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Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

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Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#141
post #31

Huh. So now I'm starting to think: what if I purposely recorded thousands and thousands of meaningless video? None of my friends would ever see them since I never published them, but Facebook would use up hard drive space storing them. What if a lot of people did that? Suddenly Facebook's cost for hanging onto all these videos would become quite high with no value in doing so. Anyone feel like making a website to hel…

You should upload random-pixel uncompressible videos and delete them over and over again. It not only increases storage cost but makes the profile SNR very low. There are general-strike level attack surfaces on these networks, but people don't really care that much.

Does their AUP/TOS allow them to lock you out in that case?

Lockout would be worse than account deletion. You would have no recourse to fight back on any of their use of your data right?

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't understand this cynicism. Facebook does not want your deleted video, and they certainly don't want to keep it given the current media frenzy, with the CEO under fire. Every application of any complexity has features which inactivate, but don't delete data. At Facebook scale, deleting data is non-trivial, and it would be impossible to immediately delete something. We all have bugs, including extremely…

they had to have the tool for gdpr. not because they are good guys

The Facebook download tool has been around since 2010. It's not correct to suggest they created this in response to GDPR.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#143
post #96
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> expecting a non-tech-savvy person to understand how data moves around the Internet Then we - the people that do have the necessary technical knowledge - have a duty to teach them what they need to know. This isn't necessarily "how data moves on the internet". Yes, this can be difficult and tedious, but understanding the risk profile for data/networks is increasingly important as networks become involved in everythi…

And how would we do that? Every time I've tried to explain privacy issues to non tech individuals at best they consider me paranoid and at worse a fucking sociopath who doesn't have a FB profile because I can't correlate with other people. I can't carry this burden and I doubt many can. There have been horror stories over the years about identity theft, even before the emergence of social media. Has this stopped anyo…

Your view is well represented on the Internet, and is perhaps most aptly exemplified by the early jargon word “luser”, and the BOFH phenomenon. I have never, I think, really been prone to such thinking. I have never had a problem talking to ordinary people or users, or felt the immense frustration which many people have vividly described. (Note: I am a sysadmin with approximately 20 years of professional experience, and have always had a user-facing role as at least a part of my job.)

It reminds me where in Zen Buddhism, there are those who become enlightened and go off to do their own thing, and those who become enlightened and stay in the world with the rest of the ordinary unenlightened people. In the words of Alan Watts:

The understanding of Zen, the understanding of awakening, the understanding of– Well, we’ll call it mystical experiences, one of the most dangerous things in the world. And for a person who cannot contain it, it’s like putting a million volts through your electric shaver. You blow your mind and it stays blown. Now, if you go off in that way, that is what would be called in Buddhism a pratyeka- buddha—“private buddha”. He is one who goes off into the transcendental world and is never seen again. And he’s made a mistake from the standpoint of Buddhism, because from the standpoint of Buddhism, there is no fundamental difference between the transcendental world and this everyday world. The bodhisattva, you see, who doesn’t go off into a nirvana and stay there forever and ever, but comes back and lives ordinary everyday life to help other beings to see through it, too, he doesn’t come back because he feels he has some solemn duty to help mankind and all that kind of pious cant. He comes back because he sees the two worlds are the same. He sees all other beings as buddhas. He sees them, to use a phrase of G.K. Chesterton’s, “but now a great thing in the street, seems any human nod, where move in strange democracies a million masks of god.”

— Alan Watts, Lecture on Zen

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trump has many supporters(not me). I don't think any facebook users particularly like facebook, it's just where "everyone" is.

Exactly this. Who even supports FB? The media? No, they hate them because they took all their ad revenue. Republicans? No, they hate them for the censorship controversy that happened a year or so ago, and because it is full of ultra left wing silicon Valley types. Democrats? No, they hate them for the whole Cambridge analytica, Russian data thing. Facebook has made a lot of enemies, and there really isn't any sort of…

Facebook's ability to prop itself up and exist as it does, despite all the animus against it, reminds me of the essay Meditations on Moloch.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#145
post #85

I have no such duty. I'll teach my kids when they get a bit older, but trying to teach adult friends is an unrewarding exercise in futily (mansplaining even).

Please don't post flamebait to Hacker News! I'm sure you didn't mean to, but you triggered just the sort of umpteenth regurgitation we're hoping to avoid here.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16725399 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#148

This (and the GDPR - even though my company is in the US) are why I now tell the developers on my team to not collect info unless they have a definitive use case as to why to store it. And make sure to delete delete data as soon as it is no longer needed. It helps that my business doesn't monetize via advertising. My guess is what actually happened here is that they had a use case to store it for a few hours or so (i…

Please don't break the site guidelines by going on about downvotes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many undergraduate, graduate and postgrads live on campus in housing provided by the university, and get paid by the same university. Soldiers in the military live in barracks, even some who would otherwise have the option to live off base. Even expats working for private energy companies abroad sometimes live in corporate housing campuses.

> Many undergraduate, graduate and postgrads live on campus in housing provided by the university Last I checked, universities weren’t busy papering the world in surveillance, pretending that’s a moral prerogative, refusing summons to the House of Commons, characterising whistleblowers with contempt, and then lying when they get caught acting unethically.

Universities have their own police forces, surveillance systems (they know every time you badge in or out somewhere, along with video footage and who knows what else) and when I was in college there was talk of installing metal detectors (thankfully the powers that be realized how idiotic this would have been). I'm not arguing that this makes surveillance OK, but from a perspective of housing, this feels overblown.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I am sure that the deletion of media files in services like Facebook has never meant to be absolute." This is very common, I'm sure. There should be a way to request or a right to request permanent deletion, by law, of one's data on site like Facebook. That said, once something is on the internet, anyone can and will archive it (see https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/ ). Closing an account, however, should imply p…

GDPR is intended to at least force service providers to give folks the right to be forgotten which compels providers to delete data. While it's own Europe, it's difficult to comply without just making general decision about honoring these requests.

The right to request deletion of data is already mandated in current laws, GDPR doesn't change much in that regard.

The hard part is actually enforcing it, and assessing compliance.

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