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Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

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Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#261

Post by icebraining »

austincheney wrote: post #179
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…

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.

Facebook disagrees: "You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook"

https://www.facebook.com/terms.php

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#262

Post by icebraining »

kerkeslager wrote: post #222
lerpa wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

That would be somewhat reasonable if it were just an implementation detail. But unfortunately, it's not just an implementation detail. When a filesystem has data to write and runs out of hard drive space, it overwrites the data which was flagged for deletion. But when a web 2.0 company has data to write and runs out of hard drive space, they buy more hard drive space, usually automatically.

It probably is an implementation detail. I'd bet you 64 days is time is takes for all their backups to be rotated.

Not that I think that's legitimate! Implementations can be changed, just like you could write a filesystem that shreds files when they are deleted.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#263

Post by droidist2 »

raverbashing wrote: post #162
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.…

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

What video would you upload? Just nonsense? Is this to become the modern equivalent of a "black fax"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_fax

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#264

Post by icebraining »

verylittlemeat wrote: post #190
andreyf wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it sound creepy? What percentage of the population, historically, have been "free" in a sense that they don't belong to an organization that exerts some sort of control over their social world? It seems there are many shades and dimensions here...

Actually I think in some ways the lower classes have more psychological freedom here. I've worked a bunch of minimum wage retail jobs and all the grunts mock the daily "walmart chant." At high status jobs people apparently really buy the "my employer is who I am" thing.

"At the same time, the proles are freer and less intimidated than the middle-class Outer Party: they are subject to certain levels of monitoring but are not expected to be particularly patriotic. They lack telescreens in their own homes and often jeer at the telescreens that they see. "The Book" indicates that is because the middle class, not the lower class, traditionally starts revolutions. The model demands tight control of the middle class, with ambitious Outer-Party members neutralised via promotion to the Inner Party or "reintegration" by the Ministry of Love, and proles can be allowed intellectual freedom because they lack intellect."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four :)

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#265

Post by dbg31415 »

I'm shocked. No one saw this coming.

* Facebook reads your private messages, California class-action suit alleges. || https://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/01/03/facebook...

* Facebook asks users for nude photos in project to combat 'revenge porn' | Technology | The Guardian || https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/07/facebook-...

* Facebook CEO Admits To Calling Users 'Dumb Fucks' || http://gawker.com/5636765/facebook-ceo-admits-to-calling-use...

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#266

Post by hrktb »

kumarvvr wrote: post #256
ori_b wrote: post #173

You mean they follow what many people consider best practices? https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1592... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/820466/never-delete-entr... https://serverfault.com/questions/31455/should-i-ever-delete... https://www.infoq.com/news/2009/09/Do-Not-Delete-Data http://udidahan.com/2009/09/01/dont-delete-just-dont/ https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2549839/are-soft-dele…

"best practices" is for developers. For the average Joe and Janet out there, "deleting" something is synonymous to "remove from the internet for eternity"

Except when it’s not, and they want back the data they’ve deleted by mistake.

In those cases it will take a lot of support to explain that what is gone is gone. I think customers don’t have a unified vision of what deleting means, they just want what’s optimal for the situation.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#267

Post by odabaxok »

untog wrote: post #216
noobermin wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Does it make it ok for Facebook to do it just because similar other companies do it? I say no, all of them should delete something I say to delete. And "everyone does it" is makes it a bigger problem, not a smaller one.

Why would they? They implement their system the way they want to. Also, this is a completely logical way to deal with deletions. This is what I would do, (what I have done, when I created a simple CMS system). I don't want an endless quarrel with a customer, who "accidentally" deleted something and wants it back. I just turn the switch and it is back.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#268

Post by jwr »

multibit wrote: post #55
thinkingemote wrote: post #19

Just an anecdote. I had a day set aside to purging my Facebook entries a year or two back. I manually deleted comments and posts. Of course there was too many to do and it was very boring so I only spent a couple of hours at it. But that's nots what's interesting. What happened was that I got a huge uptake of people commenting on some old post I made, like a profile picture change. I think Facebook saw I was purging…

Is there not a way to delete all posts and comments at once?

Facebook makes it very, very difficult. But there is a method using a Chrome browser extension, I've used this method recently with success: https://www.mariusschober.com/2018/01/20/delete-facebook-act...

It will take some effort, but it's doable.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#269

Post by philipwhiuk »

eitland wrote: post #248
fastball wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you truly want privacy and security I would recommend Signal over Telegram -- Telegram has had some controversy with respect to their encryption protocol not being audited, as well as some weird stuff with a very large recent ICO that seems entirely unnecessary except as a money grab and Russian subpoenas for their master private keys.

> and Russian subpoenas for their master private keys. While I cannit defend (or attack, I'm no cryptographer) their crypto they seem to have a solution to this: They say they don't store keys in the same datacenter or even jurisdiction as the customer data they protect. According to them this means getting unencrypted data through a legal process would mean getting a warrant in two or more countries at once.

This only works in the US due to the Cloud Act.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#270

Post by xtrapolate »

samstave wrote: post #245
alangpierce wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Fucking stupid policy - so they have 90 days to off load your shit to Utah/gov-cloud before they “delete” your data? Who can possibly believe this BS. Imagine you wanted to delete data of your own Sustem - but when you hit rm it takes 90 days to execute - this sentiment PISSES me off. When I say “delete me from your service now” I have a reasonable expectation that you will delete it. C’mon

Do you think it's as easy as "rm"-ing a file away? Your data is kept internally in a multitude of different databases. Parts of it sitting in cold storage. Log files, caches. That data is split across thousands of different nodes. Each system has different data retention policies. Some databases don't permit removal of a specific record - the records must "expire" first. It really does take time to delete data.
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