\\If you’ve finally given up on the world’s most popular social media network, removing yourself from the service isn’t all that complicated. But before deleting all these pictures, posts and likes, you must download your personal information from Facebook.
Your Facebook archives contain approximately: all relevant information about your account, your photos, active sessions, chat history, IP addresses, facial recognition data, and ads you click on, just to name a few. That’s a ton of personal information that you probably need to keep access to.
To download your archive using the web:
- Click the “down” arrow in the upper right corner.
- Go to “Settings & Privacy” > “Settings”.
- In the left column, click on “Your Facebook Information”.
- In the center, find and click “Download Your Information”.
- You can choose which information you want to download (or download all). At the top of the page are drop-down lists that allow you to create a date range (if you want), download your data as HTML or JSON, and choose between high, medium or low media quality.
- When you’re ready, click “Create File”. You will be notified by e-mail when your file is ready.
After you finish downloading your archive, you can now delete your account.
Caution: Once you have deleted your account, it cannot be recovered.
When you are ready to delete your account, return to the page titled “Your Facebook Information” and click on “Deactivate and Delete”. Here you can choose between temporarily deactivating or permanently deleting your account.
If you want to delete it, click on the “Delete Account” option on that page or this linkit will take you to the same account deletion page.
Here you will have one more chance to choose to disable your archive instead of downloading or deleting it. When you click “Delete My Account”, your account will be marked for termination and cannot be accessed by other Facebook users.
Company notes Delay termination for several days after being requested. If you log in again during this time, your deletion request will be cancelled. So do not log in or you will have to restart the process. Certain things, like comments you made to a friend’s post, may still appear even after you delete your account. Facebook also says that copies of certain items, such as log records, will remain in its database, but states that these are unrelated to personal identifiers.
If you’re really serious about leaving Facebook, remember that the company also has other popular services like Instagram and WhatsApp, so you should delete your accounts there as well.
Update Jan 15, 2021 at 9:15 pm ET: This article was originally published on September 28, 2018 and has been updated to allow changes to the Facebook interface.
