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Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

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Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#301

Post by austincheney »

icebraining wrote: post #261
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.

Facebook disagrees: "You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook" https://www.facebook.com/terms.php

It also says you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License).

This link addresses your concerns by clarifying a prior form of the above mentioned policy: http://legalteamusa.net/tacticalip/2013/02/11/does-facebook-...

I suspect the Facebook IP Policy is a standard blanket of legal compliance if the following is that policy: https://www.facebook.com/help/intellectual_property

In short Facebook can do anything they want with the IP content you provide to them. It also identifies, by example, IP content as media you provide to them. For that material the policy is pretty clear, but what about other material? What about textual content that is typed into Facebook and identified relationships? It seems this information is covered by the same policies and is IP subject to Facebook's use.

My understanding of Facebook policy is also likely dated as their terms change periodically. The current policy is dated at 30 January 2015.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#302

Post by icebraining »

austincheney wrote: post #301
icebraining wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook disagrees: "You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook" https://www.facebook.com/terms.php

It also says you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This link addresses your concerns by clarifying a prior form of the above mentioned policy: http://legalteamusa.net/tacticalip/2013/02/11/does-facebook-... I suspect the Facebook IP Policy is a standard blanket of legal compliance…

If you read a bit further, it says the license ends when you and the other users with whom you have shared the content delete it, which was the case we were discussing.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#303

Post by icebraining »

samstave wrote: post #298
icebraining wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that you think they need those 90 days to off load your data. As if they hadn't done so before your deletion. By the way, rm does work like that. The file will just be marked as deleted (by removing its entry from the filesystem index), but will remain on your disk for some time afterwards, from some minutes to months. If you want to ensure deletion, you should be using shred.

“Rm doesn’t work like that, so clearly it’s ok that Facebook takes 90 days to delete your data after you make the request” Utter horse crap

If you put words into other people's mouths, you're only creating confusion for yourself. I meant what I wrote, and nothing more.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#304

Post by dalore »

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.

A lot of the big agile companies are using event sourcing. So there isn't even a model to delete. It's all events with the models being created from a snapshot of events. The event stream is usually durable and lives forever.

https://martinfowler.com/eaaDev/EventSourcing.html

So with this type of system nothing is ever "deleted". It's just an event that something is deleted.

This is a common and very scalable system. You don't deal with models, you deal with events (and a model is a snapshot of events).

This is even an issue. Even other companies that aren't event sourcing, but traditional model architecture have backups. You ask something to be deleted and they might actually delete it, but what about last weeks backup? It's not deleted there.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#305

Post by dalore »

untog wrote: post #217
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

File systems eventually overwrite that data, though. FB's system specifically never reclaims it. Why on earth would you ever do that, unless you have absolutely no respect for your users wishes?

Not standing up for FB's other practices, but from a technical stand point there are several reasons, none of which are about not having respect.

- disk space is cheap - deletes are expensive (time) and slow - deletes are harder to scale - can't revert a real delete - delete's don't fit into an event sourcing architecture - append only data is better, more durable

I could go on.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#306

Post by mic47 »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #280
ridgeguy wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because FB deletes by flag so that content disappear instantly and then start the actual process of deletion (which can take while because of stuff like backup, cols storage)...

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#307

Post by themarkn »

dalore wrote: post #304
untog wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A lot of the big agile companies are using event sourcing. So there isn't even a model to delete. It's all events with the models being created from a snapshot of events. The event stream is usually durable and lives forever. https://martinfowler.com/eaaDev/EventSourcing.html So with this type of system nothing is ever "deleted". It's just an event that something is deleted. This is a common and very scalable system.…

User expectations about a deletion would probably be "make it as though this was never uploaded": no copy, no backup, no recoverable form whatsoever. And yet, if it was not deleted, and there was a problem requiring backups to be used, they would expect to never even know about it, just that all their data would remain.

It's very much against the rules in event sourced systems to change history. But maybe that just doesn't matter. If it means you can never meet a user expectation about privacy, I guess you could tell the user that everything persists indefinitely... or when something is deleted, go back to the upload event and remove it, rebuilding history with any event related to that uploaded item ignored. Putting the user above the "purity" of the software and creating potential problems elsewhere.

Even on backups in long term storage, there could be some process of creating new copies of the backups with any needed modifications on some kind of schedule, so deletions can propagate over time.

Ultimately the challenges here are financial. We could delete things thoroughly if we were willing to pay for the developer time and other resources needed to make it work.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#308

Post by crdoconnor »

dalore wrote: post #304
untog wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A lot of the big agile companies are using event sourcing. So there isn't even a model to delete. It's all events with the models being created from a snapshot of events. The event stream is usually durable and lives forever. https://martinfowler.com/eaaDev/EventSourcing.html So with this type of system nothing is ever "deleted". It's just an event that something is deleted. This is a common and very scalable system.…

I was thinking the other day that GDPR might make event sourcing problematic.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#309

Post by mic47 »

ohazi wrote: post #29
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…

I'm not inclined to believe PR statements like these when there's no way to verify them. Can you support your assertion? The infrequent cases where someone manages to extract or recover supposedly deleted data cast a lot of doubt on your claims. In any case, even if it's not Facebook specifically, it seems overwhelmingly likely that the majority of companies do not actually delete your data.

FB is/was regularly audited by Irish DPC, I think one of the topics was user data deletion. I think that the results were public.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#310

Post by CapacitorSet »

benwilber0 wrote: post #154
jlmorton wrote: post #103

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…

I agree with you. At Facebook-scale the data is massive -- far bigger than anyone here could possibly comprehend and that includes the Facebook and Google-ers lurking around. Data has incredible inertia. And when there's a lot of it, in a lot of different places, I can imagine that it becomes very difficult to keep track of. I'm glad that Facebook's data export tool included some things that maybe it didn't expect to…

>I can imagine that it becomes very difficult to keep track of.

The GDPR prompted them to make the data resurface, so it's not impossible to track this data given a few months of warning. It's just that Facebook as a company does not have an interest in deleting data they collected.

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