your posts are. You can display a reduced list of posts to delete using the filters provided by Facebook.

• Click on the icon Social Book Post Manager in the extensions at the top right of the window of Chromium
• Choose All in Year and Month
• If you are sure you want to delete everything, uncheck the box Prescan on page speed
• Click on Delete
• Please wait (the process may take several hours)

We told you, you have 30 days to go back and undo the deletion or deactivation of a Facebook account. It could not be easier :

• Connect to Facebook

A message is then displayed asking you to confirm or cancel the deletion. If you click on the blue button without reading too much what is displayed, the whole procedure will be automatically canceled without further intervention on your part. Some would say that this complicates the deletion of the account, because it is possible that a person connects to it and cancels the whole procedure without you knowing it.

So think, as mentioned previously, to delete your cookies and your Facebook password from your manager if you want to avoid at all costs that everything is canceled without your knowledge … We hope that this tutorial has been useful to you! Please let us know about any difficulties you have encountered – we will update this tutorial based on your feedback.