If you look at the delete Facebook hashtag, people are really angry. And I think they’re sort of becoming aware of the extent to which they’re being watched and tracked. This feels like it’s a turning point for many of the people who use Facebook and aren’t happy about how their data is being used. And the more they find out, the less happy they are. I think people underestimate how hard it is to untangle ourselves from a social network like Facebook. So before you delete your Facebook account, just remember that it’s not just Facebook that you’ll be losing access to. It’s also all of the third-party apps that you use Facebook to log in to or that are connected or plugged into your Facebook account. So it’s important before you make this choice to go through those apps, see which ones you still need access to, and if there are any, to switch your login from Facebook to something else. So you can still access it even after you’ve deleted your Facebook account. And there are just some apps that you won’t have access to if you delete your Facebook account. Facebook has a lot of ways to track your activity even if you’re not logged in or if you delete your account entirely, and it uses what it calls the social graph to track the activity of people across the internet beyond just Facebook.com. This accounts for everyone who uses the internet, and you don’t have to have a Facebook profile to be tracked by Facebook. For example, if your friends have Facebook accounts or Facebook Messenger accounts and if they’ve uploaded their contacts to Facebook and if you’re one of their contacts, then Facebook knows your name and your phone number and can track you. When you deactivate or delete your Facebook profile, your profile disappears and people can’t see what you posted or search for you. But all of the data that you gave over to third-party app developers is still out there. And those developers are not required to delete it or do anything with it. They can use it however they want. For as long as they want. There’s a whole list of ways that Facebook will track you outside of Facebook.com. To do the full cleanse, you would have to actually manually block a list of URLs that they use to track you. These are the lengths you’d have to go to if you truly wanted to get off of Facebook’s grid.