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Comment by gbrown | Hacker News Reader

How about a way to delete past activity? The fact that there's no option for "delete all my old posts, comments, likes, and photos" is infuriating. I don't need a record of my inane crap from high school on the same platform as work friends.

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I took the time to delete everything manually. I thought it was all gone. Then some stuff started to appear. I have no way of knowing whether I pressed delete on this stuff or whether it didn't appear at the time, but the point is that deleting all your stuff by pressing the delete button and viewing a seemingly blank profile does not mean your stuff is actually all gone. Next step - deleting profile entirely.

Oh, here's the fun part: you can only delete what you can see. If you posted something on a user's profile who disabled their account, you can't delete it until they enable their account again.

So even if you delete everything you see, if an old friend who disabled their account re-enables it, there's a fresh batch of content about you.

Is there a way to get them to delete everything? Under GDPR, Europeans certainly can, but then they also lose all of their Facebook friends?

Change your location in your profile to Luxembourg and then avail yourself of the GDPR compliance features?

Are you speculating or does that actually work to enable some controls that are location-based?

Speculating, the controls are still forthcoming aren't they?

Like dleslie said, speculating obviously. However since this is about compliance with EU law, actually location has nothing to do with it. It's about being a EU citizen.

If Facebook refuses to do the deleting thing for an (actual) EU citizen because they claim their location tracking shows they aren't located within the EU, they are going to have a problem.

If, however, the EU citizen selects in their profile that they live in the US, and then FB refuses to delete their data, the courts are probably going to look favourably on them, cause the user explicitly said so.

Since FB most definitely is absolutely, unforgivably, NOT allowed to request or handle the nationality data in EU passports, for purposes of being a EU citizen, they're pretty much going to have to rely that you're whatever nationality you say that you are.

Fun. The posts that reappeared for me were my posts on my wall, so it's not even that complicated.

Did they re-appear after you had remembered deleting them, or were they just not fetched when you looked the first time? I think Cassandra might be to blame where it returned a bunch of wall posts but not all of them when you looked back in history the first time.

This too! I've seen in happen as well in my quest to delete a couple years ago.

The UX is useless by design to make it really hard to bulk delete, the backend is shitty and you can't see your content on friend's walls that disabled their account.

It is bad to the point that you wonder if it is on purpose. My guess is that it is. "Shitty product" as a deterrent to deletion.

Yeah that's my opinion too.

Purposefully prioritising "everything but".

Definitely doesn't have to be on purpose.

Try building a scalable database to billions of users on ad revenue and make it retrieve all data from years ago within the time constraints that users want to see newsfeed items in, you'll see ;)

I must have deleted over 10k things, so there's no chance of remembering whether they were on the list of things I deleted or simply didn't appear.

I mostly used the Activity Log (button at the top of your profile page) to do the deletion. There are filters there so you can see the different types of interactions. Removing them is different, e.g. Delete vs Unlike.

During the process, I did notice things appearing which had previously not appeared, so that definitely does happen. I kept going back to see if there was new stuff to delete. The whole process took me about 3 months.

The plot twist is that this all happened over 6 months ago. My profile has been empty the whole time, until sometime within the past couple of weeks, where posts have started to re-appear.

Last year I ran a script to do just this. It didn't get everything, but I eventually gave up. I recently tried Social Book Post Manager to accomplish the same thing.

While it did a better job, despite my activity feed being clear, I'm still seeing a lot of posts.

The rub is that I can delete posts that show up from 2008, but that same post will show up on refresh.

Looks like I'm moving to Europe for a day in a few months.

I think about this and I wonder if they don't add it because no internal team wants to take the responsibility of adding that feature. Imagine, FB source code is >10 year old code base, could there be a delete cascading effect somewhere? You mention posts, comments, likes and photos, what about game activity? Or notes? I think that's what were called. What is all your past information? Who defines what "all" past information is? What about Farmville game activity?

I'm not defending Facebook machiavellian tactics but knowing that no code base is perfect and also that even FB is understaffed, I will give them the benefit of the doubt.

I think that's one reason people stopped using LiveJournal/Blogger and other platforms back in the early 2000s. I had countless friends delete or restrict those accounts because there was too much up there; too personal. All modern social media platforms encourage constant posting to quickly bury anything embarrassing.

It's a weird change in dynamic when you think about it, because people were too afraid of the "real" so to say. I wrote a post about this years ago. I'm not sure if I entirely still stand behind it, but I'll leave it here anyway:

https://khanism.org/society/how-social-media-destroyed-my-ge...

Delete your Facebook account, wait 30 days (to get out of the 21 day take-backsie period), and create a new account. All content you’ve created will disappear.

The photos your friends uploaded of you from your college days will still be there, but you will be untagged and can turn on tag approvals.

I did this in December 2016…to this day all email addresses that were tied to that account are banned from FB. I recently created a new FB account using a totally virgin email address and FB locked the account once I started friending my "former" network. They do offer to unlock my account(s) if I upload photos of two government documents, which I decline to do.

