Planning a break-up with Facebook, Instagram for good? Here's how to do it

Business Standard: You may have decided enough is enough: It’s time to delete Facebook.

There have been months — or is it years now? — of bad news about the social network. Last month, Facebook revealed that a security vulnerability exposed up to 50 million accounts to being hijacked by hackers. Through the vulnerability, a hacker could take over your account — meaning anything you ever posted on Facebook, or even apps that you connected with using your Facebook account, could have been infiltrated.

The company said in a statement that it was investigating the incident and would share updates. “People’s privacy and security is incredibly important, and we’re sorry this happened,” the company said Wednesday. “It’s why we took immediate action to secure people’s accounts and fix the vulnerability.”

The breach followed a scandal involving Cambridge Analytica, the voter-profiling firm that got its hands on the private data belonging to millions of Facebook users. And maybe you are just tired of the partisan yammering and updates from the six-degrees-of-friends.

I have some firsthand experience with all of this. After the disclosure of Facebook’s breach, I felt my trust in the social network was broken. So I pulled out my data from Facebook and purged the account. What I found out about the process: The more you have integrated Facebook into your life, the more time-consuming it will be to delete it.

To make account deletion as painless as possible, here is a step-by-step guide. I also included steps on breaking up with Instagram, Facebook’s photo-sharing app, for those looking for a cleaner getaway. BS