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Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

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Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why would that be the good way to do it? Especially if that deletion action was behind a confirmation, or if the data was never recoverable by the user? At that point, just delete delete it.

A lot of reasons, here's a simple example: If you have a "product" which had a CRUD interface to make and users who add it to the card, deleting it would cause relationships to fail - as in if users who already purchased the item or added it to their cart would no longer be able to see it.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#392

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...

Fuck their paying customers

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once someone understands public and private keys, and webs of trust Nobody in the general public wants this.

Okay, don't assume people won't be interested in interesting things. Who is this general public, anyway? It's not an homogeneous group; it's made up of physicians, mechanics, teachers, lovers, Doomsday preppers, engineers, preachers, and all kinds of people who have special interests. The thing I see is that if you show them how it matters to them in their special role, rather than to them as members of this general…

It's interesting to you, not to most other people. Source: 25 years of talking to people about encryption. Most people just want stuff to work, not to know how it works.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#394

The most unsettling part is in Facebook's response: “We’ve heard that when accessing their information from our Download Your Information tool, some people are seeing their old videos that do not appear on their profile or Activity Log. We are investigating.” Who wants to bet against their investigation being “how to keep users from seeing it.” Anyone?

EU Data Protection Law requires that users are entitled to view all personal data (yes that includes videos) that FB has on them.

In May the EU will be able to fine FB up to 4% of global revenue for breeches of this law. Popcorn time!

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#395
post #385
post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Placing technical convenience above user wishes is absolutely a lack of respect for those wishes. All of your reasons essentially come down to "it's not worth the effort".

Not at all. All my reasons were technical in that events are part of a stream, and delete is just one more event. When you reconstruct the stream, the end product is the item is deleted. But you could recreate the item from the stream so technically not deleted. Companies that take daily backups. Say a user asked to delete something, do they now go through and comb through their backups (which might even be offsite o…

Choosing to adopt a technology that makes deletions impossible absolutely shows a lack of respect for user decisions. Not building in the ability to deep delete from backups is the same. There is no technical restriction on deleting data, just company decisions that make it difficult.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#396

I don't care. I stopped caring about my privacy. Nobody will hurt me by knowing too much about me. Facebook can have all of my life, because nothing is private for me. It is a great tool for keeping up with friends, it allows to cultivate friendships a lot easier than anything before. We can have a lot of friends when we don't keep secrets, because by being open with your weaknesses you create new friend, not an enem…

[deleted]

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users didn't accept anything just because they checked a checkbox next to a link to an ever-changing jumble of legalese to get past a screen. This isn't agreement, it's manufactured consent.

Extortion

That's like saying having to pay for any product is extortion, just because it's something you want but don't want the consequences of that, in that case paying for it.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, don't assume people won't be interested in interesting things. Who is this general public, anyway? It's not an homogeneous group; it's made up of physicians, mechanics, teachers, lovers, Doomsday preppers, engineers, preachers, and all kinds of people who have special interests. The thing I see is that if you show them how it matters to them in their special role, rather than to them as members of this general…

It's interesting to you, not to most other people. Source: 25 years of talking to people about encryption. Most people just want stuff to work, not to know how it works.

Honestly, it's not been that interesting to me in general. It's only interesting to me for the same reason it might be interesting to the sorts of people I enumerated --- because of the ways it can be useful to me. I don't really care about how it works, in depth; I just want it to keep my stuff private. The only difference is that I have just enough technical expertise, as a programmer, that I can see its applicability without having it explained in a sympathetic manner.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why even have a delete button? Why lie to your customers about their privacy?

What does this have to do with privacy?

Do you mean the delete button is a lie? Why would it be a lie? Can you or someone else access the deleted video from Facebook.com? Or in another public way? Isn't it deleted from this point of view?

I am not defending Facebook in anyway. I just don't understand why is everybody surprised about these things. Do you think if you click delete on a video on youtube, then it physically deletes the video from all of its servers?

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#400
post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but that doesn't explain why Facebook decided to include so-called deleted files in a download of user data. This happened because the person tasked with writing the code to build the archive forgot to include the filter for "deleted" records somewhere in the code. I.e., they forgot the "where is_deleted = false" part below on one or more DB query requests like this: select * from table where is_deleted = false; Th…

If you have soft-deleted user data, then you have user data, so you had better include it.

That is a good point, but flagging shouldn’t be the end of the line for soft deleted data. There should be a process going back and removing everything that was flagged for deletion, prioritized to guarantee deletion within a set time frame but without impacting performance. Meanwhile, most queries should be done through a view that automatically masks out any flagged data. It’s a basic data integrity feature that shouldn’t be left to their API (which is such a fast moving target that one developer doesn’t know what the other is doing much of the time).
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