#DeleteFacebook Movement Gains Steam After 50 Million Users Have Data Leaked

People are jumping on Twitter to announce their breakup with Facebook.

The hashtag #DeleteFacebook is trending on Monday after the New York Times reported this weekend that the data of 50 million users had been unknowingly leaked and purchased to aid President Trump’s successful 2016 bid for the presidency.

Twitter was littered with users sharing the hashtag:

Hey everyone #DeleteFacebook, it won't kill you. I did it 3 years ago and am surprisingly still alive and God forbid, happy! Just do it.

— Max ⚡ Power 🤘✌️ (@Max_Power_) March 19, 2018

https://twitter.com/ChangetheMsg/status/975811585527595009

https://twitter.com/suecab/status/975841817856913408

Facebook is under fire after data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica received $15 million from Republican donor Robert Mercer ahead of the 2014 midterm elections to pay Cambridge Professor Aleksandr Kogan for data on millions of users. Kogan had paid about 270,000 people to fill out a survey built on Facebook’s developer tools — allowing him to pull information on “liked” pages, as well as look at the “friends” of users that opted into his app. The data was leveraged by Cambridge Analytica to target voters with specific personality profiles.

Pulling that information was kosher, but selling it to a third-party, like Cambridge Analytica, violated Facebook’s terms of service. Facebook has since tightened its agreement, barring app developers from looking at friends’ profiles. Facebook said on Saturday that “Kogan lied to us” by passing data collected from his app to Cambridge Analytica. Facebook said that when it learned of the violation in 2015, it removed Kogan’s app.

But for many users, the news highlighted the danger of Facebook housing the personal information of billions of users. Several app developers told TheWrap there is still little stopping them from violating Facebook’s terms of service and selling its data.

And even before the Cambridge Analytica news, Facebook has been grappling with its waning popularity in the U.S. The company lost 1 million domestic users last quarter — its first quarterly drop in daily users.

TheWrap isn’t telling you what to do, but if you were looking to #DeleteFacebook as well, here’s what you need to know. First off, there’s a difference between deleting and deactivating your Facebook. Deactivating essentially takes your Facebook profile off the map, but if you head back over to the social network and login, your profile will pop back up.

Still, if you’re going all-out, there’s a simple three-step “delete” process once you’re logged into Facebook:

Go to “Settings”
When you find “Manage account,” click “Edit”
Then click “Request account deletion” and follow the steps

That’s all you need to know — but there’s a holdup. Facebook says it “may take up to 90 days from the beginning of the deletion process to delete all of the things you’ve posted, like your photos, status updates, or other data stored in backup systems.”

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