Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#211

Post by dx034 » Sun, Apr 01, 2018, 4:17 AM UTC

fakescience wrote: post #139

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is powerful and insular. Taking it down requires extraordinary organisation. Outrage is helpful in that respect. Agreement is better than disagreement. Would I prefer we had agreement earlier? Yes. Is agreement today better than agreement tomorrow? Absolutely. Now that we have a constituency, the important thing is to mobilise. The past is in the past. Our job, in the present, is to protect the future.

Call for a facebook user strike on May 1st. #May1FBstrike https://medium.com/@oddbert2000/call-for-a-facebook-users-st...

Why not just every day? Only use it as much as absolutely necessary (to communicate with people you wouldn't be able to reach otherwise) and use competitors instead. Even using FB owned companies (e.g. Whatsapp) would help. While FB still gets some data, they don't get contents (unlike FB messenger all chats are end-to-end encrypted) and most importantly no ad revenues. And lower revenues is what would truly change Facebook's policies.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#212

Post by navium » Sun, Apr 01, 2018, 4:18 AM UTC

hodl wrote: post #174

demxzy wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like visible=false;

Display=none is more appropriate

Maybe visibility:hidden too.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#213

Post by fiatpandas » Sun, Apr 01, 2018, 4:22 AM UTC

derimagia wrote: post #204

whalesalad wrote: post #152

Is this really a secret or a surprise? Most SaaS companies of this size don’t really ever delete anything. They set a deletion flag and call it a day.

Yeah for most things this is a good way to do it. For user data when they delete the account it would be ideal if they actually removed it though

Why would that be the good way to do it? Especially if that deletion action was behind a confirmation, or if the data was never recoverable by the user? At that point, just delete delete it.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#214

Post by dennisgorelik » Sun, Apr 01, 2018, 4:23 AM UTC

r00fus wrote: post #136

dennisgorelik wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You made changes to old post (deleted comments), so Facebook decided that because there are some updates to old posts - it makes sense to treat these old posts as new. So Facebook started to show these posts to your friends in their news feeds.

Isn't that against the goal of a deletion? FB should honor intentions and let deleted stuff not be flagged as "new".

"What to show" prioritization should mostly focus on the interest a reader (not the writer).

I, as a reader, want to see posts with recently deleted [or updated] comments.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#215

Post by fiatpandas » Sun, Apr 01, 2018, 4:28 AM UTC

xab9 wrote: post #51

Btw why do we think that the downloadable archive contains everything they have? Because they said so? Just add a bool field to the table "canExport".

I don’t think we think that. Obviously, in the context of HN crowd, FB has no real credibility / ethical compass.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#216

Post by untog » Sun, Apr 01, 2018, 4:42 AM UTC

noobermin wrote: post #176

dividuum wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am sure that the deletion of media files in services like Facebook has never meant to be absolute. Many of my colleagues believe the same thing that I believe: Facebook and other services do not actually delete data, they just mark it as "deleted" and purge it only if they need the space. No reason to believe. You can read about the storage architecture used to store photos from a post in 2009 here: https://code.…

Allow me to ask the obvious question. Who doesn't do the something like this? Not to alleviate facebook of blame, but who's to say data on almost every other social media service isn't also just flagged for deletion?

Does it make it ok for Facebook to do it just because similar other companies do it? I say no, all of them should delete something I say to delete. And "everyone does it" is makes it a bigger problem, not a smaller one.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#217

Post by untog » Sun, Apr 01, 2018, 4:43 AM UTC

raverbashing wrote: post #162

dividuum wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am sure that the deletion of media files in services like Facebook has never meant to be absolute. Many of my colleagues believe the same thing that I believe: Facebook and other services do not actually delete data, they just mark it as "deleted" and purge it only if they need the space. No reason to believe. You can read about the storage architecture used to store photos from a post in 2009 here: https://code.…

So, like a filesystem more or less I might just "help" them by uploading more data I guess

File systems eventually overwrite that data, though. FB's system specifically never reclaims it. Why on earth would you ever do that, unless you have absolutely no respect for your users wishes?

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#218

Post by dboreham » Sun, Apr 01, 2018, 4:51 AM UTC

chmaynard wrote: post #10

guessmyname wrote: post #8

This reminds me of the long conversations that I used to have with family members and friends several years ago. With their continuous requests to create my own Facebook profile so I can keep in contact with them and with their activities as well as to share my whereabouts. I always used the same argument to reject these suggestions — "I don't want Facebook to have too much data about me, more than the data that you…

> Facebook and other services do not actually delete data, they just mark it as "deleted" and purge it only if they need the space. You may be correct, but that doesn't explain why Facebook decided to include so-called deleted files in a download of user data. Clearly these deleted files are still a part of Facebook user profiles and accessible to company data mining software. Facebook has exposed their own duplicity…

>Facebook has exposed their own duplicity.

Or possibly they just screwed up. Perhaps the "soft delete" was originally intended to allow "undelete" by the user with delayed purge, and/or single-instance storage with reference counting that they never quite got around to finishing.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#219

Post by kerkeslager » Sun, Apr 01, 2018, 4:51 AM UTC

austincheney wrote: post #208

kerkeslager wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anything submitted to Facebook is the property of Facebook. I'm not sure how you came to this conclusion. Are we to accept that this is how it works simply because Facebook says this is how it works?

Facebook's terms of services agreement that you must consent to in order to open or maintain your account. These are the rules not because Facebook says so, but because you say so when you agree to their terms.

Let's be clear here: I'm not the Facebook user in question. I've never uploaded a video to Facebook and never will.

Users didn't sign or agree to anything just because they checked a checkbox next to a link to an ever-changing jumble of legalese to get past a screen. This isn't agreement, it's manufactured consent.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#220

Post by gschier » Sun, Apr 01, 2018, 4:52 AM UTC

untog wrote: post #217

raverbashing wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, like a filesystem more or less I might just "help" them by uploading more data I guess

File systems eventually overwrite that data, though. FB's system specifically never reclaims it. Why on earth would you ever do that, unless you have absolutely no respect for your users wishes?

> unless you have absolutely no respect for your users wishes?

Hehe, you mean, like... Facebook? They respect advertisers with money, not users.