How to delete or deactivate your Facebook account

With the recent massive Facebook data breach in the news you have probably heard about it by now. More than 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries had their personal data leaked online. The data includes things like phone numbers, Facebook IDs and birthdates and so on. So we wanted to help you find out if your Facebook data has been compromised and help you finally delete or deactivate your Facebook account.

Have I Been Pwned

One popular tool for finding out if any of your data has been compromised online is Have I Been Pwned. This helpful online tool asks for your email address and phone number and with that info, it will find out if your data has been in a data breach.

The News Each Day

Another online tool is The News Each Day, which asks for your phone number and will find if it has been part of a data breach. The tool creator describes it like this:

The first version of this tool received some skepticism on Hacker News and elsewhere because it sent the phone number to the server, which I could be saving. I’m not, but it’s impossible to prove. This version generates random phone numbers that start with the same five digits as your number and sends 99 fake and one real number to the server, so it can’t know which is the real number.

You can check the source of this page and it should be easy to verify it’s doing what I claim. As with the previous version, the server is not saving anything you enter.

There is also an Australian version of this, although it only sends the real number to the server. If you don’t trust it, it can be used more securely by using it multiple times with random numbers and once with the real number.

As with all data online, it is the best practice to limit what the world knows about you online as much as possible. Facebook and other social media services ask you to put every kind of personal piece of information into their service with the user expecting that data to be private. Today user’s of online services should not have that expectation anymore, that is why we all need to be more savy and prepare for the worst and hope for the best online.

How to Delete or Deactivate your Facebook account

• First, sign into your Facebook account in a browser
• Next, visit this direct link to your ‘Facebook Information’

• Find the ‘Deactivation and Deletion section at the bottom of the list than select it.

• On this page you have two options, Deactivating your account just makes your account hidden to everyone else and enables you to take a break from it. Deleting your account is permanent, but you are essentially not allowing Facebook to sell your personal data or allowing your data to be hacked anymore, plus it is incredibly healthy.