How to remove your number from Facebook (even if you are not registered)

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We came across a very interesting article on Ghacks written by Martin Brinkmann, German journalist and founder of Ghacks. Once we read it we immediately thought it was impossible not to share it with you. We also reveal that if you think that this article does not concern you because you have never signed up to Facebook, you are very wrong: how to remove your number from Facebook is an article dedicated to anyone. Even to those who have never signed up to Facebook (or has, in the meantime, unsubscribed).

But how is it possible that Meta (or any other company) has your phone number or email address if you never gave it to them? You know when installing an application you are asked for various permissions including, strangely and insistently, access to your address book?

There, you guessed it. At that moment you are handing over your entire address book to the company in question (in this case Meta and therefore Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp). You are telling that company that the phone number “xxx” belongs to the name or nickname “yyyy” and that his email address is “xx@yyy.zz“.

How to remove your number from Facebook (even if you have never signed up to Facebook)

This is something we already knew and knew and it is in fact for this reason that we often suggest using applications such as Shelter to create an empty work profile from which applications can only pick up the addresses in the address book that we decide.

And, more generally, this is also why we recommend you alternatives FOSS even for simple applications. Because the ones suggested by us do not try at all costs to steal your address book to hoard data.

The problem, however, is that the people around us who have our personal data in their address books (name, surname, telephone number, email) generally don't have many scruples about accepting whatever is proposed to them. And to use Shelter Unfortunately, there are very few of us who refuse the majority of authorizations.

And this is why your phone number or email may be in Meta's databases.

The tool to remove your data from Meta

What we discovered thanks toarticle by Ghacks but it is tool for removing your data from Facebook and Instagram. In fact, in mid-2022, Meta published a tool to remove and block your personal information from their database forever. This tool was obviously not particularly publicized ¹ and it seems to be found only at the bottom of this support page.

The tool to check if your email or telephone numbers are present on Facebook or Instagram is available at this address.

Before using the tool

However, we would like to underline some things that could, rightly, stop you from using it. For obvious reasons, to find out if your phone number or email is in the Meta database you will have to enter it and confirm it.

So on the one hand there must also be a minimum of trust: you must trust that their tool is true, reliable and that they actually do what they say and that this is not a gigantic honeypot (i.e. a trap, a bait, a way to get data that they otherwise wouldn't have).

Warning: we are not saying it is a scam, we are just describing what you will have to do and what some of you might think.

How to remove your number from Facebook and Instagram forever

After entering one of your personal data, and after confirming it via SMS or code via email, you will be directed to a page where the presence of these data within the database will be confirmed or not.

At this point you can ask for its cancellation and above all you can say that you never want them to be stored again.

Now, as mentioned, nothing else is known.

Not how their blacklist works, not whether or how data is actually deleted, and so on. However, the tool exists and Meta probably would not have much reason to create a fake tool and risk serious repercussions.

We conclude by saying that unfortunately we only talk about Facebook and Instagram, nowhere is there a mention of WhatsApp.

1. Facebook probably has your phone number, even if you never shared it. Now it has a secret tool to let you delete it.[↩]

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