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

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

#91

Post by javagram »

givinguflac wrote: post #88
bduerst wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is a big reason I view the new “we’ll automatically delete your data!” Crap as disingenuous at best. They’ve already learned everything from the data in a few hours, it’s useless after that anyhow.

A big problem with data is not the company itself using it, but other ways it can come back to bite you.

E.g. a sexual photo retrieved from a private social media album is no threat to your reputation when it’s been assumed into some machine learning model for detecting sexual photos, but it’s certainly a threat if a future data leak allows your enemies to get the actual .PNG or .JPG and send it to the news media or your loved ones. Knowing that the photo can actually be deleted is valuable in this case and I’m sure there are many other similar ones that could be listed.

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

#92

Post by jxcl »

new_here wrote: post #23

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…

A fun artifact of deleting your facebook account is that all of your comments get deleted (hidden, I guess, is more accurate) too, which means that in old threads people who interacted with you now appear to be interacting with themselves.

My friend had a profile picture in which he was doing something silly with his eyebrows. I commented "Nice eyebrows" and he replied "You're just jealous." I've since deleted my account and now there is only one comment on this profile picture, by the person the picture is of, reading "You're just jealous."

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

#93

Post by kyoob »

adzm wrote: post #86

Regarding selenium, is there a better way to wait for a specific state or element etc rather than simply sleep for a few seconds?

It's considered a better practice to explicitly wait for an element on a page before acting. How to do it is documented for the Python bindings here: https://selenium-python.readthedocs.io/waits.html

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

#94

Post by luckylion »

snazz wrote: post #82
luckylion wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Post-modern privacy models include those developed by University of Chicago law professor Richard Hasen, who argued the Obama administration could regulate Facebook under the guise of protecting privacy. (He was later fired from his posts.) Other authors have argued that allowing Facebook users to choose what information they share online would weaken privacy, and that if Facebook were able to take over the content m…

I might have to use this to reply to unclear tasks from now on, great find.

There are times when we need to ask ourselves, are our interests really served by having this ability, when so many of us are now doing so much online anyway?

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

#96

Post by xmprt »

srcmap wrote: post #44
javagram wrote: post #25

Earlier 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…

The model is probably based off of your watch history before you deleted everything. There would be no way (theoretically) for anyone to see your watch history but YouTube still thinks those old videos are ones that you'd be interested in and fortunately you haven't watched them yet (as far as the algorithm is concerned) so it's recommending them to you again.

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

#97

Post by e1ven »

I've seen other people recommend the Social Book Post Manager extension [1] in the past.

One of the nice things is you have more granularity in what you remove - You can leave things that mention certain words, or in a date range, etc.

Because it runs in your browser, it should work with MFA logins, etc, without submitting credentials to an external service.

[1] - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social-book-post-m...

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

#98

Post by onychomys »

Canadauni wrote: post #80
nostalgk wrote: post #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…

It takes a while but what I ended up doing was deleting friends on their birthdays. It takes at least a year but mostly weeds people out who don't fit in your circle.

I don't have my birthday listed there (because I find the constant birthday posts from friends to be annoying), so I'm functionally immortal under this scheme!

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

#100

Post by Vordimous »

So I have been putting together a way for people to more easily make their own blogging platform. It would kind of mimic a social media platform, but since everything is committed to a repository using the JAMstack it could easily be converted to a full website or in your case you could simply delete the repository or any number of your posts because they are just files in your repository. Any feedback would be wonderful. https://your-media.netlify.com/post/make-your-own-media/ Everything is owned by the end user. This is only providing a recipe for people to use. I will also mention that https://www.stackbit.com/ is doing basically the same thing but more from a “Make life easier for Website designers” perspective.
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