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Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

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Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#271

Post by philipwhiuk »

r00fus wrote: post #141
pishpash wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> You would have no recourse to fight back on any of their use of your data right?

Yes you would if you were European. You can't stop people exercising their legal rights because they broke your terms of service.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#272

Post by philipwhiuk »

donatj wrote: post #240

What I think so many privacy advocates don’t realize while frothing at the mouth is that odds are 99.9999% no one really wants your old photos or data specifically. Surely in large aggregate, but on a macro level you are no more interesting than anyone else. You’re not. You have a delusion of grandeur. Sure, you might get some targeted ads by data used in aggregate and put you into a group but so what? If I had to se…

Ah the old nothing to fear argument.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#273

Post by madez »

pennaMan wrote: post #94
guessmyname wrote: post #8

This reminds me of the long conversations that I used to have with family members and friends several years ago. With their continuous requests to create my own Facebook profile so I can keep in contact with them and with their activities as well as to share my whereabouts. I always used the same argument to reject these suggestions — "I don't want Facebook to have too much data about me, more than the data that you…

>Unfortunately, expecting a non-tech-savvy person to understand how data moves around the Internet Explain how data can be unreadable while it moves. Teach them to use secure communication options. You don't need to be an electric engineer to use a TV remote control.

What secure communications options specifically?

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#274

Post by nasredin »

fastball wrote: post #227
sp527 wrote: post #43

One fascinating outcome of all this fallout is that there's now a readymade excuse to stop using Facebook. My personal observations are that a good number of people have felt 'fatigued' by Facebook for a very long time, but were also unsure of how best to extricate themselves without incurring a social penalty. But now there's an impetus that most people can understand. I'm not sure about how many people will move aw…

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.

You are getting off one boat and getting on the other one. Destination is the same.

Any centralized communication network is by definition insecure (one point of failure).

Maybe try Tox.

https://tox.chat/

Telegram copperating with Iran

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16039859

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#275

Post by craigsmansion »

guessmyname wrote: post #8

This reminds me of the long conversations that I used to have with family members and friends several years ago. With their continuous requests to create my own Facebook profile so I can keep in contact with them and with their activities as well as to share my whereabouts. I always used the same argument to reject these suggestions — "I don't want Facebook to have too much data about me, more than the data that you…

Unfortunately there will be no prizes for having been right all along.

Even now, as facebook is burning, statements of how one has quit or will be quitting facebook get swept into the pile of incendiary indignation, with encouragement from all sides.

But never having used facebook, even at significant personal effort as you indicate, one is relegated from "elitist" before to "smug" now.

One day in the future a recruiter will ask why there's nothing about you on the Internet, and you will proudly be able to say: "Because I know the Internet and its dynamics that well" and they will hire you, in awe of your analytical foresight.

That's the dream anyway, because you're more likely to be reported for being suspicious. After facebook there will be another facebook, and another, and people will flock to them just the same, and you get to experience being an antisocial hermit all over again.

Now I made myself sad. "Social Media: even more depressing when you're not on them!"

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#276

Post by pmlnr »

sverige wrote: post #68
pmlnr wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't mean they shouldn't.

I'm fairly tech savvy (ok, I'm an expert compared to my non-tech family and friends, but not compared to people here). I even had a copy of pgp on my Windows 3.1 machine shortly after Phil Zimmerman created it. I didn't understand it then, and I don't want to understand it now. The better and easier solution has been to avoid putting stuff I don't want anyone to know about me on the internet.

I'm a linux sysadmin, and GPG is horrible. Complicated, complex, with weird naming scheme, multiple programs (gpg vs gpg2), etc - but it's a brilliant example why all of this is so complicated. Other ideas about describing the trouble trust means on the internet are welcome.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#277

Post by dpwm »

icebraining wrote: post #254
dpwm wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to believe Twitter was better. But once you're above a certain number of active (i.e. publicly retweeting) followers there's a pretty high chance that your tweets will end up in the feed that is used to generate the twitter stream archives: https://archive.org/details/twitterstream?sort=-publicdate These are tar files that contain bz2 compressed newline separated twitter events as json. These include deletion…

Why would you ever believe it was private? I think Twitter is better because everything is explicitly public, rather than dishonestly pretending it's private.

Well, I never said I did believe it was private. When I said better, I should really have said better behaved in respect to deletions.

Because of the twitter stream APIs it's not. But there does seem to be a strange presumption amongst users that deleted tweets are gone from public view and cannot resurface. There are people who use tweets in all manner of ways that they really weren't designed for, some of which involve deleting them after a few minutes.

Many a public figure uses these tweet deletion apps. Some do it for more honest reasons (status count limits -- do they still exist?), others do it to limit their exposure.

In the UK at least, there have been cases of libel where either the claimant or the defendant depended upon twitter and in at least one of these the court admitted the claimant had an unfair advantage by forgetting about having a tweet deletion app attached to their account. The case proceeded and the claimant won despite the acknowledged advantage. To some, this may be seen as a clear message that in the eyes of the judiciary it's okay to delete tweets (evidence) as long as it was through an auto deletion app and the individual concerned forgot about its existence.

I would not at all be surprised if some lawyers to the rich quietly suggest they install a tweet deletion app as general advice upon instruction.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#278

Post by pbhjpbhj »

sgtmas2006 wrote: post #157
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

Yes there are, but there are no moral reasons to not comply with it.

If your ethics are such that you believe the state should be able to view data on someone in order to help prosecution of a crime then you could support the retention of data on all users in order to avoid deletions made to hide criminal activity.

Such an ethic creates a moral reasoning to not comply with an individual's wishes in the immediate deletion of data.

(FWIW I'm not defending this position nor suggesting it's the case here, just you said there's no moral reason that can support it, which seems wrong; different ethical systems can provide different reasoned moral outcomes.)

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#279

Post by pbhjpbhj »

narrator wrote: post #32
guessmyname wrote: post #8

This reminds me of the long conversations that I used to have with family members and friends several years ago. With their continuous requests to create my own Facebook profile so I can keep in contact with them and with their activities as well as to share my whereabouts. I always used the same argument to reject these suggestions — "I don't want Facebook to have too much data about me, more than the data that you…

I always tell people to treat Facebook as if every person you ever meet will be able to see it. It's more or less my public persona. Twitter is more anonymous.

How is Twitter more anonymous? In the UK people have been locked up for tweets.

Twitter probably have less data on you, but I doubt it can't be linked direct to you by a TLA, say.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#280

Post by pbhjpbhj »

ridgeguy wrote: post #166
wormseed wrote: post #16

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. This is a dumb conspiracy theory. Facebook has made plenty of public statements that say otherwise, and there's a whole team t…

Looking online briefly for definitions of "delete": "remove or obliterate (written or printed matter), especially by drawing a line through it or marking it with a delete sign." "synonyms: remove, cut out, take out, edit out, expunge, excise, eradicate, cancel" All of these seem clearly "absolute" to me. "Delete" means it's gone. I think Facebook has its own special linguistic distortion field. It requires no "dumb c…

Deletion by flag is very common in IT and presumably has been since the first undelete program was created. It's not a Facebook thing.

Some mail programs for a long time have had a soft-delete that requires an expunging process to create compete removal.

In an IT setting you can delete a blob from a db, but it might still be on disk, and it will still be in caches, on user machines, and in backups/archives.

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