There are a variety of reasons why you may want to cancel your Facebook account. You may have seen that using social media negatively impacts your emotional well-being. Perhaps you criticize the site for reports of political squabbles, privacy issues, false information, and other potentially dangerous stuff for teenagers. You could also be attempting to remove all of your personal information from the internet. In any case, we’ll show you how to permanently delete your Facebook account.

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CNET’s Brett Pearce
It’s crucial to understand that deactivating your Facebook account is not the same as deleting it. If you wish to take a short break, deactivating your Facebook account will temporarily freeze it. However, it doesn’t stop the business from monitoring your internet behavior.

The only way to completely get away from Facebook is to delete your account. Additionally, deleting it breaks connections to Facebook Messenger, the messaging program on the platform. (You will need to do this individually if you also want to remove WhatsApp and Instagram, which are Facebook products.) Before beginning the procedure, which calls for patience and time, we’ll go over some items you should think about.

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1. Uninstall the Facebook app on your tablet and phone.\

Getting rid of the app from your tablet or smartphone is the first step. Keep in mind that your account is still accessible via the internet and that other applications may still utilize Facebook as a login if you remove the Facebook app.

Although removing the symbol from your phone puts it out of your line of sight, it has no effect on your account as a whole. Facebook can still monitor your internet activities if you don’t take these additional precautions.

2. Select a different social networking or messaging platform.

Signal and WhatsApp Messaging’s privacy and security
You may stay in contact with people using a variety of communications options.
Martin James/CNET
Keep in mind that you lose access to Messenger when you deactivate your Facebook account. In other words, you will need to inform those you often communicate with on Messenger of your intentions and find an alternative messaging program or service to keep in contact.

Apply the same strategy to all of your Facebook friends. A few days before you intend to delete your account, post a status asking anybody who want to stay in touch to send a message with their contact information.

Additionally, Facebook allows you to move your posts, notes, videos, and images to other websites, such as Dropbox and Google Photos. Here’s how to move data from Facebook.

3. Unlink your Facebook account from all other logins and applications.

For a long time, third-party apps like DoorDash and Spotify have allowed users to sign up and log in to their services using their Facebook accounts. You don’t have to remember another password, which makes it convenient. Until your Facebook account is deleted, that is.

You must get into each external account that uses your Facebook information and separate it from your Facebook account in order to handle those accounts.

To see which applications are connected to your Facebook account:

Log in to Facebook.
Navigate to Settings > Websites and Apps.
For assistance in unlinking your Facebook account from a service, get in touch with the customer support division of the business.
Facebook-app-logins
Don’t lose access to the services and applications you use to check in with Facebook.
Jason Cipriani/CNET screenshot
After that, do the following actions to obtain and download a copy of all your Facebook data:

Open Facebook on your PC and log in.
Navigate to Settings > Facebook Data.
To download your information, click View next to it.
In the “Your Information” section, make sure that every item is ticked.
All of my data should be the date range.
Your data will be in an easily navigable format if you leave the format set to HTML.
Adjust the Media Quality drop-down from Medium to High to save high-resolution versions of the images and videos you upload to Facebook.
Click Create File at the end. After compiling all of your data, Facebook will notify you via email when it is prepared for download. This is not a procedure that happens instantly; it may take some time.

screenshot of October 6, 2021, at 1:08:57 p.m.
Before you proceed, download all of your Facebook data.
Katie Teague/CNET 4 screenshot.

It’s time to finally erase your Facebook account.

Lastly, you may delete your account. Go to this page and log in to do this.

Prior to deactivating your account, Facebook will provide you with a list of chores and considerations. For instance, you may be requested to offer another account admin powers if you are the only administrator of a Facebook page, or you may be prompted to download all of your data. If not, your account and the page will be removed.

Okay, are you prepared? After entering your password and selecting “Delete Account,” click “Continue.” When you’re finished, click Delete Account once again.

Facebook account deletion
Before you delete your account, read Facebook’s last piece of advise.
Jason Cipriani/CNET 5 screenshot. You have 30 days to decide whether or not to use Facebook.
Facebook may take up to ninety days to remove all of the information associated with your account from its servers. You may still sign in and revoke your deletion request throughout the first thirty days of that time frame. It will be as if you never left once your account has been restored. For better or worse.

Go to Facebook.com, sign in to your account, then choose the Cancel Deletion option to reverse your deletion request.

Here are some suggestions on how to lessen the pain of Facebook separation if you need any assistance with the emotional aspects of the split. Additionally, you may review CNET’s list of the year’s top VPN and password management services.