Why is it so difficult to “delete all friends” on Facebook?

Facebook wants you to keep your long list of friends because it helps reveal your social history, which helps reveal to advertisers what kind of consumer you are.

By making you keep your long list of friends who you don’t talk to anymore, Facebook can infer different social groups and networks you belonged to in the past. Photo from https://digi.uga.edu/network-graphs/

Facebook loves that you have friends. In fact, if you ever want to reset your profile to have no friends and start from scratch, you will need to go through a list of all friends and remove them one at a time. Even third-party Facebook apps that developers build have a hard time getting around this, because Facebook constantly changes the commands/APIs for it.

Why does Facebook make removing friends so difficult?

Your social connections tell Facebook who you are. This includes “strong ties” like your family and close friends, but also “weak ties” like folks you haven’t talked to since grade school. By keeping your “weak ties” from grade school, you are essentially joining an invisible Facebook group. And these invisible groups are critical for Facebook’s advertising platform, because groups can signal your history, current activities, preferences, location, and more.

For example, an advertiser may want to reach everyone who graduated from your high school. Even if you haven’t explicitly told Facebook where you went to high school, if you are friends with 70 people who have, then Facebook can infer that information about you.

If you have ever thought that Facebook was spying on you or listening to your microphone, you were likely just part of an invisible group that tipped off an advertiser to certain conversation topics. Their system makes gobs of inferences about you using your social history, and they can predict a lot more than you could ever imagine.

An infamous example of inference gone awry involved Target’s coupon platform. By analyzing purchasing history, it learned pregnant women preferred unscented lotion, and started showing pregnancy-related ads (ex. diapers, baby food, cribs, etc.) to women who bought unscented lotion. When one woman bought unscented lotion and started receiving these pregnancy ads before even taking a pregnancy test, it sparked some debate about the privacy infringements of these inference systems.

Groups and friends are often more important to Facebook’s advertisers than to end users.

In fact, inferences are also why Facebook is currently pushing their group features so heavily. They are not pivoting to a their espoused privacy-centered “living room” social network, they just want to collect more information about your social connections. Just like Facebook as a whole, friends and groups are not primarily a service to users, but to advertisers. If it was truly a service to users, we would be able to delete all our friends.

There are many ways to cut down on Facebook tracking if you don’t want the surveillance but don’t want to fully delete your account. Here are two easy steps you can take:

1. Use the Facebook mobile website and delete the Facebook app. This reduces surveillance since they can’t read as many signals (such as GPS) directly from from your phone.
2. Use Firefox with the Facebook container whenever possible. This blocks those Facebook tracking pixels from tracking you across the web.