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Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

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Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#201

Post by lerpa »

kerkeslager wrote: post #182
oh_sigh wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google deletes your data within I think 64 days if you request them to or delete your account. https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/32046

There's nothing there which clarifies that "delete" isn't a euphemism for "flag it to no longer be displayed to users" like it is everywhere else where companies collect data on users, so you'll excuse my skepticism.

Exactly and they have the perfect excuse:

"Well when talking about deleting we mean we do the exact same thing the file system does to a file, it flags it, but doesn't actually erase it's content. Acting like a filesystem delete operation is what people expect when using that word"

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#202

Post by alangpierce »

kerkeslager wrote: post #175

Secretly? Secretly from whom? There is nothing I've come across, ever, that has lead me to believe that Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc., ever delete anything, ever. Not even to clean up space as some people on this thread are suggesting. Hard drive space is cheap and data is valuable. This isn't a secret, this is a fairly obvious business practice that all the big players, and most competent small players, are engagin…

FWIW, Facebook does say that they will delete all of your data within 90 days of account deletion. I believe that indicates that they've put the engineering effort to do a full audit of data to be deleted, handle missing references across the product, and to fully delete user data from logs and backups.

From https://www.facebook.com/help/250563911970368 :

> When you delete your account, people won't be able to see it on Facebook. It may take up to 90 days from the beginning of the deletion process to delete all of the things you've posted, like your photos, status updates or other data stored in backup systems.

The case from the article is trickier. My impression is the feature was just implemented with an append-only data model, which is often (maybe usually) a good engineering decision. "Secretly" from the article title feels disingenuous because Facebook never said it was deleted. As an engineer, it's frustrating that I might have to write my software to be more fragile to match the implicit expectations of how a non-technical user thinks software should work. But the frustration on the user's end is also plenty understandable here. Hopefully the gap can be closed a little on both sides by a combination of educating users and being more privacy-conscious in engineering and business decisions.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#203

Post by halflings »

mistermann wrote: post #198
raverbashing wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, like a filesystem more or less I might just "help" them by uploading more data I guess

A browser addin to help with this helping might help make the world a better place.

Banning accounts using this add-on (breach of ToS) would be a formality for facebook, if this was to become an issue in the first place. (unlikely that a sufficient number of people will bother doing this)

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#204

Post by derimagia »

whalesalad wrote: post #152

Is this really a secret or a surprise? Most SaaS companies of this size don’t really ever delete anything. They set a deletion flag and call it a day.

Yeah for most things this is a good way to do it. For user data when they delete the account it would be ideal if they actually removed it though

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#205

Post by PaulStatezny »

ipsum2 wrote: post #169
jsemrau wrote: post #168

I always believed in the right to be forgotten. That's why I am not on Facebook nor Google Plus

How does being on HN help? Your comments can't be deleted after a certain amount of time (a few hours).

At least Hacker News is transparent about that that behavior.

Facebook et al. are not.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#206

Post by ekianjo »

fakescience wrote: post #139
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is powerful and insular. Taking it down requires extraordinary organisation. Outrage is helpful in that respect. Agreement is better than disagreement. Would I prefer we had agreement earlier? Yes. Is agreement today better than agreement tomorrow? Absolutely. Now that we have a constituency, the important thing is to mobilise. The past is in the past. Our job, in the present, is to protect the future.

Call for a facebook user strike on May 1st. #May1FBstrike https://medium.com/@oddbert2000/call-for-a-facebook-users-st...

what is the point?

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#207

Post by floatingatoll »

murukesh_s wrote: post #196
duck wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you believe them after they have lied to you once already?

Right, I wonder how much people trust American companies. Imagine a Chinese firm doing the same and how many will trust them again..

Chinese firms are generally required under threat of arrest to store and/or transmit all data on users. A single Chinese firm failing to delete data would have little or no negative impact within China given that they’re probably already secretly required to do exactly this. Do you mean US customer impact?

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#208

Post by austincheney »

kerkeslager wrote: post #188
austincheney wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly there is a big disconnect here. It seems somebody is suggesting there should be a correlation between a user removing content from their account and Facebook destroying some of Facebook property. Anything submitted to Facebook is the property of Facebook. Users have no business telling Facebook to destroy Facebook property.

> Anything submitted to Facebook is the property of Facebook. I'm not sure how you came to this conclusion. Are we to accept that this is how it works simply because Facebook says this is how it works?

Facebook's terms of services agreement that you must consent to in order to open or maintain your account. These are the rules not because Facebook says so, but because you say so when you agree to their terms.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#209

Post by dx034 »

bigiain wrote: post #159
paulie_a wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Storage being cheap is irrelevant..when a user requests the data to be deleted. You delete it. Outside of government compliance there is no reason to not comply with that request

When a _customer_ requests data to be deleted, you delete it. Pretty sure Facebook have probably complied with every user-data-deletion request they've ever got from their paying customers - because advertisers are well know for wanting access to less data about the cattle...

I doubt that advertisers requesting to have all their information deleted (apart from tax relevant data) would be more successful.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#210

Post by ndespres »

noobermin wrote: post #176
dividuum wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am sure that the deletion of media files in services like Facebook has never meant to be absolute. Many of my colleagues believe the same thing that I believe: Facebook and other services do not actually delete data, they just mark it as "deleted" and purge it only if they need the space. No reason to believe. You can read about the storage architecture used to store photos from a post in 2009 here: https://code.…

Allow me to ask the obvious question. Who doesn't do the something like this? Not to alleviate facebook of blame, but who's to say data on almost every other social media service isn't also just flagged for deletion?

I recall the distinction being made very clear on LiveJournal between "deleted" content vs "purged". I would be very surprised if they were not being forthright about this. Of course this was 10 years ago, before the Russian ownership. So I do have reason to believe that not all companies act in deceitful ways when it comes to retention of user data.
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