This article was taken from the January 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
Want to say no to the social-networking giant, but don't know how to do it? Wired can help you lose friends and influence fewer people.
Safeguard your photos
Pick&Zip, Photograbber and
SocialFolders let you download Facebook photos you've uploaded, and any pictures you've been tagged in. If you want to share or store them in the cloud, Google's Picasa is the easiest way to move them -- its Move Your Photos extension for Chrome proves useful here.
Download your data
For your Facebook data, go to "account settings" and click "download". Send other data such as contact info to your phone with Address Book for Android and SmartSync for iOS. To save birthdays, go to "events", click "settings" and select "export" to push them to an Outlook, Google or Apple account.
Delete your Facebook profile
Rather than trying to navigate through Facebook, the easiest way is to type "facebook.com/help/delete_account" into your browser, and follow the steps. At the time of writing, Facebook Ireland faced an £80,000 fine for retaining users' deleted data, so don't expect your details to be scrubbed right away.
Stay strong and stay offline
For your Facebook account to disappear permanently, you must not log in for 14 days after deleting it. That includes not logging in via your smartphone or any web apps that are linked to your Facebook account. Log out of these apps -- or safer still, delete them entirely until your period of quarantine is up.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
