Data removal. Updated 2026-09-13. About 6 minutes to read.
In How people find and contact you, set email and phone lookup and your friends list to Only me and turn off search engine linking, then run Limit past posts.
Facebook's defaults favour being found. Your friends list is public by default, your profile picture and cover photo are always public, and lookup by email or phone number is often left open. Strangers, scammers and scrapers use exactly those gaps to map who you are, who you know and where you live.
The paths below were checked in September 2026 on a computer: click your profile picture, then Settings and privacy, then Settings. The mobile app uses the same names under Menu, then Settings and privacy. Meta moves things around, so if a label has shifted, type it into the search box at the top of Settings.
One honest note before you start. These settings control what other people see. They do not stop Meta collecting data, and in July 2026 Meta removed one of the few controls that limited off-platform tracking. That section is at the end.
All of these live in Settings, under Audience and visibility, then How people find and contact you.
Turning off search engine linking stops new links to your profile, but already indexed results can take weeks to drop, and public posts in groups, Pages and comments can still appear in Google. In 2021, a scraped set of about 533 million Facebook users' phone numbers circulated publicly, so lookup settings cannot unpublish what was already harvested.
Go to Audience and visibility, then Profile details, or edit the About section of your profile directly. Each field has its own audience selector.
Limit past posts cannot be undone with one click. It also does not change posts shared with a custom audience, and people tagged in a post, plus their friends, may still see it.
These settings control your profile only. A post you are tagged in still appears on the poster's profile, in search and in other people's feeds. To detach yourself, open the post and remove the tag.
Until mid 2026, a setting called Your activity off Meta technologies let you disconnect the browsing and purchase data that other websites and apps send to Meta. Meta announced in June 2026 that it would discontinue that setting in the US and a number of other countries from July.
The replacement is Activity from other businesses, found in Accounts Center, then Your information and permissions. It only controls whether Meta uses that data to personalise ads and other content such as your feed. According to Meta's own help page, businesses may still send your activity to Meta regardless of your choice. Turn it off anyway, because it limits how that data is used.
To reduce what reaches Meta in the first place, stop using Log in with Facebook on other sites, use a browser that blocks third party trackers, and consider using Facebook in a browser rather than the app. To see what Meta already holds, use Download your information in the same Accounts Center section.
Go to Settings and privacy, Settings, then How people find and contact you, and set Who can see your friends list to Only me. Mutual friendships can still appear on your friends' profiles if their lists are public, so this reduces exposure rather than erasing it.
No. Your name, current profile picture and cover photo are always public on Facebook. Older profile pictures sit in an album whose audience you can change, but the current ones cannot be hidden.
In How people find and contact you, turn off search engines outside of Facebook linking to your profile. Expect existing results to fade over several weeks as search engines recrawl. Public comments and group posts can still appear.
Facebook offers Lock profile only in some countries, such as India. If you do not see it in your profile menu, it is not available to you, and the settings in this guide are the closest equivalent.
Deactivation hides your profile but keeps everything, and you can come back by logging in. Deletion is permanent after a grace period of 30 days, during which logging in cancels it. Download your information first if you want a copy.