Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

141–150 of 277 posts

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

#141

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.

If you use Reddit and want to delete your comment/post history I would recommend Shreddit[0] for the reason you mentioned[1]. It's important to do this frequently because there are quite a few sites out there that cache Reddit content periodically. [0] https://github.com/x89/Shreddit [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/1dhw2j/reddits_privac...

Read it at least gives you every opportunity to remain anonymous.

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

#142

Alternatively, my friend turned on the "on this day" feature that would send her a notification every day of what she did on facebook for that day of the year. So every day she just took a minute to the cringiest of that 1/365th of her content and in just one year she was free.

So it takes an entire year to maybe disassociate yourself from Facebook?

No, it takes a year to clean out the stuff you want cleaned out if you want to remain on Facebook and not sit down to the task for hours.

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

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> that trick someone came up with years ago for pinging the credit bureau so many times That sounds hilarious. You don't happen to remember or have a source for that, do you? Would love to read more.

https://www.doctorofcredit.com/an-introduction-to-b-bumpage-...

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

#145
post #81
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.

But those "suggested" videos were something I watched months/years ago and not some recently watched after I deleted the view history.

That's what I'm talking about. Think of the recommender model as your own personal neural net that is trained, over time, to show you videos it thinks you might like. It is not capable of telling you which videos you watched, because it is not a database or list of watched videos, but it is instead a classifier that predicts what you probably want to watch.

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

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

What will be the consequences though? I'm sure they can easily discover that the user is trying to overwrite his history, batch edits are easy to spot - but what will they do about it? Ban him & delete his data? Stop him from editing his own posts? Just throw away all changes that don't pass the smell test?

I would speculate that they have built systems in a way that it would not matter what any user does. any edits to a already existing post probably just append

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

#147

Here's a good app idea: Take all your facebook posts and replace them with copywrited sections of books. I.g. my cringy posts from highschool become chapters from Harry Potter. No doubt Facebook would delete these posts permanently and DMCA them.

Only if somebody complains, I expect, e.g., a DMCA takedown from the publisher. You could also have your account banned as a repeat copyright infringer, which I suppose would be a bonus in this case.

I'd advise against it though, at least in the USA, due to the commercial value of the Harry Potter novels, and the penalties for infringement.

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

#148

Here's a good app idea: Take all your facebook posts and replace them with copywrited sections of books. I.g. my cringy posts from highschool become chapters from Harry Potter. No doubt Facebook would delete these posts permanently and DMCA them.

but what would that help anyway?

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

#150

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

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Delete what you can, then shut down your account.

Post reply on HN