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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

#241

Post by circular_logic »

dx034 wrote: post #225
laumars wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not lie per se but they might have multiple data stores, one for the "social media" side of things and an archive for machine learning, one for targeted ads, etc. So they could legitimately say "we delete your data [from the perspective of social media]" while still having an archive for their other business units. It wouldn't be the first time Facebook (nor any other business that profits from people's data) h…

Under GDPR, you cannot tell users you deleted data if it's still available for other purposes (except for legal requirements like invoices). Given FB's size and the small amount of people deleting data, I doubt Facebook would take the risk to keep a few more datasets.

Facebook looks to be willingly not following most of GDPR https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/

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

#242

Post by glenneroo »

dx034 wrote: post #227
hu3 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think FB goes to great lenghts to never erase data. Including using Blue-ray discs to store stale data: https://datacenterfrontier.com/inside-facebooks-blu-ray-cold...

Basically tape backups but with a different medium. I'd be surprised if they didn't have any offline backups.

Tape backup is re-writable though isn't it? I had inherited one in the 90s and could re-write, granted it was painfully slow. Or are you saying that Blu-ray is re-writable too? The first iteration I used a few years ago could only write once.

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

#243

Post by laumars »

dx034 wrote: post #225
laumars wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not lie per se but they might have multiple data stores, one for the "social media" side of things and an archive for machine learning, one for targeted ads, etc. So they could legitimately say "we delete your data [from the perspective of social media]" while still having an archive for their other business units. It wouldn't be the first time Facebook (nor any other business that profits from people's data) h…

Under GDPR, you cannot tell users you deleted data if it's still available for other purposes (except for legal requirements like invoices). Given FB's size and the small amount of people deleting data, I doubt Facebook would take the risk to keep a few more datasets.

The UI doesn't say "delete", it says "remove". Remove could mean "hide from view" or it could mean "delete the underlying database entry". It's a bit of grey area where it could be argued that users have consented to by using Facebook.

Granted GDPR is supposed to catch businesses that pull those kind of stunts, you have to remember that Facebook do already break GDPR in number of public ways too. So it's pretty clear they have a relatively open interpretation of the regulations (and an army of lawyers who are confident they can proceed in such a way). Or it might just be the case that even the worst fine issued by the GDPR is worth the risk given the financial benefits awarded to Facebook for retaining data.

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

#245

Post by brujoand »

corbett3000 wrote: post #157
spieglt wrote: post #29

I wrote a similar tool in Node a while back that can delete by year and category: https://github.com/spieglt/fb-delete And one to download all "Photos of you", which Facebook doesn't include when downloading your data: https://github.com/spieglt/fb-photos

Nice. Running Fb-Delete. I couldn't get the DeleteFB to work so I'm running yours instead. Any idea how long it takes if you got 1000s of posts?

Did you get it to work? It just hung after an uncaught exception for me.

Edit: had to disable 2FA to get it to work.

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

#246

Post by maxheadroom »

throwaway_tech7 wrote: post #222
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…

Pretty much exactly this, but also: I work at a company you've heard of, and you've probably (P > .5) used at least one of our products. We're international (including EU). I personally wrote our user data deletion logic for GDPR compliance. We delete all of your PII. It doesn't matter if you're from the EU or not, because it's too expensive to figure it out and too risky because you're going to miss some weird edge…

>There is no conspiracy between the six-digit number of engineers who work at these companies to keep quiet about it.

I wouldn't say "conspiracy" but they've been mums-the-word about things like shadow-profiles. Perhaps, it comes down to too much kool-aid but to say that engineers would initially speak-up in such cases has been proven wrong, time and again.

Take the Snowden revelations, as an example: How many years were the programs in service before Snowden went public? How long have we known about shadow profiles and no one from Facebook has come forward to say, "yes, this is what they're doing and it's wrong"?

Relying on people to do the good that should be done by the organisations doesn't take into consideration that those engineers face severe penalties for "going pubic" about such things - namely because whistle-blower laws do not supercede such thing as NDAs.

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

#247

Post by neiman »

bluehatbrit wrote: post #236
neiman wrote: post #231

Fantastic! Now the same for Firefox please.

I'm a user and fan of FF, I left chrome a while back now, but for one piece of one-off automation why couldn't you use Chrome?

My new year resolution for 2019 was to keep my computer Google free. It's less of a statement and more a "fun" geeky game. So I rather not install Chrome:-)

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

#248

Post by rmtech »

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.

I think the benefit of this is that other people can't easily see what you posted. For example recruiters for jobs, journalists or activists trying to publicly doxx or embarrass you, stalkers, people with a grudge against you, etc.

If FB has this data squirrelled away somewhere in cold storage then in order for anyone to harm you with it, FB has to admit to keeping it (which would be a scandal) and it has to get out into the wild. That is a reduction in risk compared to someone just looking at your profile.

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

#249

Post by nerdponx »

Fnoord wrote: post #221
nerdponx wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't un-train the model. Your contribution has already been made.

Either #1 You can train the model continously #2 the model stops learning #3 it has a submodel which detects you are feeding it false data. Given that people change over time, #2 seems unlikely. The question to me is "how advanced is #3?". Another thing I wonder about is how relative are these to eaxh other. At odds?

#1 is a well-established technique called "online learning", and I'd bet money that it's how many of these "industrial scale" ML algorithms are trained.

#2 makes no sense from a business perspective.

#3 is also well-established. This is how Google's Captchas work, for example.

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

#250

Post by acct1771 »

ishan1121 wrote: post #207
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…

One of the first thing I learned in the IT industry...do not delete any data no matter what the circumstance is! And I believe internet companies whose life and soul is data would not want to delete it

Simply archive it in an "emergency backup".
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