How to remove your Facebook past (2016)

Working on 30/03/2016.

Facebook is a great place to post about the present. It is a fun place to read about events over the last couple of years. It is a terrible place to look back on old memories from your teenage self.

The team at Facebook certainly do not make it easy to remove your old data, short of deleting your profile entirely. Through the use of a browser extension, some privacy settings and manual changes, you can clear out your profile enough not to be completely embarrassed when adding a new friend.

Step 1: Backup your old photos and posts.

You can backup most of your Facebook content by heading to Settings > General > “Download a copy of your Facebook data.”.

This won’t download your photos and photos you are tagged in, which you can do by following the instructions in my post How to download all Facebook photos you are tagged in (2016).

Step 2: Change your privacy settings

Go to Settings > Privacy.

Set “Who can see your future posts?” to “Friends”

Click “Limit Past Posts” and then “Limit Old Posts”

Go to Settings > Timeline and Tagging

Here are my recommendations for the relevant options:

Who can see posts you’ve been tagged in on your timeline?
Only Me. This is quite restrictive, but it’s the only way I’ve found to remove posts you’ve been tagged in, short of manually untagging yourself from all posts. People will still be able to see new posts you are tagged in on their News Feed, just not on your timeline.

Who can see what others post on your timeline?
Only Me. This is, again, restrictive, but it’s also the only way I’ve found to remove these posts in bulk. These posts won’t appear on others’ News Feeds.

Review tags people add to your own posts before the tags appear on Facebook?
On (optional). This is sensible to avoid unwanted tags.

When you’re tagged in a post, who do you want to add to the audience if they aren’t already in it?
Only Me (optional). No need to drag your friends into the audience. This will stop your friends seeing new photos of you, unless they are also friends with the person who uploaded the photo.

Using these options will result in a very clamped down Facebook profile, but it will still be usable. If you’re reading this post you probably care about your privacy, in my opinion these options are the way to go.

Step 3: Use the Facebook Activity Remover extension for Chrome to delete your old posts.

Download at: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/facebook-activity-remover/cjhdaapekomkhcdfkeogcmhimmmkgkpb

To delete more than 20 posts, you’ll need to cough up $2.99 to unlock the full version. Even though it doesn’t work perfectly, this is the only working method I have found to delete old posts in bulk and I therefore think it is worth the money.

The extension suggests heading to activity log (down-facing arrow in the top right of Facebook > Activity Log), but I suggest going a step further and using filters such as “Your Posts”, “Likes”,  on the left side of the page. The extension works much faster if you do this. It may be that by doing this you miss some posts that should be deleted, so you should perhaps go back to the full activity log afterwards and repeat.

You can choose a date range to delete my clicking the extension icon, choose a speed which works for you, then click “Start Removing Facebook Activities”.

The extension tends to stop after a few minutes, at which point you should restart it until all your posts have been deleted.

Step 4: Secure your old photos.

At this point your Facebook profile will look pretty bare to any of your friends, but you can still see a lot of the old content. Photos you are tagged in will not be visible on your timeline unless the person viewing your profile is also tagged in the photo, or you uploaded the photo yourself. Your photos page will only display your photos, not photos you are tagged in. Friends may still be able to view your tagged photos by searching for “photos of [your name]”.

You can limit the audience for your own photos by heading to your profile > Photos > Albums. You can then click on each of the down-facing arrows in the bottom-right corner of each album cover and change “Who should see this?” to “Only Me”. This actually means that only you and anyone else tagged in the album can see the photos.

You can’t change the audience for the albums “Mobile Uploads”, “Cover Photos”, “Profile Pictures” and “Timeline Photos”. To do so you’ll need to go into each album and change the audience for each photo individually, or delete the photos. Cover photos are always public so if you don’t want them visible, delete them.

As I mentioned above, anyone tagged in your photos can still see that album. If you don’t want this, either untag your friends or delete the albums.

Step 5: Remove interests

Head to your profile > More > Manage Sections. You then have a few options.

If you leave a box unchecked, that category will not be visible on your “About” page, but will be visible on your timeline. Since your timeline will be stripped-down at this point, these likes will be quite obvious, keep that in mind.

If you want to remove these interests from your timeline too, tick the boxes for all sections. Then go to you “About” page and scroll through, deleting all your interests and information you don’t want to share. You can then uncheck all the section boxes so the empty sections are no longer visible.

If you want to remove interests from your timeline and About page without deleting them (maybe you still want to see updates from those pages), you’ll need to go to “Likes” on your activity log and remove all relevant posts.

You may also want to leave groups.

Step 6: What’s left?

If you’ve followed the most aggressive changes above, you’ll have a very stripped-down profile right about now.

Your photos, posts and interests are gone.

Posts and photos you are tagged in remain, but can’t be viewed on your timeline unless the viewer is also tagged. They may be viewed by others using Facebook search. Terms such as “posts to [your name]” and “[your name] photos”.

You can’t easily remove photos of you that others have uploaded, the only reliable method is to ask them to remove the photos.

You can remove tags from photos, which will stop anyone from viewing the photo on your timeline or by searching your name. I have not found a reliable way to do this in bulk unfortunately.

Final tweaks

Manually untagging yourself from photos is time consuming so you may wish to target particular photos. If you head to your activity log, filter to “Photos”, then choose shared with “Public”. These photos are visible to the public on others’ profiles, so you may wish to target these for manual untagging. You can quickly untag yourself in this view by clicking checkboxes on the left side, then report/remove tags and “I want the photos untagged”.

Conclusion

I wish Facebook would make it easier to remove old posts. I personally think old posts should have some sort of privacy expiry date, so that posts older than a few years become private. At the very least we need better ways to remove old data in a given date range. I find it highly unlikely that anyone would knowingly want to keep their posts from 8-10 years ago visible to any new friend they add.

For now the above steps work without spending excessive time making the changes, apart from posts and photos you are tagged in which is still an issue.