How Do I Delete My Facebook Account Permanently?
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Here's today's question
what is the safest way to deactivate and completely eliminate my Facebook account?
So there are a lot of reasons people look into deleting their Facebook account.
Sometimes it's because they are just tired of social media, sometimes it's because
they're being harassed, sometimes it's for any number of other reasons.
I am going to show you exactly how to do that in this video.
However, I have to start with a caveat
because there's another reason that people try or would like to delete their Facebook
account, and that's because they've lost access to it.
Unfortunately,
if you cannot log in to your Facebook account, you cannot delete it.
It's that simple.
You cannot delete it.
The problem, of course, here is very simple.
Facebook only allows authorized people to delete accounts.
Otherwise, anybody could delete any account and it'd be chaos.
The way you prove that you are
the authorized person is by your ability to log into the account.
If you can't log in, you're not authorized.
It's that simple.
So if for some reason you have an account that you have lost access to,
your password doesn't work, you don't have the recovery information.
Whatever the reason is that you can't log
into your account, you must first regain access to the account.
So assuming that you have access to your
account and you want to delete it, here's what we do.
Flip on over to Windows, already open to my example Facebook account.
No, I'm not going to delete it,
but we can take you through the steps just shy of deleting it.
Another caveat here.
Real quick, as I started to record this
video, the user interface for Facebook changed.
You'll notice that the controls
on the website are on the left hand side instead of being across the top.
That's a change.
The steps are still the same.
It just may look different depending on where you are on the rollout schedule
for this particular piece of functionality.
And I also strongly recommend that whenever you're doing something as
major or as important as deleting an account like this, do it on a computer.
Do it on a full screen with a web browser.
Like I'm going to show you here,
I say that because the website essentially makes it easier.
It exposes more information.
You can see more context of what you're doing.
It's harder to make mistakes.
It's just safer to do it from your computer.
That being said, down at the bottom here, I'm clicking on the account icon and I'm
clicking on Settings and Privacy, clicking on Settings
and then in your Facebook information.
If we scroll down, you may need to scroll down.
Depending on your screen size.
There it is deactivation and deletion.
I'm going to click on that.
And now this is going to give me a choice.
I want you to seriously consider whether
or not deactivation is what you really want.
Deactivation is essentially removing your
account from the Facebook ecosystem without actually deleting it.
You can come back.
You can come back at any time as long as your account has been deactivated.
It may also be important for you to deactivate your account rather than
deleting it if you're using other services.
For example, Facebook Messenger.
Facebook messenger will continue to work if you've deactivated your account.
If you delete your account, then Facebook Messenger associated
with that account will stop to work and you'll need to set up something new.
So keep that in mind.
If you choose to delete your account as it says, it's permanent.
However, there is one scenario where I
really think you want to be very, very careful.
And that is once you delete your account,
don't try and log into it again.
There's a real tendency for people to say, okay, let's make sure the account is
deleted by making sure that an attempt to log into the account will fail.
It won't.
If you log into the account that you've just deleted too soon,
Facebook will take that as an indication that you didn't really mean it.
Facebook will take that as a sign that you want to reactivate the account.
So what's the difference?
Well, deactivating account.
If you choose to deactivate account, it's temporary.
It's just going to hang around forever.
Deleting the account is permanent eventually.
Now, my belief is it's a two week window.
If you try and sign in again within two
weeks, it's going to resurrect your deleted account.
But if you wait longer than that, then it won't.
Your account is well and truly gone.
However, don't count on the two weeks.
I could be wrong and it could change.
Just if you're certain, you're absolutely, positively certain that you want to delete
the account, delete the account and never log in again.
Just don't.
That's the safest thing to do.
Now, there is one last set of caveats that I want to throw out here.
Before you delete your account and before
you even potentially deactivate the account.
And that is simply this.
Make sure that you've severed all ties
and you may have ties that you're not even aware of.
For example, if on some third party service,
they offered you the ability to login with Facebook, that's going to stop working.
That will stop working if you've deleted your Facebook account.
So make sure that before you delete the Facebook account,
you've severed all those ties, you've gone to those third party services
and you've chosen a different method of logging in.
My recommendation generally is to use
email and password, because that way each site has its own login credentials.
But that's a discussion for a different day.
The idea here is that if you're going to delete your Facebook account,
you will no longer be able to log into other sites where you've been logging
in using your Facebook account and finally consider downloading everything that's
in your Facebook account before you delete it.
In other words, all those pictures,
all those videos, maybe even your posts, your articles or whatever you've written.
If you delete your Facebook account
and let it delete permanently, they're gone they're all gone permanently.
If you didn't have copies yourself, they're gone forever.
Make sure that you have everything that you've uploaded to Facebook
in other words, I'm saying before you
delete it, make a backup because that's ultimately what it boils down to is you're
backing up all of the data that you stored on Facebook.
But as long as you're certain that you are
ready, you've disconnected and you've got everything you want to keep.
This is how you delete your account on Facebook permanently.
Hope that helps for updates Related links for comments and more, visit askleocom/4322.
I'm Leo Notenboom and this is askleo.com.
Thanks for watching.