How to make your Facebook account more private

This article details how to minimize your Facebook footprint, offering a practical alternative to full account deletion for those bound to the platform for professional reasons. The author, unable to fully delete their account due to professional networking needs, opts for a thorough data purge to enhance privacy.

Grow Up: Removing Personal Information

The first step involves removing sensitive personal data like birthdates and phone numbers, easily accessible and editable via the "Edit Profile" section. While some information, like phone numbers used for account verification, may only be hidden, not completely removed, this significantly reduces exposure. This process took approximately 10 minutes.

Clearing Out Photos

Next, the author tackles photos. Albums can be easily hidden ("Only You" privacy setting) or deleted, with the option to download albums before deletion. However, profile and cover photos require manual editing. Cleaning up personal albums took around 45 minutes. Untagging from photos others posted proved far more time-consuming, leading to the use of automation tools.

Automating the Purge

Due to Facebook's limitations on bulk deletion, the author utilizes the "Social Book Post Manager" Chrome extension. This tool automates the deletion or hiding of posts based on customizable filters (date, keywords, etc.). This process, while requiring multiple runs to cover different post types, took approximately four hours to delete around 5,000 posts and photos.

Preemptive Measures and Alternatives

Before undertaking a large-scale deletion, the author recommends downloading a copy of all Facebook data. This can be done via the "Download Your Information" feature. As an alternative to complete deletion, account deactivation is also discussed; this hides the profile but doesn't delete data and allows continued Messenger use. Reactivation occurs upon logging back in.

Conclusion

The author concludes the process, reflecting on the emotional aspect of deleting years of digital history. While initially hesitant to delete posts and photos representing a significant portion of their past 12 years, the author feels relieved to have minimized their digital footprint and enhanced their privacy on the platform. The experience highlights the difficulty Facebook intentionally creates in removing user data.

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