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How to delete your Facebook account completely on your iPhone or Mac

Last updated

With anger and distrust at the social network at perhaps an all-time high, here's how to go about getting rid of Facebook — something that's a lot easier than it used to be.

Facebook is once again in the news for not-very-positive reasons, this time due to a series of news stories related to its relationship with the polling and data mining outfit Cambridge Analytica, and specifically the way CA improperly used a large cache of Facebook users' data, without permission, in connection with the 2016 presidential election.

This has all made trust in Facebook collapse, along with its stock price, while also pushing some users to get off the platform altogether. But for users to take the plunge, how exactly can they go about doing it?

There are two different options for getting off Facebook: deactivating and deleting. If one chooses to de-activate, that simply means they are removing their profile from public view, while retaining the option of re-activating it at a later time. This allows Facebook to retain your data.

Deleting your account means both they and you lose everything you've posted.

Still want to delete? First, open up Facebook in a browser, as you can't delete your account from the app. Second, Go to the Delete Account page:

Click Delete My Account, and that's it. However, even if you do, deletion requests take a few days to go into effect, and if the user logs back in during the deletion process, the deletion is cancelled with no warning to the user.

If you wish to save all of your data before deleting Facebook, there's an easy way to do that, too. Go to Facebook.com/settings and click "Download a copy of your Facebook data" at the bottom.

Deleting Facebook used to be much more difficult, but some EU regulations passed last year led the social network to change the protocol.