Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

nymag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 405 posts

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#81

Post by thomastjeffery »

pjc50 wrote: post #69
thomastjeffery wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a great way to explain privacy limitations to a non-tech-savvy person is to walk them through using GPG. Once someone understands public and private keys, and webs of trust, there really isn't much left to learn. For someone who understands keypairs, the limitations of Facebook/Twitter/etc., DRM, etc. are obvious. It seems most of us are afraid our non-tech-savvy friends and family won't be able to wrap their…

> great way to explain privacy limitations to a non-tech-savvy person is to walk them through using GPG. Have you ever actually successfully done this? More than once? And they continue to use it? It's a usability nightmare. https://moxie.org/blog/gpg-and-me/

OK. Maybe not GPG specifically.

But keypairs. Everyone should understand keypairs. They are the basis for all of digital security, and they are really not that difficult.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#82

Post by mynameishere »

mabbo wrote: post #31

Huh. So now I'm starting to think: what if I purposely recorded thousands and thousands of meaningless video? None of my friends would ever see them since I never published them, but Facebook would use up hard drive space storing them. What if a lot of people did that? Suddenly Facebook's cost for hanging onto all these videos would become quite high with no value in doing so. Anyone feel like making a website to hel…

What if a lot of people did that?

That is exactly what a lot of people do. I don't think Facebook is conspiratorially hording funny cat videos. It's just standard practice to flag things as deleted. Everyone does it. I certainly have.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#83

Post by thomastjeffery »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #28
thomastjeffery wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a great way to explain privacy limitations to a non-tech-savvy person is to walk them through using GPG. Once someone understands public and private keys, and webs of trust, there really isn't much left to learn. For someone who understands keypairs, the limitations of Facebook/Twitter/etc., DRM, etc. are obvious. It seems most of us are afraid our non-tech-savvy friends and family won't be able to wrap their…

> Once someone understands public and private keys, and webs of trust Nobody in the general public wants this.

An awful lot of people in the general public do.

Especially if their tech-savvy friends are confident they can learn about it - because it really isn't that complex - and if they understand that keypairs and trust are the basis for literally all digital security.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#84

Post by dna_polymerase »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #73
dna_polymerase wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't imagine this being intentionally. Even if I try to consider malicious use cases I can't think of any where it would be beneficial for Facebook to actually store this data besides being too lazy to clean it up. Nope. They wrote a routine that makes the video invisible to the actual user but refrained from deleting it right away. That is intentional.

> That is intentional. It's funny you are so sure of this. And you essentially just called me wrong without providing a use case. My statement was I couldn't think of a use case for them to do this intentionally and your statement does nothing to disprove that. Hiding a video can and probably is just an "UPDATE videos SET visible=0 WHERE id=123" And it is extremely common to soft delete things for hard delete later i…

Okay, so if it wasn't intentional how else could old videos still be in the system. Videos is not a new feature and the videos date back as far as 2008.

Facebook may be a bad player, but they have tons of talent working for them. Are you seriously suggesting that they stored a decade worth of videos that never saw a single view/download and nobody there realized it?

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#86

Post by tzahola »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #24
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…

I think a great way to explain privacy limitations to a non-tech-savvy person is to walk them through using GPG. Once someone understands public and private keys, and webs of trust, there really isn't much left to learn. For someone who understands keypairs, the limitations of Facebook/Twitter/etc., DRM, etc. are obvious. It seems most of us are afraid our non-tech-savvy friends and family won't be able to wrap their…

Lol. Sure, and the best way to teach my grandma about computers is to install arch linux on her pc.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#87

Post by Silhouette »

strictfp wrote: post #36
invisible wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDPR is intended to at least force service providers to give folks the right to be forgotten which compels providers to delete data. While it's own Europe, it's difficult to comply without just making general decision about honoring these requests.

Actually, GDPR only requires that any links from the data to the user should be destroyed, so that you can no longer figure out who created the data. This means that a lot of data will be left. And realistically I think that a lot of it will remain identifiable, just like anonymized data can be traced back to real users pretty easily if you have enough data points.

Actually, GDPR only requires that any links from the data to the user should be destroyed, so that you can no longer figure out who created the data.

Not in this case, because if the photos or videos contain recognisable people then they are themselves personal data.

How far the new subjects rights involving data deletion will go in practice is one of the biggest unknowns with the GDPR. Clearly from a technical point of view we understand that deleting a key isn't the same as deleting data from a disk, and often that would also include deleting a file in a filesystem if the underlying storage isn't robustly wiped as well. Throw in the kinds of distributed architecture, redundancies and backup systems that many organisations use, particularly in the era of cloud-based hosting and off-site backup services, and you have an unfortunate conflict between not truly deleting data (and therefore still having some degree of risk that the data will leak even if it's intended to be beyond use, contrary to the spirit and possibly the letter of the new regulations) and potentially high or even prohibitive implementation costs to ensure robust deletion of all copies of personal data when a suitable request is received.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#88

Post by feelin_googley »

"The guy who was showing me around pointed out where they were building "apartments for our people to live".

"So they'll work on campus, they'll eat on campus, they'll socialise on campus and now they'll sleep on campus?" I asked. I wondered whether maybe that was kind of unhealthy. Creepy, even.

My guide looked right at me, and for a moment, his megawatt smile faltered. When he first worked there, it reminded him of the Dave Eggers book, The Circle, he said. Then he started talking about the opportunity to connect the world's people, and I stopped listening."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(2017_film)

Source:

https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/jennifer-o-...

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#89

Post by kerkeslager »

mabbo wrote: post #31

Huh. So now I'm starting to think: what if I purposely recorded thousands and thousands of meaningless video? None of my friends would ever see them since I never published them, but Facebook would use up hard drive space storing them. What if a lot of people did that? Suddenly Facebook's cost for hanging onto all these videos would become quite high with no value in doing so. Anyone feel like making a website to hel…

I generally agree with other people's posts that there are better uses of your time.

However, if you wanted to do this, why bother recording it? Read a little about the mp4 spec and it would probably be fairly easy to generate mp4s containing random data. You could even go further and generate video that tricks facial/object recognition.

Re: Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted

#90

Post by [deleted] »

wormseed wrote: post #16
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…

> 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. This is a dumb conspiracy theory. Facebook has made plenty of public statements that say otherwise, and there's a whole team t…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN