Tag: Facebook

I have been contemplating Facebook suicide for quite some time now, since 2014. This blog post gives a step-by-step description of how I did this (with links) in case you want to do the same. I hope you find this useful…

Reason for this action – were primarily motivated by the feeling that my concerns for privacy started to outweigh the benefits. In addition the amount of junk popping up in my feed influenced by my click history was boring. I also felt that I had become a ‘passive consumer’ of social media, just as my generation were the first real ‘passive consumers’ of television. I wanted to stop this ‘addiction’ which is what it is… checking your feed for updates, checking if your posts got some Likes and Comments…. when I could be reading a book, or spending time with my family doing normal things.

Requirements:

• I still wanted to be connected to my family and very close friends;
• I wanted to delete the years of ‘my user behaviours’ from my account that were behind the adverts popping up;
• I wanted to be anonymous enough so that anyone that searched for my name, would not know who I was through my connections, even if they shared something that I shared;
• I did not want any personal photos that my FB friends would feel compelled to Like, and then I would be compelled to check my feeds for Likes 😉
• I didn’t want to be drawn to restart my behaviour as a ‘passive consumer’ of social media content;
• Given what I wanted, I knew that it is quite impossible to be anonymous from government intelligent agencies, they would keep my old FB content for at least 10 years, however I needed a compromise for today and the future;
• I wanted FB, but I wanted a clean start.

Here is what I did:

1. I set-up a new clean account and added my active FB account as a friend. I gave an age under 18, false name, an email not linked to my old account, and no additional information. The fact that I created an account as under 18 years, means some of the privacy settings are stricter by default.
2. I warned my FB friends that I would be deleting my account – in January – and gave them the choice of connecting to my new account. When I deleted my active account I had 20 FB friends on the new clean account.
3. I did nothing for 3 months, and made no postings on the clean account and minimal on the active account. My FB friends that were also friends on the clean account started posting to both during this time.
4. I downloaded a copy of the FB account to be deleted. This includes all your posts, your photos, even your click history, just about eveything except your Instant Messages.
5. I deleted my Instant Messages. This is not so easy as you need to go into each message individually and delete, and it takes several clicks for each. What I did was use Chrome and downloaded an extension that deletes all your messages in one or two attempts, it works and it is good 🙂
6. However deleting your messages does not delete them from your friends message archive unfortunately. Your best bet is to ask them them delete anything linked to your old account. I didn’t work this one out until after I had deleted all my messages 🙁
7. I removed my old account as a friend from my clean account.
8. I deleted my FB account – Delete Facebook Account.
9. I ‘unfollowed’ all friends feeds on clean account.
10. Privacy Settings – I set ‘who can contact me’ to “Strict Filtering”
11. Privacy Settings – ‘Do you want other search engines to link to your Timeline?’ = No
12. Notifications – I basically turned them off except those pertaining to Security and Privacy.
13. Apps, Websites and Plug-ins – Disabled
14. Always Play Anonymously – On
15. Apps others use – Unclick All
16. Old versions of Facebook for mobile – Only Me
17. Adverts – third-party sites = No one
18. Adverts and friends = No one
19. Adverts Based on Your Use of Websites or Apps Outside of Facebook – now this is a bit complicated, but you need to go into each of the Opt-out sites (there are 4) and choose Opt-out. You need to have cookies enabled to make this work. I did this in Chrome. Here you can see the sites that you are already opted-out of. It is dynamic, so when you opt-out it will update immediately.