How to delete VKontakte (but keep your data)

[harlan4096]

VKontakte is one of the most popular social networks in Russia. Although it’s less known outside the country, you may have signed up out of curiosity or to chat with Russian friends. But then perhaps your Russian pals got on Facebook and VKontakte became irrelevant. This post is about how to delete your redundant profile while keeping something to remember it by.

How to download data from VKontakte

Let’s start by preserving what’s accumulated in your VKontakte account. This is not as difficult as it may seem — if you ask nicely, VKontakte will send you an archive with your data. To do so, click the button at the bottom of this linked page.

True, you can’t count on being sent everything you’ve managed to amass during your sojourn on VKontakte. The company does not allow downloading of music and videos, so the archive will be of no use in that regard. There are many apps and extensions online for exporting media files from VK. But remember they are all unofficial, which means they may be less than reliable, or even malicious. So we do not advise using them.

Beloved videos and songs aside, you can still save a lot of valuable stuff:

* Personal correspondence. You will be sent all of your chats with users and communities, including ones you deleted relatively recently (not earlier than six months before creating the archive).

* Your posts. More precisely, the text of your posts with links to photos, videos, and the posts themselves, as well as a reminder that audio was once attached to them (if it was). In other words, media files in your posts are lost when you delete your profile, but you can still use the link in the archive to open other people’s messages that you reposted.

* Links to posts, notes, photos, videos, and products that you liked or bookmarked. All can be opened even after you leave the social network, unless the authors themselves delete such posts or hide them from unregistered users.

* Your photos. You will receive an HTML page with all your albums and saved pictures and photos in which you were tagged. True, pictures are uploaded to this page from the VKontakte servers and can be opened only while on these servers. When your account is deactivated, they will remain there for at least another 210 days, giving you ample time to restore them. After that they can be deleted, so we would recommend saving your favorite memes one by one.

* Gifts. You will be sent all gifts, related comments, and links to the senders’ pages.

* Profile info. Your contact details, user pic, list of interests, favorite quotes, and other stuff you’ve revealed about yourself are saved as an HTML page.

* Information about actions in VKontakte (payments, transfers, logins, blocks, etc.) and how the social network’s targeted advertising mechanism views you. As a backup, it’s probably of little use to you, but it can help assess the scale of data collection.

* Lists of friends, and people and communities you follow. If such profiles are not closed to unregistered users, you will be able to read their posts even after deleting your account.

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