I wonder if there's a way to do this in the US. I will look into this.
How to Force Facebook into Handing Over their Secret Tracking Data
101–107 of 107 posts
Re: How to Force Facebook into Handing Over their Secret Tracking Data
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is how I usually implement delete. Deleting a record can have many cascading effects and there is no possibility for undoing it if it was an error. I think this is a pretty standard way of doing it.
I agree with the fact a hard delete may have unintended effects, even in the best design, but in my ideal world I'd rather make allowances for that than simply offer my users the illusion I'm deleting their data. I think that may be a view shared between developers who care about ethical practices, where our personal ideals and how we think we should respect the user takes precedence over the data collection and prof…
I think it's a bit of a jump to imply that if I don't actually delete the data that I don't care about ethical practices nor my users.
For me, at least, it all depends on what 'delete' means to the user. There are some people out there that want 'delete' to mean "I don't want this stored anywhere anymore". There are other users that want it to mean "I don't want to see this anymore".
Unfortunately, people in both groups sometimes regret deleting stuff. Those in the first group accept the responsibility, however some people in the second group feel as though it's a problem with the system that they are using when they cannot restore the data easily. There are a lot of people that appreciate the "Recycle Bin" in Windows and never empty it.
Now, I've written a number of systems over time and I've implemented 'delete' in most of them. Sometimes I do an actual delete, sometimes I set a flag. It all depends on what I expect my users to actually want. It's got nothing to do with trying to exploit them for capital gain though, that's for sure!
Re: How to Force Facebook into Handing Over their Secret Tracking Data
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that it is probably one of the major reasons, though certainly not the only one. In my experience, one of the most common customer service complaints/requests is "Oh no, I did this irreversible thing you warned me not to, fix it." I imagine facebook also gets its fair share of complaints like "Oh no, my ex-boyfriend deleted my account, fix it." This stuff is really common, and I can understand why a company w…
I'd venture that a major reason has less to do with customer UI and law enforcement and more to do with data mining.
I'm sure you're right, and not necessarily in any insidious manner. There's any number of entities that we won't actually purge when deleted from our system here. For example, when a sales rep wants to get rid of a Quote, we can't necessarily dump it, because we'll need a future record if there has already been a customer order placed against that quote. Sometimes the integrity of the system, and the ability to look at history in a (unfortunately necessary) CYA view, demands that some data be "deactivated" rather than deleted.
Re: How to Force Facebook into Handing Over their Secret Tracking Data
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does this apply to patents as well?
Not sure. Almost all countries respect each others copyrights, that's why if a work is copyrighted in the UK, then it is copyrighted in Brasil (that's the Geneve Convention I think). I'm not sure about patents, especially when it comes to things like software patents. Ask your lawyer.
I think you mean Berne: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention_for_the_Protec.... The Geneva conventions are about victims of war.
Re: How to Force Facebook into Handing Over their Secret Tracking Data
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
You may be surprised that many (at a guess, maybe most?) companies/websites actually consider a delete function to be changing a 'deleted' flag to 1 in a database. The data persists, but is no longer shown. I would also make a very big assumption that the only companies who wouldn't do this are those run by developers or other people who have had experience implementing that sort of system. There's nothing bosses lov…
This is how I usually implement delete. Deleting a record can have many cascading effects and there is no possibility for undoing it if it was an error. I think this is a pretty standard way of doing it.
This is one stage of deletes (mark for deletion). The 2nd equally important deletion metric is to purge the deleted records (expunge)... this may be a complicated process, stubbing out or redirecting pointers where need be.
You can force local governments to expunge your data (it's not just off the records, it's forcibly erased).
I think this weight of eternal data is both unnatural and unsustainable. All living things die. Things that don't have a natural cycle of creation and destruction are abominations and should rightfully be feared (see Corporation).
Re: How to Force Facebook into Handing Over their Secret Tracking Data
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with the fact a hard delete may have unintended effects, even in the best design, but in my ideal world I'd rather make allowances for that than simply offer my users the illusion I'm deleting their data. I think that may be a view shared between developers who care about ethical practices, where our personal ideals and how we think we should respect the user takes precedence over the data collection and prof…
I think it's a bit of a jump to imply that if I don't actually delete the data that I don't care about ethical practices nor my users. For me, at least, it all depends on what 'delete' means to the user. There are some people out there that want 'delete' to mean "I don't want this stored anywhere anymore". There are other users that want it to mean "I don't want to see this anymore". Unfortunately, people in both gro…
I'd certainly like to think I'm an ethical developer, and I always implement the delete as a flag.
I, however, do not implement an easy way to retrieve deleted data without going into the database or through an administrative interface with heavy auditing.
It isn't just about data mining for customer data -- it's about data mining for site usage and user activity. Using metrics off of visited web pages or tracking that way can be too convoluted when the KISS method is: flag it on the data side and you can interpret flow.
Re: How to Force Facebook into Handing Over their Secret Tracking Data
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Additionally you should write in big letters over the scan "Request to access Facebook Data ", so that nobody else can use the scan of your ID-card for anything else. This serves no purpose as it is trivial to 'shop these big letters out of the image.
I dunno what your ID cards look like, but ours have intricate patterns all over them. Additionally there's a punctured-hole pattern that vaguely corresponds to the photograph, so that's unique for every ID. I can't really imagine how you'd want to reconstruct that, and even if you could I'd hardly call it trivial.
No need to reconstruct anything, just save the image with a higher JPEG compression and all the intricate patterns will be well blurred. I really doubt FB is spending any time whatsoever on validating these patterns.