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Comment by oceanstone | Hacker News Reader

I looked at the "Google" page (https://www.thecreepyline.com/programs/google-v2) and noticed it doesn't mention a few kind of important things.

(1) You can pause activity collection at https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols

(2) You can delete activity here https://myactivity.google.com/delete-activity

Also, does anyone know if Facebook offers interfaces like these?

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When a company gets so big that it doesn’t have to listen to customer complaint, it’s time to go.

I had a great car repair shop with awesome care for customer. Gave you special care and nice deals. Well, because of great reviews they grew very much, rebuilt the shop and hired a lot of staff. The culture that made them successful was forgotten, the CEO had no insight in the employees so the experience as a customer deteriorated, hence left.

Lesson: don’t grow so fast that you forget what built your company in the first place.

Examples: Google, Facebook, etc.

Well said and I completely agree. Unfortunately many people grew so dependent on their services. That they remain glued to the company.

That's very true. In the early years we all loved Google. Good and fast searches, spartan interface, do no evil mantra... So different from AOL and Yahoo. Then, with time, it became a monster that you practically can't get away from even if you want.

Would this unlearn the Google's ML models from my data?

I am going to guess no.

no.

i would argue it’s not even your data, but that’s for another time.

It's yours at least to some extent under GDPR.

Why would it matter, models are regenerated frequently, from millions, billions of other data.

Would you ask somebody who had you in an A/B test to destroy the feature?

Surely A/B does not require PII? In FB case-if the model's purpose is to identify individuals then yes, it should be undone as requested.

What I hate, is that the privacy respecting method should be default always.

When you look at the tracking in google maps, the app asks me nearly every time whether I want to switch it on. Similar thing with the search preferences. Every time they update something in their search preferences you have to step through nested pages and flip a bunch of switches to go back to your previous setup.

That is the equivalent of a creepy guy working at a grocery store, stalking someone every month until they are confronted in painstakingly detail about what they should stop to do. And he is nice, because he stops (unless you forgot to tell him about a tiny thing that he will continue to do).

The thing is: you should not have to ask them to stop even once. This stuff should be opt in and not opt out

FB has Activity Log, visible only to you, and shows what you posted, commented, liked, tagged, shared, searched, etc. From there you can manage and delete stuff if you want, by hand.

Does deletion of your data unlearn the models from the data?

I don't really know this. Just provided what similar functionality exists in FB.

It's a black box for most of us. You might need to provide fake data to make it relearn. There were comments here and there about people liking various pages/posts not related to them, just to feed it with junk.

it was probably rhetorical, lol

I don't even think it guarantees that new neural nets won't be trained on your 'deleted' data

Of course not. What would that even mean? Their objective is to model you. To maximize profit, they should retrain the model with the input "user deleted this and that". As added data points.

Perhaps, that would mean complying with GDPR? You are obliged to remove data physically from databases upon request (including backups if possible, if not possible then keep deletion patches to be ran after backup restore!). Since you cannot continue processing data after GDPR deletion request, that could mean that a model (which is processing the data) should unlearn any knowledge of you.

This is what any reasonable person will think. I fully expect FB to argue that "oh these are just some computer bits you see. There is no way to from this model deduce what inputs made it into this model. It's like a hash function. And since we have removed the inputs, we have complied."

That they are in essence keeping "the ghost" of a person is another thing.

I don't even know if deleting your account through standard Facebook means is the same as requesting the deletion by GDPR request.

FB also has shadow profiles of people whom they track even if they're not signed into the FB or even have a FB account. How do you suggest I opt out of that?

https://theconversation.com/shadow-profiles-facebook-knows-a...

Good question. Probably you need to send a data request, so they can provide you with info they have about you. But based on what should they search in their data warehouse? IP? Cookies? Interests? Leaked email?

I guess one way to avoid shadow profiles would be to block FB scripts/cookies on pages you visit, so they won't track you.

Delete merely updates a flag to deleted=true so it doesn’t show in the interface.

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