Live data from Hacker News

DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts

github.com

1–10 of 277 posts

Re: DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts

#3
What do you think the chances are that Facebook actually does any delete operation on their data? I'm sure this is simply marking it as hidden in their database. Maybe I'm just paranoid, but to me the only way to take back something you say on social media, is to never have posted it in the first place.

Re: DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts

#4
This is beautiful: succinct and powerful.

Back in the day there was a similar js bookmarklet that could be used to export all your friends' contacts (name + emails) so you can leave without worrying that you'll be missing out on all your "connections." It would be nice to extend this with a "backup my posts + contacts" info before deleting everything.

Re: DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts

#5
Does anyone know if there is an equivalent to delete Facebook friends or unlike pages/leave groups? I really want to clean out my Facebook since I've had it for a very long time and much of it doesn't appeal to me anymore, but I don't necessarily want to lose the tiny social ecosystem I've created with my family.

However, I would like to remove the hundreds of friends and pages that I don't talk to/don't represent me/are mining my data even more than the platform is.

Re: DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts

#6
I don't trust the "delete" button to scrub it from FB's database.

I'd be slightly more confident (slightly) that editing the post might cause the core data in the db to be updated, however. In which case, I think the more effective script would be one that goes through all of your FB posts and scrambles them, or replaces the text with gibberish.

Re: DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts

#9

What do you think the chances are that Facebook actually does any delete operation on their data? I'm sure this is simply marking it as hidden in their database. Maybe I'm just paranoid, but to me the only way to take back something you say on social media, is to never have posted it in the first place.

There are a million reasons to agree that the data is never actually deleted

* need to retain data to fulfill government requests

* internal auditing

* it's all backed up in some "data lake" somewhere to do internal ml or analytics on

* hundreds of copies in database backups from different times

* internal logs that contain the data

* it's already been analyzed and aggregated into learning products and models that aren't going to be recomputed

It's not being "paranoid". As someone who has worked on large scale saas, I say: there is zero, 0, ZERO, 0.00 chance of that data every actually being deleted

Re: DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts

#10

I don't trust the "delete" button to scrub it from FB's database. I'd be slightly more confident ( slightly ) that editing the post might cause the core data in the db to be updated, however. In which case, I think the more effective script would be one that goes through all of your FB posts and scrambles them, or replaces the text with gibberish.

Or insert GPT2-generated essays about post-modern privacy models. Regularly. Generate noise, and lots of it.
Post reply on HN