How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends and photos • Hacker News Board

Re: How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends and photos

#81

Post by motdiem » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 8:39 AM UTC

Very timely post. Full disclosure : my current project [1] deals with archiving content from social network, and we're considering adding more things to import from facebook. The friends list example from the article is a good one :

  As for my friend list.. well.. It's all in Json format..
  So now you can essentially use the power of your brain to think how your friend looked.
  If you can't, well then you probably weren't friends anyway. Sorry.

I'd be interested in your experiences either in leaving facebook, or about things you'd which you could have saved

[1](https://www.getkumbu.com/)

Re: How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends and photos

#82

Post by motdiem » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 8:41 AM UTC

vyuh wrote: post #57

When I downloaded my Facebook data few years ago, my notes were missing. I had to reactivate my account, save them as HTML pages, and queue account for deletion again. One should not think of profiles on these sites as reliable archive of ones data. There is no alternative to local backup for this. With deletion one loses so many little memorable things, for example comments.

can I ask how did you save your notes ? Just view source and save the html as files ?

Re: How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends and photos

#83

Post by andygates » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 8:43 AM UTC

gammateam wrote: post #60

"GOOD MORNING! Want to see someone getting killed by police and watch your friends quickly get baited by Russians to form to actual American protests related to their preconceived notions? No? Well its already playing enjoy! but be careful where you tap because IF YOU LIKE ANYTHING you'll lose half of your friends in real life but thats okay because we were only going to show you more of this exact thing regardless"

> watch your friends quickly get baited

Yeah, that's a good sign that you need smarter friends.

Autoplay is cancer, though.

Re: How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends and photos

#84

Post by motdiem » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 8:44 AM UTC

Jaruzel wrote: post #18

This thread seems a good place to re-pimp my Facebook profile cleaner (for those that missed it first time): http://www.jaruzel.com/blog/how-i-erased-5000-facebook-comme...

Going through the mbasic interface of facebook for this is brilliant. Good job !

Re: How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends and photos

#85

Post by bogomipz » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 8:44 AM UTC

telesilla wrote: post #78

SequoiaHope wrote: post #46

I just wanted to say that I walked away from Facebook about a year and a half ago now. I didn’t delete it, I just logged out and uninstalled the mobile app. It’s all been totally fine. The most social social media I use now is reddit, where I’m more just talking to people. I don’t post status updates anywhere, and often amazing things happen to me that I never tell anyone about. I eat great meals and don’t share. I b…

>when cool things happen I share them with the people I’m around I really expect the next generation (I guess, kids born in the last 8 years) to launch a major backlash against over-sharing and pretty go back to the roots of relationships: exactly how you said it.

That that would also be a generation who had their baby and childhood pictures unwittingly shared and now owned by social media companies. This is something I find really strange and unsettling.

Re: How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends and photos

#86

Post by motdiem » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 8:46 AM UTC

fromthestart wrote: post #30

Realistically, what are the odds that deleting a Facebook profile actually removes one's data from Facebook's servers? It's far too easy to secretly retain such data, and Zuckerberg has repeatedly demonstrated the requisite malciousness.

Technically, if you're EU based, you could ask for proof of deletion and/or sue - not sure it's worth the effort though, especially since FB is keeping shadow profiles of you anyway (so you may have deleted your profile, but because your friends have your phone number, email, etc facebook doesn't actually need you to have a profile to track you now...)

Re: How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends and photos

#87

Post by motdiem » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 8:47 AM UTC

philliphaydon wrote: post #10

I’d love to make a dumb social network which could import friends/photos/videos from a Facebook export. Which just shows photos videos and comments/posts. Ditched the shares, likes, and all the other crap. And was just a place where we can keep in touch with people. And leave it at that.

Or something like binky [1] but with your friends data, and no notification of interaction

[1](https://www.binky.rocks/)

Re: How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends and photos

#88

Post by Jaruzel » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 8:49 AM UTC

motdiem wrote: post #84

Jaruzel wrote: post #18

This thread seems a good place to re-pimp my Facebook profile cleaner (for those that missed it first time): http://www.jaruzel.com/blog/how-i-erased-5000-facebook-comme...

Going through the mbasic interface of facebook for this is brilliant. Good job !

Cheers!

Re: How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends and photos

#89

Post by motdiem » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 8:50 AM UTC

heinrichhartman wrote: post #68

I wrote about this a while ago: http://heinrichhartmann.com/blog/2017/12/31/Quitting-Faceboo... """ Problem with the facebook exporter are: - All comments are missing. Even the ones you wrote yourself! - There are no images in the timeline. - The number of likes and shares is missing on the posts. Before I delete my account, I wanted to have a more decent backup of my timeline. I looked into printing out the timeline…

Screenshotting is one method that is surprisingly popular in the wild - It makes me a bit sad that so much state/metadata is lost when screenshotting, but it may prove the most efficient method going forward. I wonder if it'll be easier with DOM screenshot tools now available in major browers, so you can easily screenshot "just a post"

Re: How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends and photos

#90

Post by bfred_it » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 8:57 AM UTC

sdrothrock wrote: post #40

twblalock wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Facebook is what you make of it. It offers relatively granular control over who you want to see so if even you must be friends with someone, you can still unfollow them. Recent events have demonstrated that the privacy controls are not what people think they are. Cambridge Analytica was able to access data belonging to the friends of people who granted certain permissions, and there was a recent data breach caused…

I don't think this is related to what bfred_it is saying. To me, he's saying "if you have 1500 friends, use Facebook's follow/unfollow feature to improve your S/N ratio while still being friends with those people." That is, rather than privacy (controlling outgoing information), he's discussing the ability to filter incoming information.

That’s correct. I’m not talking about what happens to your data but about what you see on your feed.