I don’t trust Meta to actually delete all copies of my data if I “delete” my accounts, but I will lose access to any privacy controls if I do it.

So, I have been deleting my posts, comments, photos, etc… stripping the account down to a mostly empty shell. Sometimes you can find browser scripts to help automate this.

I might add some junk data to the account later.

There’s no disadvantage to deleting your account…?

Revive and delete all media, then delete the account. In practice, it likely doesn’t mean much, but it does technically mean you sort of “deny further permissions” to use the data you left there. Again, IRL they’ll use it anyway.

Also, don’t leave an account associated with your name there to possibly get hacked years from now and abuse any connections you have.

Also an option if it’s not tied to your name, revive it and sell it. Aged accounts can be worth about $50+ to sell to scammers.

Delete

I deleted mine. Leaving old accounts around gives hackers another thing to potentially get into. You could always log in, ensure it’s locked down, and log out forever.

Even if you log back in to opt out, you can probably assume whatever data you gave them is already being used for AI. Best to abandon Meta and let it implode by itself.

I haven’t tried it myself but I’ve seen other people say that when they go back to an old Facebook account, Facebook will require a scan of their ID in order to log in. They can be a real removed about letting people log in to accounts that have been inactive for a long time.

I’d say leave it. I don’t know about at Facebook, but lots of companies still have that data in their database. They just remove publicly facing versions or index to it. And even if they do remove it they’d have backups and wont go through every backup ever to remove your info. So you’ll always be in there. And even if for some reason they close, they’ll sell all that data to someone else. We have digital ghosts floating everywhere. Don’t give them anymore pieces of you. Just walk away and never look back IMO.

edit: you never logged in in 10+ years? Unless you know there’s sensitive stuff in there, leave it. You probably won’t even be able to log in without going through major hoops.

I decided to actively delete my account a couple of years back. I did NOT want to scan my ID, as they demanded, but there were always other options. None of which appealed to me since they were clearly designed to get one last bit of valuable info for my shadow profile, but I went with the option to have 3 friends vouch for me.

After that I was told that it would take 30 days or so and trying to log in during that time would be interpreted as canceling my deletion. I never did.

Hey thanks for asking I had the same question !!

A solution I would like is an automated way to poison my old data and edit all my old post, change image and edit all my comments with something non related and totally false.

After some digging, their api is very limited and doesn’t allow such thing very easily. My programming skills beeing very limited I gave it a try with AI (yeah I know this is kinda “hypocrite” but we have to fight their empire with their own weapons…) and found out about a very cool tool you can selfhost and give instruction to execute this kind of operation in an automated way with AI !

It’s called browser use and it’s the open source alternative to ChatGPT operator. I haven’t tried it yet so I can’t give you any feedback but If that’s something you have the horse power for you can give it a try to slowely poison and edit all your facebook data without hitting their limit or their alert !

Does omebody know about a trusted tool for easy deletion of specific chunks of info from Facebook?

I would like to keep some stuff so no copycats can be made, but I’d like to delete things such as my “liked movies” and shit.