In the wake of Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data breach raising some serious privacy concerns among Facebook users, the need to protect our data is of paramount importance. Although #DeleteFacebook movement was popularised by some prominent names in the industry like WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton and SpaceX chief Elon Musk, getting rid of a Facebook account may not be possible for everyone. But in case you want to simply erase your past Facebook footprint including your photos, videos, comments and likes, without deleting your entire Facebook account, we have something that might help you do just that. Read on.
First things first, deleting our Facebook activity from the past is time-consuming. What one needs to do is navigate to his/her profile > View Activity Log and manually delete all entries listed over there. And as unfortunate as it may sound, Facebook does not provide any option that allows users to delete multiple entries at the same time.
Hence, deleting each entry manually in your Facebook activity log is practically impossible without some degree of automation. Talking of which, we have discovered a Google Chrome extension called ‘Social Book Post Manager’ that makes it easier to clear our Facebook activity log all at once.
To delete your Facebook activities, you will need to select period (year and month) and scan speed for which you run the data removal script.
Step 1: Before you start, it is advisable to backup all your Facebook data. Go to Facebook > Settings > General Account Settings and click ‘Download a copy of your Facebook data’ link at the bottom. It includes all your wall posts, photos, videos and messages.
Step 2: Go to http://chrome.google.com/webstore/ and search for ‘Social Book Post Manager’ extension developed by htang.dev under extensions tab.
Also Read: Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal: How data can be used to acquire voters
Step 3: Install it on your Google Chrome browser. Once you have added it to your Google Chrome, go to Facebook > View Activity Log.
Step 4: To delete your Facebook activities, you will need to select period (year and month) and scan speed for which you run the data removal script. Ideally, 4x is recommended for a good balance between speed and accuracy.
If you have filtered out only posts and comments, you can either hide or delete them.
From what I have observed, it is recommended that you should set a specific filter such as likes, comments, posts etc. The extension works only on the page where you open your Facebook Activity Log.
Assuming that you have opened your Facebook Activity Log in one of the tabs, click on Social Book Post Manager extension icon at the top right corner of Google Chrome. If you have filtered out only posts and comments, you can either hide or delete them. Once again, choose the period and scan speed. Lower the speed, higher the chances of deleting all your activities accurately for the specified period in one go. Similarly, you can unlike all your liked entries and hide tagged posts for any specific period you want.
Thus, you can erase your past Facebook footprint without having to delete your account. A word of caution though. This is a third party extension, so tread cautiously.