By Katherine Bindley 

You're fed up with Facebook. It's understandable. An outside developer violated the social network's policies and shared the data of tens of millions of users with people he shouldn't have.

This isn't the first time users have felt betrayed by the company, and a lot are feeling like this could be the final straw.

The hashtag #deletefacebook has been trending on Twitter. Deleting your account is an option, but just know: It's more complicated than just clicking a button.

There are other ways to cope, if you're conflicted about your relationship. From scaling back your account activity and Facebook's data collection to full-on deletion, these are your options:

Turn Off Outside Apps

Facebook's byzantine, at times inscrutable, settings menus cover a lot, from ad preferences to data collection.

As the Cambridge Analytica scandal reminds us, many outside apps and websites let you log in using your Facebook account. By doing this, you agree to let those apps and websites have certain information about you.

In a Facebook post earlier this week, company founder Mark Zuckerberg said that going forward, the information that apps can get about you would be reduced to only your name, profile photo and email address. Until now, basic permissions have included your "public profile" -- name, cover photo, profile pic, gender, age range, language, time zone and networks -- along with your email address and list of friends who also are on that particular app.

Apps can still ask for additional information, with Facebook's permission, including your relationships, birthday, work history, education history, current city, likes and more.

Facebook gets information, too, when you log into apps and websites with its credentials. It knows what those apps and websites are, and it can get other info. Waze, for instance, can share your location and routing with Facebook if you log in this way. An app or website might also share information with Facebook to measure engagement or optimize advertising. It's up to the app or website to tell you what it's doing in these cases.

Want to take this option off the table? Go here.

If this stuff sounds confusing, it is, even for Facebook. A setting called Apps Others Use on this page purports to let you control what other people can share about you. It does nothing.

"We changed our systems years ago so that people could not share friends information with developers unless each friend also had explicitly granted permission to the developer," says a Facebook spokeswoman, who added that Facebook will be updating these settings soon.

Reduce Ad Tracking

You can manage the way advertisers target you by peeking at your ad preferences. Look for "Your Information." Under "About You," you'll see categories, from your job title to your relationship status.

Facebook's website says this setting helps you "manage whether we can show you ads intended to reach people based on these profile fields." I've turned all mine off because I will be fine with, or even prefer, ads that don't freakily pertain to my life.

Note Facebook's fine print: "These settings only affect how we determine whether to show certain ads to you. They don't change which information is visible on your profile or who can see it. We may still add you to categories related to these fields."

So yep, there's another settings tab to check out. Click on "Your Categories," also under "Your Information." Some might be unsurprising, others more jarring. You might want to do what I did and X through all of them. And you might need to go back and do this every now and again.

There are more ad settings on this page. Can my Facebook ad preferences be used to show me ads on connected TVs? Can my social connections see the ads I've liked? I say no to all of them.

For more on ad tracking, check out this comprehensive guide by my colleague Joanna Stern.

Deactivate Your Account

If you just need a break, consider deactivating your account. It's easy to reactivate whenever, and you won't lose any account information, so this isn't a dramatic decision.

Go to Manage Account on the General Account Settings page. Scroll down to Deactivate Your Account.

Facebook will flash a screen of all the people who will miss you and basically ask if you're sure about this decision. Don't fall for it. I deactivated my account yesterday and reactivated it five minutes later.

While you're gone, here's what happens: People can't find you on search. It's almost like you're Facebook invisible. Your Facebook friends will see you in their friend list, but it'll say, "This account has been deactivated."

Another thing to know is that deactivating your account doesn't deactivate Facebook's Messenger app, so people will still be able to contact you there.

Delete Your Account

Here's where things get serious. If you're deleting your account, you have to go to Facebook's Help Center.

But before you do, I recommend first downloading a copy of your Facebook data. You can do this under General Account Settings. The profile contains all your profile information -- pictures, posts, messages, timeline and then some. For example, the list of harvested IP addresses and estimated locations in my 63.6MB download was quite long.

Just because you download your profile doesn't mean you can restore any of this after deleting your account. You'd have to create a new account from scratch.

Some other things to know about deleting: Facebook says it delays deletion "a few days after it's requested." This seems like Facebook hoping you're acting out of rage and will be back soon. It also says it takes 90 days "to delete data stored in backup systems," during which time your account will be inaccessible. And lastly, things that aren't part of your account -- such as messages you've exchanged with friends -- do not disappear when you delete.

Once you're ready to pull the plug, go here.

Follow the instructions and you're done. Really done.

 

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 23, 2018 19:16 ET (23:16 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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