Over the weekend, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg released a full-page ad in major U.S. and U.K. newspapers apologizing for the company’s role in allowing a controversial company’s app to access users’ personal data.
“This was a breach of trust, and I’m sorry we didn’t do more at the time,” Zuckerberg said in the ad. “We’re now taking steps to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”
Deactivate your Facebook account in 3 easy steps
A weekend Reuters/Ipsos online poll that gauged how Americans feel about tech companies’ use of people’s data found that just 41% of them trust Facebook to obey U.S. privacy laws. Other tech companies fared much better, with 62% of poll respondents saying that Amazon had their confidence and 60% giving Google and Microsoft their trust.
The poll results indicate that many users are smarting from the Facebook data scandal, which has led to congressional scrutiny and talk of greater regulations of social media sites. Because of the outrage, many people are looking into deactivating their Facebook accounts.
A full page ad in The Observer today — an apology from Facebook. A week after Facebook threatened the newspaper with legal action about the story exposing Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook data. pic.twitter.com/lJte7hh0tT
— Donie O'Sullivan (@donie) March 25, 2018
Of course, this is a fairly drastic measure, but it is a clear signal that the largest social networking site in the United States must do a better job in protecting people’s data. So how would you go about deactivating your Facebook account? Here’s a step-by-step guide to doing just that:
Here’s how to deactivate your Facebook account
- Click
at the top right of any Facebook page and go to Settings.
2. This will take you to another page on the platform. Click General at the top of the left column.
3. Choose Manage your account and then scroll down to click Deactivate your account. This will disable your account and hide your profile from most things you’ve posted on the social media site.
Once you’ve deactivated your account, people will no longer be able to search for you. It will be as if you’ve become invisible on the site. But note that your information is not lost. You can still come back to your account and reactivate it after any period of time.
Additionally, even if you deactivate your Facebook account, your Messenger account will remain active. That means any chats that you engaged in via Messenger will still be there and your profile picture will remain.
Zuckerberg posted late last week on Facebook that his company has “a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you.” We couldn’t agree more.
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