51–60 of 277 posts
About 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. Toi…
Yikes, sounds like it.
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 ar…
See also: Myspace accidentally dumping everything pre-2015 https://www.engadget.com/2019/03/18/myspace-lost-12-years-mu...
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I did this a year ago, and it considerably improved my Fb feed’s signal/noise ratio. Specific procedure I’d recommend is to make this a regular process: open fb feed, read until you find a thing which does not improves your life, click on owner (author / group) -click “friend” -> unfollow. Iterate until sanity is restored. And one moral of this story (hi Facebook, please understand this) is that people are multidimen…
Maybe I'm too forgiving but I'll generally just snooze a person unless they're genuinely consistently horrible. People change. I had friends who would post tireless political rants that just post memes now.
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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…
> GDPR has changed this. That's a far, far cry from the reality of "possibly prosecutable in EU in some scenarios." We aren't even using a website right now that's in GDPR jurisdiction. But there's also a weird fetishization of GDPR I've noticed where people invoke it like "heh, my dad works for Xbox. just you wait buddy, he'll have you banned."
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.
I believe there is zero doubt that somewhere the text has been saved. Not only the original text, but also various results of analysis. Since they store edit history, too, replacing it with other text would simply be an indication that you’re trying to cover it up. I would guess that this has been demonstrated in court.
It's text you wrote, why would there be any problem "covering up" your own text?
Note that, I'm not arguing you should have a right to use Selenium to scrape their site and replace the text, but if you went through every post in a non-automated fashion and changed the text, from a perspective of "covering up" the text, the purpose would be the same. Facebook almost certainly has an interest in keeping 100M users from scraping with Selenium, that's a separate thing entirely.
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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).
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.
Something like this is probably against some terms of use that you implicitly agree to as a Facebook user, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they would auto detect it and ban you.
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…
Facebook's algorithm should mostly do this by default. If you don't interact with people's posts, you'll see less of them. You can explicitly mute people as well or even just certain websites. My aunt has been posting a ton of weird alt-right news lately and I've had pretty good success by just blocking her news sources so I can still see posts from her that I care about (family stuff.) I also have a few friends who…
I also don't really scroll the feed anymore, so I'd rather just keep it to people I want to keep tabs on (close family, professional contacts)
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.
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Maybe I'm too forgiving but I'll generally just snooze a person unless they're genuinely consistently horrible. People change. I had friends who would post tireless political rants that just post memes now.
My experience is that I have hundreds of people to snooze, and would rather just have a fresh start and let those people trickle back in if they want to. Maybe I should just make a new account.
But slowly started getting requests from many of the previous friends. Some thought I had unfriended them, so had to explain to them that it was a new account. Felt obligated to add back most of the people. Now my feed is useless again.
Perhaps this should be yearly ritual.