There needs to also be an obfuscate profile method.
Any data is probably never deleted. What makes more sense if a long running script (multiple years??) that updates / inserts / deletes your profile with random information.
DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts
61–70 of 277 posts
Re: DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If I’m banned will they stop sending me email finally?
No. Once they banned my account (one of the accounts), but still were sending some mails.
Re: DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
After knowing Google have been tracking few hundreds millions people's precise locations for the last 10+ years, I went thru the exercise of deleting all the activities history from Map, Youtube and Search and disable all activities tracking. For the first few hours, I see new default youtube suggestions. After a few days, I see a lot of old search/view videos pop back to the youtube home page. YT still seems "sugges…
It's likely they have an ML "recommender" model that was built off of your history, but doesn't actually store the history nor is it reverse engineer-able. Once you hit a certain threshold of activity or time duration, the model will probably rebuild.
Re: DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts
#64I 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.
FWIW, I believe this is still true of reddit. Deleting a post doesn't actually delete it. It just no longer shows on the webpage. To really remove it from the database, you need to edit the post/comment, replace the contents with something simple (e.g., the character "a"), save it, then delete it.
Re: DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Ever is a very very long time indeed. Facebook will go out of business or get sold eventually and delete it all to save money or by accident. See also: Myspace accidentally dumping everything pre-2015 https://www.engadget.com/2019/03/18/myspace-lost-12-years-mu...
For similar reasons, I doubt very much that they actually deleted everything they said they did. I know that they were backing up to tape and storing it at Iron Mountain years prior.
Re: DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts
#66I can't imagine this is more likely to actually delete the data on their end than just deleting your whole account.
However, I am really interested in learning more about Selenium so I'm curious to look at your project.
Re: DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts
#67About 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…
I'm so glad Facebook wasn't around when I was a teenager...
Re: DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts
#68I 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'm pretty sure they use some sort of event store for their backend in which case all versions/changes/updates/deletes are stored as a separate revision alongside the original content.
I suspect this is the case as well.
All the big companies are doing immutable, append-only event logging and probably have no mechanism to expunge this data. All because storage is cheap and they need to hold on to everything for testing or whatever future need that might arise.
What a pitiful dystopia we're living in.
Re: DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts
#69Similar, but OT: does anyone know of a script that will delete your tweets from before X date? There's tools that bulk delete, but I want to delete from before a certain date.
Re: DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Hmm ... I wonder if they have an edit limit where old edits get erased if you keep editing, sort of like that trick someone came up with years ago for pinging the credit bureau so many times so that eventually your credit looked better since old items were erased or not considered for your credit score ... or something.
Somebody hire this genius at $300k/yr immediately