How to delete your Facebook account? The social network of Mark Zuckerberg has, in fifteen years of existence, passed from status of must have, to that of a kind of digital drug accompanied by a difficult withdrawal. The impact of the social network on our lives is simply insane and the need for disconnection is more and more pressing. We explain how to perform this operation from the PC or 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, especially since the 2016 American elections which highlighted the perverse effects of the platform. The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica affair also passed by there, then the recent hacking of Facebook did not help anything and proves us once again 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. It’s high time to close your account and join them, right?SUMMARY
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How to delete or deactivate a Facebook account from a Windows, Linux or Mac PC
To delete or deactivate a Facebook account:
- First of all we advise you to save your data and delete your activity on Facebook
- Go to Settings then click on Your Facebook information
- Click on View in the line Delete your account and your information
- Click on Delete my account and confirm with your password
The total and final deletion of your Facebook account 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 no longer be available and your profile will no longer appear in the search results. After this time, all your data will be lost forever provided that you have correctly deleted all your interactions.
A word of advice: if you are really sure of your choice, we advise you to log out manually, delete your cookies and the Facebook password in your managers, in order to avoid any accidental connection which would then reactivate your account immediately.
How to delete or deactivate a Facebook account from an Android smartphone
The approach on 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 is even longer and laborious, and there is no way on smartphone to automate this task.
- Go to menu ≡> Settings and Privacy> Settings> Properties and account control> Deactivation and deletion
From there you can simply deactivate your account. If you are sure you want to delete it:
- Touch Delete account and confirm by touching Continue account deletion
- Tap Delete account and confirm with your password
- Uninstall Facebook on your smartphone and on all devices where the application is installed
How to download data from your Facebook account before deleting it
You want to disappear from Facebook, either. That said, are you sure you won’t want to find a photo or publication in the next few months that made you laugh in the past? Another argument is that you may need to find information posted on your wall a long time ago. Thus, it is better to play it safe by preserving all the information accumulated during your presence on Facebook, before losing any access to it. You can do this manually if little information really interests you (texts, photos).
If you have lots of souvenirs to collect, there is an option to Download a copy of your data on Facebook :
- Go to the arrow at the top right on the home page
- Click on Settings> Your Facebook information (in the menu on the left)
- Click on Download your information
- Select the contents which interest 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.
How to delete your activity on Facebook
Even if you close your account, your actions, publications, comments , etc. will remain on the social network. You must therefore go through an additional step to delete your activity on Facebook. It is a step too often overlooked 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 that right : Facebook doesn’t allow you to delete everything all at once. By hand, deleting your posts will take approximately 20 to 30 minutes per month of activity . This can occupy you very long if you have been on Facebook for several years. Fortunately, there are Chrome or Firefox extensions to automate this grotesquely laborious task!
For that :
- Install the Social Book Post Manager extension in Google Chrome by clicking here
- Open Facebook from Chrome
- Go to the arrow at the top right then in Personal history
This is where all of your posts are located. You can view a reduced list of posts to delete using the filters made available by Facebook.
- Click on the Social Book Post Manager icon in the extensions at the top right of the Chrome window
- Choose All in Year and Month
- If you are sure you want to delete everything, uncheck the Prescan on page speed box.
- Click on Delete
- Wait (the process may take several hours)
How to cancel the deletion or deactivation of a Facebook account
A message then appears asking you to confirm or cancel the deletion. If you click on the blue button without reading too much of what is displayed, the entire procedure will be automatically canceled without further action on your part. Some people will 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 remember to delete your Facebook cookies and password from your manager if you want to avoid at all costs that everything is canceled without your knowledge …
We hope you have found this tutorial useful! Do not hesitate to let us know about the difficulties you encountered – we will update this tutorial based on your feedback.