There was a time a few years ago where people were flocking around in millions to log in to the biggest social media network on the planet – Facebook. Today seems to be a different day for the social media giant, as now users are quitting and deleting their Facebook accounts by the masses. Following the Cambridge Analytica hack, Facebook suffered a massive backlash from the tech community and the citizens alike as users felt insecure about their data security and privacy. Following a similar episode, where 50 million users lost their data to hackers, Facebook has gotten a negative reputation for itself as a social media platform. If you are one of the many who has decided to quit Facebook after reading the news, here is how you can do it.
Things to Know Before Facebook Deletion
Before proceeding to delete your Facebook account it is essential to note that Facebook stores almost all-important data related to you be it photos, active sessions, chat history, IP addresses, facial recognition data, which ads you clicked on, your comments, friends interactions, life events and much more. Luckily for us, Facebook provides the facility to its users to download and save their entire Facebook data as an exported file. We suggest that before you delete your account, it would be wise to download all your Facebook data in one place.
How to Download Copy of Facebook Data
To download your Facebook data, navigate to the Settings page and then move to the “General Account Settings” tab and tap on “Download a copy of your Facebook data”. After that, click on “Start my Archive” to start compilation. Once done, you will be able to download the copy of your Facebook data.
Post Facebook Account Deletion
To delete your Facebook account, you will need to navigate to the Facebook Delete account page which will ask for your confirmation about deleting the account. It’s worth noting that once you delete your account, you won’t be able to retrieve it back. However, Facebook does give a termination extension period when users decide to delete their account. In this period, the particular account marked for deletion remains deactivated for 14 days, if the user does not log in or does any activity from their Facebook account in this period, their account is deleted. So if you are firm about your decision of deleting Facebook, we would suggest you stay away from logging in to Facebook during this time, or you will have to repeat the entire process from the beginning.
Facebook has also highlighted that even after deleting your account, some information like your comments on other users’ pictures or posts will remain on the platform. Also, Facebook reserves some log files and other related data on its database. The company has also remarked that it takes up to 90 days to entirely wipe out the account pertaining data from Facebook servers. However, your account remains inaccessible to other users during this time.
