@FBUSER1,
Your FB data pretty much is exactly what your account is.
However, you can start by deleting apps and turning off location.
That won't dump the old data, and it won't keep them from gathering new. They'll just gather less.
Understand how FB works. You are not the customer.
Surprised?
Nope. You're the product.
FB's income stream, because it doesn't come from subscriptions, comes from advertising. The better they can target advertising to you, the more likely you are to click and buy, and keep coming back. This keeps advertisers happy, and so they keep buying ads, and FB makes more $$.
It's not a bad business model and, I might add, it's not an illegal or even an unethical one.
A lot of the use of FB is tied to preferences. You join a group, you communicated a preference. Hide an ad? A preference. Like, share, react with the angry face? More preferences. Complain on a company's page about a product going up in price? Another preference. Click that you're going to an event (or not), whether it's a town hall meeting, a Star Trek convention, or a ceramics class? Another preference. Accept a friend request? Yet another preference.
FB is a very big and very complicated decision tree. Your profile as a consumer is built from all of this, so they will know if you're a thirtysomething mom from New Jersey or a secular Muslim teenaged boy in the UAE.
If you want to delete your account and start from scratch, and only interact with your family and a small circle of friends, then that's your prerogative. You'll still be bagged and tagged like the one billion-plus other human products using FB. They'll just categorize you as a person who will only minimally interact with ads. So they'll serve you a generic ads experience, based on the few bits of information they'll have on you, which are likely to be age, gender, location, and maybe marital status. With your connections to your family they may also dope out your religion (if any) and even your age and race if you're tagged in photos (even if you untag yourself).
You can't stop being the product for Facebook. That's their business model, and one person out of over a billion regular users is not going to change that.
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