If Facebook doesn’t have data about you, it can’t sell it to the highest bidder, let it be harvested by hackers, or use it in ways you might find creepy.įacebook’s Privacy Checkup walks you through many of Facebook’s privacy settings: On a personal level, there are two ways to think about privacy on Facebook: limiting the information you share with other people on Facebook and limiting the information that you’re willing to provide to Facebook. It’s also a good idea to offer customers multiple ways to contact you, particularly via email. So make sure you have a Web site that you control, and make sure that customers can easily find it and contact you through it. Back in 2018, Facebook said it would be prioritizing posts from friends and family over public content, which is a nice way of saying that Facebook is deprecating business-related posts. If you’re a business, the most sensible approach is to keep your Facebook page but avoid relying on it. Plus, lots of companies have Facebook pages, and taking those down might result in a loss of business from customers who would find out about the firm only through Facebook. For many, losing access to Facebook would hurt real-world relationships and activities. It may be the only connection you have with certain friends or family members, and many informal groups use Facebook for meetup logistics. The problem is that Facebook can be useful. Deactivating your account just makes you invisible on Facebook, whereas deleting your account may eventually (up to 3 months) result in most of the data being removed.

Facebook provides instructions for both actions. If you’re done with Facebook, you’re welcome to deactivate or even delete your account. That even includes the billionaire co-founder of the WhatsApp messaging service, which Facebook bought in 2014. The criticisms of Facebook go on and on.īecause of this, many have encouraged Facebook users to delete their accounts. Apple caused that to be shut down too.įacebook has also silently shared user data with other tech giants, received confidential health data from other apps without users’ informed consent, and stored hundreds of millions of Facebook and Instagram passwords in an unencrypted form, among much else. After pressure from Apple, Facebook pulled the VPN but reused it for the Facebook Research program, which paid users as young as 13 for their data. Closer to home, the company pushed a VPN service in the Facebook iOS app that collected all your mobile data traffic for Facebook. Most notable, of course, were the 50 million Facebook profiles gathered for Cambridge Analytica for the 2016 election. Take a Few Minutes to Lock Down Your Facebook Privacy SettingsĮven beyond its often controversial behavior in the 2020 US presidential election, Facebook continually makes news headlines for its numerous privacy and security problems.

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