Is there a “Marie Kondo” for the digital world? Seems like something or someone that could be just as relevant if not more than organizing your physical world.
DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts
21–30 of 277 posts
Re: DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts
#22I 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.
> I'd be slightly more confident (slightly) that editing the post might cause the core data in the db to be updated I'd be much less confident, considering that they explicitly save and make public post's edit history.
I think that idea is based on how Reddit stores (or stored) comment edits, and how they would overwrite the original value.
Re: DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts
#23About a two years ago my friends and I used to scroll back into each other’s posts from the early days and ‘like’ some of the most cringeworthy posts and photos we could find. It would cause them to bubble up into everyone’s newsfeeds again. Was a fun game.
This script would have saved me some manual labour back then.
(Edit: we also used to endorse each other on LinkedIn for the most bizarre skills we could find. Toilets, divorce and animal husbandry to recall a few)
Re: DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts
#24I 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.
> I'd be slightly more confident (slightly) that editing the post might cause the core data in the db to be updated, however. Don't be confident. They have [1], or used to, post edit history. Even if the feature isn't there in the UI, I bet they didn't remove it internally. [1]: DDG: facebook post edit history.
It's currently possible to view previous versions of posts, just click "# edits" in the bottom-right by the "# comments" button (neither of which look like a link)
Re: DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts
#25What 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.
Last I remember it was supposed to be a good software engineering practice to never actually delete data from database but just mark it as deleted.
GDPR has changed this.
FWIW I’ve seen comments from a privacy engineer at google who posted here and said they actually do work hard to delete your data.
I’d expect Facebook and google to successfully delete the data (after giving 3-6 months for backups to age out) but wouldn’t trust most smaller operations to do so. And yeah, that doesn’t mean ML models or whatever but just the retrievable copies of your photos and text posts.
Re: DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts
#26I 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.
probably safe to say that the idea of a user on a platform like Facebook trying to obfuscate their history on the platform... is a short jog from an individual trying to avoid government backed hacking on them.
Facebook has many years of pretty smart work, and probably safe to say tens of millions of dollars just in meetings about specifically this (re costs associated with effort of user data retention).
Re: DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts
#27Is there a way to export the data beforehand? Just in case there are old photos or anything one may potentially want to keep saved...
Re: DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts
#28Is there a way to export the data beforehand? Just in case there are old photos or anything one may potentially want to keep saved...
https://www.facebook.com/help/1701730696756992?helpref=hc_gl...
See "How do I download a copy of my information on Facebook?"
Re: DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts
#29I wrote a similar tool in Node a while back that can delete by year and category:
https://github.com/spieglt/fb-delete
And one to download all "Photos of you", which Facebook doesn't include when downloading your data:
Re: DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts
#30Is there a way to export the data beforehand? Just in case there are old photos or anything one may potentially want to keep saved...
Facebook offers a data export:
https://www.facebook.com/help/1701730696756992?helpref=hc_gl...