This is what happens when you try to delete your Facebook history

I joined Facebook in early 2007. It was a completely different platform at the time. Back then you would post comments directly to your friends’ walls instead of messaging them in private. Photo sharing was done via albums and you could change your status which always had to begin with the convention “<Your Name> is..”. That was pretty much it. Friends lists were comprised almost entirely of people you knew and trusted in real life. It was the first time that people were comfortable using their real names on the internet.

Over the past decade, things changed. The platform evolved and matured. It added a slew of features including direct messaging, instant chat, groups, video, pages, events, check-ins, and a ton more that I’m sure even most people at Facebook aren’t aware of. With time, we began to expand our trust past our friends — we began to follow brands, interests, and celebrities. We started to use our Facebook login to connect to other websites. The “Like” button was a trojan horse that let Facebook know what we were doing even when we weren’t on their platform.

It was only a matter of time before our all of our data would get leaked.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal was the beginning of the end of Facebook for me. I removed the app from my phone but I held onto my account since I’m an admin on a few business pages. Soon after the scandal, the inevitable happened–someone hacked Facebook and at least 50 million accounts might have been compromised. This wasn’t a small breach either, the hackers had total access to our accounts.

I was one of the people who was automatically logged off Facebook the day of the hack. That was it for me. I was not okay with strangers having access to a decade’s worth of my digital diary.

Instead of deleting my Facebook account, I decided to completely remove everything I had ever posted or had been tagged in. I ’d leave my account active so I can still have access to the portions of the platform that I still needed to use.

The first step was to download my entire Facebook history as a backup. Surprisingly, this was easy to do with the press of a button. Done.

Now for the messy part, deleting my history. This was one of the most arduous tasks I’ve completed in recent memory. Facebook does offer the tools to delete your activity, posts, videos, pictures, and tags but it’s purposely not a streamlined process. Their livelihood depends on the data that they collect therefore they add unnecessary hurdles to try and deter you from removing it. There is no way to bulk delete any of your information.

You can only delete your activity one at a time

What I found the most interesting during all of this was that the data that gives Facebook the most information about me was also the data that requires the most steps to delete. Certain sections refresh the entire page which makes it incredibly hard to remove your information.

I found some scripts and browser extensions that helped speed up the process but even those were flawed. Being a techie, I dug into the errors to see why they weren’t working correctly. It turns out Facebook was detecting non-human behavior and preventing the scripts from deleting my posts. It took me a solid week to delete all of my data. It would have been considerably faster to just start fresh.

Going back to Facebook after you’ve deleted all your information is a pretty bizarre experience. It messes up their algorithm which is both good and bad. As expected, their ads are no longer tailored to my interests. My feed has posts from friends and acquaintances whom I haven’t heard from in a while. To my surprise, my friend recommendation no longer made any sense. Facebook doesn’t know who I communicate with on a regular basis anymore and can’t accurately provide me suggestions for new friends. I’ve unfollowed all brands which means my feed is once again all about my inner circle and Facebook no longer feels like a quasi-news site.

I know that Facebook still has a large portion of my data on their backup servers in an archive somewhere but I’m okay with that. I’m smart enough to have never posted anything too personal that I didn’t want to be leaked online. Any new hacks should, in theory, be limited to what I can see on Facebook about myself. Anything more sophisticated would be out of my control. Going forward, I still plan to use Facebook but in a more limited capacity. Of course, I’ll also be scrubbing my data as frequently as possible from now on.

UPDATE APRIL 2020

It’s been a while since I had “deleted” my Facebook history. Here’s some stuff that I have realized since.

1. Posts from friends who had deactivated their accounts were never deleted. When these friends reactivated their accounts, all the old posts, pictures I was tagged in, places and events I had gone to with them came back.
2. Some stories I had posted and deleted still resurfaced for unexplainable reasons.
3. Data from Facebook’s other platforms surfaces on Facebook all the time. For example, I took a picture in front of a store on Instagram, never tagged the store or my location, and then I received an ad for said store on Facebook. I’m not too surprised that this happened but it goes to show the effort to figure out where you take pictures, of what, and how they share that data amongst their platforms.