With the rapid increase in social media usage, recent studies have explored its impact on mental health and wellbeing, as well as the potential to leverage the popularity and interactive features of social media to enhance interventions.

Cases such as clinicians discovering suicidal ideation on Facebook through explicit statements and photos are examples of how our data may be used to obtain information about you within a clinical setting, to diagnose and treat disease. With that, ethical issues arise, including the principles of beneficence and maleficence, issues of privacy and confidentiality, and informed consent.

It is difficult to imagine that a seemingly harmless action like messaging a friend can give Facebook so much information, and there is no easy way to stop this except for staying away from Messenger and favor a different messaging app.

You cannot really delete this data, neither can you stop it from being used for advertising. Facebook has perfect knowledge of your social network and who is closest to you.

Deleting messages progressively might be a solution, let us know if you want us to build this into FaceErase, the Chrome extension we’ve built for people who subscribe as an Early Believer! If you want to at least make sure Facebook cannot read your messages, you can use Secret Conversations which are encrypted.