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

Post by cyphar » Tue, May 21, 2019, 6:59 AM UTC

IanCal wrote: post #193

cyphar wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mark Zuckerberg testified in-front of congress and stated they do I just want to point out that "testified in-front of Congress" seems to have no relation to the truth of any statement. I don't recall the last time (if ever) there have been legal ramifications for lying in front of Congress. Zuckerberg also testified that shadow profiles don't exist and that users can always remove their personal information from F…

> I don't recall the last time (if ever) there have been legal ramifications for lying in front of Congress. It's one of the reasons Cohen is in prison, isn't it?

Post by irjustin » Tue, May 21, 2019, 6:59 AM UTC

cyphar wrote: post #183

saddlerustle wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people in this thread are claiming that it doesn't based on gut feeling, but consider: - Facebook publicly claims it does [1] - Mark Zuckerberg testified in-front of congress and stated they do [2] - Multiple government regulators have specifically checked that it does in their privacy audits. [3] They might be lying and actively conspiring to not delete it, but they'd have to have a very good reason to take…

> Mark Zuckerberg testified in-front of congress and stated they do I just want to point out that "testified in-front of Congress" seems to have no relation to the truth of any statement. I don't recall the last time (if ever) there have been legal ramifications for lying in front of Congress. Zuckerberg also testified that shadow profiles don't exist and that users can always remove their personal information from F…

Post by ddorian43 » Tue, May 21, 2019, 7:07 AM UTC

mdjasper wrote: post #9

SteveNuts wrote: post #3

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…

Post by ishan1121 » Tue, May 21, 2019, 7:12 AM UTC

saddlerustle wrote: post #109

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #6

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.

Lots of people in this thread are claiming that it doesn't based on gut feeling, but consider: - Facebook publicly claims it does [1] - Mark Zuckerberg testified in-front of congress and stated they do [2] - Multiple government regulators have specifically checked that it does in their privacy audits. [3] They might be lying and actively conspiring to not delete it, but they'd have to have a very good reason to take…

Post by [deleted] » Tue, May 21, 2019, 7:31 AM UTC

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #121

penagwin wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the case with many other online platforms (such as reddit) in that the original content of a post is still reachable if it was deleted, so a common method is to "scrub" edit your posts then delete them. However at Facebook's size, and given they're known for 0 privacy, they likely track all changes anyway.

Reddit doesn't actually store the history of your edits, only that you edited it (which is why, when you scrub reddit history, people recommend editing it because then your posting is gone except for say a backup). Facebook, however, allows you to see the history of posts so if someone edits it you can see what they originally posted. I don't think editing a Facebook post first would have the desired effect.