I love a good David and Goliath story: a small firm successfully suing a multinational giant over a copyright infringement, or the obscure underdog surging ahead to beat the household name incumbent in what everyone thought was an undisputed election.

And in the same spirit, I wholly believe that the common people have a duty to hold corporate behemoths to account when legal or ethical lines are crossed or challenged. Surely that’s the definition of true democracy.

I respect anyone who took the decision to abandon Facebook this month in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal that engulfed the social media giant. Killing off your online avatar is commendable, especially as so many of us rely on the omniscient platform to design everything from our social lives to our next job moves – not to mention for pure, hedonistic entertainment.

So for that reason it’s with a sense of pity that I tell you: deleting your Facebook account probably wasn’t worth it after all. You shouldn’t have bothered trying to quit. It’s too late; your martyrdom won’t change anything – and chances are it probably didn’t work anyway.

Perhaps you joined the #DeleteFacebook movement to deal a blow to multibillionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s sprawling enterprise. You might have hoped that by joining a collective crusade you’d be partially responsible for slaying the beast, and making the world a fairer place.

It’s a nice idea, but it’s unrealistic. Facebook has over two billion users, and even if a throng of disgruntled westerners appalled by the prospect of their data being shared decides to sulkily throw in the towel, that won’t offset the daily wave of new subscribers, particularly stemming from parts of Asia and Africa.

According to number crunchers at Statista, Facebook accounts for over 42 per cent of monthly social media visits. Some 1.4 billion active users visit it daily. As emerging markets catch up on online connectivity, platforms like this are only going to proliferate – partially because they tend to be reliable tools for communication.

In a bid to win users in parts of the world where internet connections are still slow, Facebook has actually released a data-efficient version of its app. Against such astuteness, your attempt to deal the company a blow by turning your back in a huff amounts to little more than a Lilliputian child pathetically slapping Gulliver on the wrist. If it even notices, Facebook just won’t care.

Perhaps your decision to quit Facebook was driven by your moral compass, your ethical conscience, and a desire to just feel like a better person who does the right thing. If that’s the case, you might as well give up the internet all together.

If you’re concerned that Facebook facilitates the spread of extremist propaganda, and that users are therefore partially responsible for publicising those disgusting hate messages, then you don’t know enough about YouTube, which is owned by Google, or Twitter.

How to stop Facebook from revealing everything about you Show all 9 1 /9 How to stop Facebook from revealing everything about you How to stop Facebook from revealing everything about you Lock your profile down If you haven’t done this already, do it now. In Settings, hit the Privacy tab. From here, you can control who gets to see your future posts and friends list. Choose from Public, Friends, Only Me and Custom in the dropdown menu. How to stop Facebook from revealing everything about you Limit old posts Annoyingly, changing this has no effect on who’s able to see your past Facebook posts. Instead, on the Privacy page, you have to click on Limit Past Posts, then select Limit Old Posts and finally hit Confirm on the pop-up. How to stop Facebook from revealing everything about you Make yourself harder to find You can stop completely random people from adding you by selecting Friends of Friends from the dropdown menu in the Who can send you friend requests? section of the Privacy page. It’s also worth limiting who can find your Facebook profile with your number and email address. At the bottom of the page is the option to prevent search engines outside of Facebook from linking to your profile. How to stop Facebook from revealing everything about you Control access to your Timeline You can limit who gets to post things on your Timeline and who gets to see posts on your Timeline too. In Settings, go to Timeline and Tagging and edit the sections you want to lock down. How to stop Facebook from revealing everything about you Block people When you block someone, they won’t be able to see things you post on your Timeline, tag you, invite you to events or groups, start conversations with you or add you as a friend. To do it, go to Settings and Blocking. Annoyingly, you have to block people on Messenger separately. You can also add friends to your Restricted list here, which means they’ll still be friends with you but will only be able to see your public posts and things you share on a mutual friend's Timeline. How to stop Facebook from revealing everything about you Review tags One of Facebook’s handiest privacy features is the ability to review posts you’re tagged in before they appear on your Timeline. They’ll still be visible on the News Feed while they’re fresh, but won’t be tied to your profile forever. In Timeline and Tagging, enable Timeline review controls. How to stop Facebook from revealing everything about you Clean up your apps You can view a list of all of the apps you’ve connected to your Facebook account by going to Settings and Apps. The list might be longer than you expected it to be. It’s worth tidying this up to ensure things you no longer use lose access to your personal information. If you don’t want to log into websites and apps with your facebook account, scroll down and turn Platform off. How to stop Facebook from revealing everything about you Change your ad preferences You can view a list of everything Facebook thinks you’re into and tinker with your ad preferences by going to Settings and Adverts. A lot more information is displayed on the desktop site than the app, so we’d recommend doing this on a computer. How to stop Facebook from revealing everything about you Download your data Facebook lets you download all of the data it has on you, including the posts you’ve shared, your messages and photos, ads you’ve clicked on and even the IP addresses that are logged when you log in or out of the site. It’s a hell of a lot of information, which you should download to ensure you never over-share on the social network again.

I know the most popular incentive to desert Facebook is a fear that your data will be compromised. But unfortunately even that logic doesn’t really stack up.

To be clear, every big telecommunication and technology firm uses targeted advertising in some way. And guess what? They rely on your data to do so.

Take Google. If you haven’t actively turned off location-tracking, Google will know exactly where you’ve been. It knows what you’ve searched for, even if you’ve deleted your search history, and what emails you’ve sent, received and chosen not to send. It’s aware of your age, relationship status, interests, hobbies and maybe even your income.

Similarly, Facebook has been collecting call records and SMS data from Android device services for years. If someone using Facebook Messenger has your number in their phone, Mr Zuckerberg’s band of merry men probably has access to your data, however careful you might have been about your own security settings.

It knows every single place you’ve ever logged in, and it has a record of all the applications you’ve ever connected to your account. If you’ve been on Tinder, Facebook might know several less salubrious things too. Things you would probably not like to be reminded of.

In short, you’re in too deep.

Cleaning up the winding trail of personal records that you’ve left over the last decade would amount to a full-time job – and a stressful one at that. You implicitly agreed to share everything around 2005, when you most likely discovered Facebook and learned to love it as a way of innocently reconnecting with school friends.