This sucks for everyone, but I understand why Facebook did that.

A very real threat against users who delete their accounts is that a scammer will re-create the account, and re-friend your former network, in order to defraud your friends. The account uses your name and photos and is under their control.

FB can't tell the difference between you and an impersonator.

Now, how they even have the data to conclude that you're "impersonating" your deleted self is a fascinating question. Shadow profiles? And yet if FB didn't do anything about this, it would be even worse for people who leave Facebook.

> FB can't tell the difference between you and an impersonator.

They should get you to send a picture of your passport on signup to verify that it's you.

The regulations for handling that kind of data are even more stringent in the EU. Which is a good thing btw. I have no compassion for Facebook, they burned themselves over this years ago, the damage has been done, and there's not much more they can do in my eyes.

Yes, sorry. It was a poor attempt at sarcasm.

I've used https://github.com/spieglt/fb-delete to most success (although there is an issue with removing items from the current year, see issues).

Curious if this deleting all old posts is related to everything you published - including publicly - or only private posts?

Likewise, if people were friends/connections on Facebook when you posted something to them, would you care if they were findable by them (they presumably could save a record of everything their friends published privately), and new friends/connections are prevented from seeing that past content?

I agree there's value in separating what people in new chapters of your life see vs. the old chapters in your life where you weren't as evolved or nuanced (potentially known as inane crap). Just trying to get an understanding of nuances if you're willing to share your take.

I don't mind too much if some link from a decade ago is no longer findable by someone I posted it to. That's what email is for. Activity records on a shared platform should be batch purgeable.

So there's a difference still from email vs. posting on Facebook - email which is usually 1-to-1 with explicit intent because you are typing in the email of each person receiving it vs. a Facebook post set as private ("Only to friends"), going to a pre-set group of friends in (unless you select to show it as Public). Do you feel there's a difference if old Facebook posts sent to "Only my friends" should still be readable by that pre-set group of friends vs. having the same ability with email?

I wouldn't be satisfied, and I think that's already available. My Facebook posts are my posts, while emails I send you are yours. In my mind, it's very much like the difference between putting up signs in my yard vs. sending letters.

I get that the legal issues are different, and that there's no requirement that Facebook provide this functionality, but they already provide some limited control via deleting accounts and individual posts, so I dont think it's unreasonable to expect.

I get what you're saying. It's interesting that there's a different mindset since they're relatively the same, perhaps the explicit nature of action of inputting an email address is the important piece. Of course Facebook also has options for "Friends of friends" to be able to view posts, and likewise any of those friends (or people you send an email to) can forward the email or a post - or even make it public in part or whole; that explicit action of taking the effort to define who you're sending it to also likely makes receiving the message/post more valuable to the reader. The ability to CC and BCC in email also has some unwritten rules as to the intent of if you're attached as a recipient of either - ability to dictate to show others "you're the main person I'm sending this to", "see who else I've sent this to", "I want you to see this but the others don't need to know that."

Thanks for responding.

It's a negotiable fuzzy boundary. How would feel if your friends made private copies of posts you shared with them? ("Took a photo of your yard sign").

How would you feel if Facebook provided them a tool to help with that?

How would you feel if Facebook did that automatically as a courtesy to them?

Ok, meh, hostile

This is a pretty difficult problem to solve. Facebook would need to delete your data from production databases, database backups that were made while you had an account, caches and CDNs, etc. But even if they managed to delete the data in every possible place they could find it, a third party might have made copies of your data via Facebook's APIs some time in the past, and they might still have it.

So, even if Facebook offered such a feature, I wouldn't have much faith that it actually worked.

I really don't think that's a good excuse

It's a fundamentally important problem to solve. If to get rid of my old and no longer wanted public activity record I have to sit for hours upon hours manually deleting stuff, I'm going to be much more judicious in how I post in the future.

Also, it's Facebook. They can figure it out, they just don't want to.

They have to do this anyways when you choose to delete their account. And according to Zuckerberg's testimony, he is very confident that this functionality works very well currently.

"it's hard lol" is not an acceptable answer from a company worth billions when it involves data kept on their servers.

The problem is Facebook data is on a lot of other companies' servers at this point, and nobody knows who has what data.

I fail to see why determining where it lives is anyone's problem other than Facebook's, and why they should not be held culpable for it.

I'm not making a moral point about blame and culpability here. I'm making the practical point that it's impossible to delete all of the data if nobody knows who has it.

Yeah it's really going to suck for FB (boo hoo), they just can't win. It's years past due. The warnings have been on the horizon and they've only amped up their data collection to the point it's become even more unmanageable than it already was.

I have my doubts about this feature. In the case of Russian bots, having access to their data is critical.

That’s assuming “delete“ actually removes the data from Facebook‘s servers rather than just hiding it from you and ignoring it for ad targeting.

Stuff can still be deleted, it just has to happen one item at a time (which is stupid and user hostile).

Like it or not, the right to proper, permanent deletion is enshrined in GDPR.

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