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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

#81

Post by srcmap »

bduerst wrote: post #63
srcmap wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After knowing Google have been tracking few hundreds millions people's precise locations for the last 10+ years, I went thru the exercise of deleting all the activities history from Map, Youtube and Search and disable all activities tracking. For the first few hours, I see new default youtube suggestions. After a few days, I see a lot of old search/view videos pop back to the youtube home page. YT still seems "sugges…

It's likely they have an ML "recommender" model that was built off of your history, but doesn't actually store the history nor is it reverse engineer-able. Once you hit a certain threshold of activity or time duration, the model will probably rebuild.

But those "suggested" videos were something I watched months/years ago and not some recently watched after I deleted the view history.

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

#82

Post by snazz »

luckylion wrote: post #10
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.

Or insert GPT2-generated essays about post-modern privacy models. Regularly. Generate noise, and lots of it.

Post-modern privacy models include those developed by University of Chicago law professor Richard Hasen, who argued the Obama administration could regulate Facebook under the guise of protecting privacy. (He was later fired from his posts.) Other authors have argued that allowing Facebook users to choose what information they share online would weaken privacy, and that if Facebook were able to take over the content management systems of websites and allow people to censor content, that was something the First Amendment should prohibit.

https://talktotransformer.com

It’s really good.

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

#84

Post by DerfNet »

billysielu wrote: post #77

I've been through this before and some posts 'came back'. The only way to be sure is to delete your account. If you really want an account just make a new one.

This was my experience using a Greasemonkey script some time ago. Some posts would "come back", and there were pockets years back it couldn't even find to delete, but were still accessible on my profile. Wound up just deleting my account and making a new one that I never, ever post on.

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

#88

Post by givinguflac »

bduerst wrote: post #63
srcmap wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After knowing Google have been tracking few hundreds millions people's precise locations for the last 10+ years, I went thru the exercise of deleting all the activities history from Map, Youtube and Search and disable all activities tracking. For the first few hours, I see new default youtube suggestions. After a few days, I see a lot of old search/view videos pop back to the youtube home page. YT still seems "sugges…

It's likely they have an ML "recommender" model that was built off of your history, but doesn't actually store the history nor is it reverse engineer-able. Once you hit a certain threshold of activity or time duration, the model will probably rebuild.

This is a big reason I view the new “we’ll automatically delete your data!” Crap as disingenuous at best. They’ve already learned everything from the data in a few hours, it’s useless after that anyhow.

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

#89

Post by javagram »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #42
javagram wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDPR has changed this. FWIW I’ve seen comments from a privacy engineer at google who posted here and said they actually do work hard to delete your data. I’d expect Facebook and google to successfully delete the data (after giving 3-6 months for backups to age out) but wouldn’t trust most smaller operations to do so. And yeah, that doesn’t mean ML models or whatever but just the retrievable copies of your photos and…

> GDPR has changed this. That's a far, far cry from the reality of "possibly prosecutable in EU in some scenarios." We aren't even using a website right now that's in GDPR jurisdiction. But there's also a weird fetishization of GDPR I've noticed where people invoke it like "heh, my dad works for Xbox. just you wait buddy, he'll have you banned."

I think it’s changed what is best practice. Unless you plan to never introduce your product in the EU, designing your product so that it cannot ever delete data is a bad idea.

In my experience I’ve definitely seen GDPR result in a large company having developers looking at how data can actually be deleted and not just set to deleted=true. I don’t think my company’s lawyers were alone in thinking this suddenly became more important than before.

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

#90

Post by jefftk »

echelon wrote: post #68
devtanna wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure they use some sort of event store for their backend in which case all versions/changes/updates/deletes are stored as a separate revision alongside the original content.

I suspect this is the case as well. All the big companies are doing immutable, append-only event logging and probably have no mechanism to expunge this data. All because storage is cheap and they need to hold on to everything for testing or whatever future need that might arise. What a pitiful dystopia we're living in.

> All the big companies are doing immutable, append-only event logging and probably have no mechanism to expunge this data. All because storage is cheap and they need to hold on to everything for testing or whatever future need that might arise.

This is not true at all. Here's a recent HN discussion that talks about how Google handles this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19809259

(Disclosure: I work for Google, but I'm speaking for myself)

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