How to Disappear from Facebook and Twitter | Hacker News Reader

How to Disappear from Facebook and Twitter

time.com

42 pointsgeoka910 comments

Even more interesting than the suicide-site itself is the panic-response from Facebook. A C&D with the most laughable justification ever, Quote:

Facebook demanded that they "cease this activity immediately," citing a violation of users' privacy.

If Facebook is concerned about my privacy then why do they C&D a site that helps me to remove my personal data from the public web?

Major kudos to the suicidemachine makers for provoking Facebook and similar sites to reveal their true face for a moment.

That's not their justification.

You can see the actual Cease-and-Desist on their website http://suicidemachine.org/

They are being told to cease-and-desist:

  - Soliciting users' Facebook login information
  - Accessing a Facebook account belonging to someone else
  - Collecting Facebook users' content or information using
    automated means such as scripts or scrapers without 
    Facebook's permission

Can anyone find that link regarding Facebook using someone's profile picture at a presentation without her permission?

It's probably most interesting to see how they implemented a service that does this. From their FAQ:

"The machine consists of a tweaked Linux server running apache2 with python modules installed. Selenium RC Control is used to automatically launch and kill browser sessions. This all driven by a single python/cgi script with some additional self-written python libraries. Each user can watch her suicide action in real-time via a VNC remote desktop session, displayed on our website via an flash applet rendered live into the client's webbrowser. We are also running some customized bash scripts plus MySQL in the background for logging and debugging, jquery/PHP for the website and a modified version of the great FlashlightVNC application built in Flex. Web2.0 Suicide Machine consists of roughly 2500 lines of self-written code."

Maybe somebody will build another website that lets you watch a video of the server browsing another website. I heard you like websites...

Yo dogg…

just kidding! What I'd like to see is this kind of code opened up so I can host it myself for fun. Writing a script to delete twitter "tweets" is easy enough in Bash but Facebook is another beast entirely :\

Thats brilliant to use Selenium RC for the scripted deletions. Selenium is incredibly flexible and easy to script, though not very fast which is probably why they have such a backlog. Also because it is all coming from a legitimate browser it would be very difficult for the sites to block, though I suppose they could just block the ip of the server.

I've used Selenium for automated webapp testing. Some people don't like it, but I've found it a good fit for the abilities and preferences of my testing team. Having scripts runnable in a Firefox plugin as they are developed, and then also from a command line server to do mass unit tests, makes for a pretty flexible testing setup. You can test against multiple browsers including IE.

The major complaint people have is usually against the command arg1 arg2 grid for the scripts, but here's the thing about programming in a table: you can get your testers to do it without freaking out like "I can't learn how to program, I am bad with computer languages". The command table gives them exactly what they need--a way to repeatedly run a series of actions in a web browser--without making them learn anything more.

>When trying to close an online account, [users'] information and connections aren't ... erased; they're just unpublished. By deleting all your data, Suicide Machine says, your private information is snuffed out on website servers.

Do any of these sites guarantee that data will actually be deleted from their servers? I would bet that this "deletion" doesn't remove any data, but just unpublishes or archives it, like closing an account does.

Reading this reminded me of why the lucky stiff, who committed online suicide last year, at least as far as the Ruby community is concerned. It was fast an efficient: he was gone as well as all of his projects and websites. The Ruby community had to scramble to try to piece back together his missing work, like Try Ruby. http://www.rubyinside.com/why-the-lucky-stiff-is-missing-227...

I was just thinking, "I wonder if this is _why's new project."

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