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

I just want to point out that "testified in-front of Congress" seems to have no relation to the truth of any statement. I don't recall the last time (if ever) there have been legal ramifications for lying in front of Congress.

Zuckerberg also testified that shadow profiles don't exist and that users can always remove their personal information from Facebook (they do exist, and you can't). James Clapper testified that the NSA doesn't "wittingly" surveil hundreds of millions of Americans (they do, very "wittingly").

They technically wouldn't be lying if they only deleted the record from application systems, but retained it in historical data by simply setting a bit flag (eg "IsDeleted") to 1.

The question about what motive they have comes down to whether or not the types of posts a person deletes indicate something meaningful about their personality. Ad analytics are ultimately seeking to understand the kind of person you are, after all.

If my friends or acquaintances continue to use facebook, then information about me continues to be useful to facebook as that information can be used to complete their model of what sort of people my friends are, that they would associate with somebody like me.

I wouldn't trust Zuckerberg to pour a glass of water on a burning orphan, let alone delete data for real. Nor would I trust any politician to know anything about the subject.

It wouldn't be the first time Facebook (nor any other business that profits from people's data) have been deceptive while treading a careful line between honesty and lies.

edit: I should add that if they were keeping archived records in a separate business unit, there is the possibility that they keep the original or even all edits. So scrambling your data might not do much aside confusing those who have you in their feed.

This part at least is incorrect. Your data will always be an asset, and FB makes money not just by showing you ads but by selling your data.

I work at a company you've heard of, and you've probably (P > .5) used at least one of our products. We're international (including EU). I personally wrote our user data deletion logic for GDPR compliance.

We delete all of your PII. It doesn't matter if you're from the EU or not, because it's too expensive to figure it out and too risky because you're going to miss some weird edge case - Legal doesn't have much of a sense of humor when it comes to wiggle room.

My experience has been that larger organizations consistently spend more effort (relative to size) to genuinely comply with privacy regulations than smaller ones. The risk:reward ratio for deliberately ignoring or subverting privacy regulations is insanely bad. There are too many surfaces along which that would leak out, and the gains would be pretty marginal. Pretty much anyone who works at a large tech company can and will confirm that this is the case (see Jeff Kaufman's posts on this thread). There is no conspiracy between the six-digit number of engineers who work at these companies to keep quiet about it.

And then, what about all the data copied into Hive? Copied to 3rd parties? Does Facebook go and delete data that 3rd parties took?

  >>> They "trust me"

  >>> Dumb fucks

I doubt this

> Mark Zuckerberg testified in-front of congress and stated they do He would tell us everything that helps him as he is an opportunist

> Multiple government regulators have specifically checked that it does in their privacy audits You're talking about the governments secretly spying on us and lying about that since decades? Ouch.

There is no legal risk for those who observe if you abide the laws.

> A infinitesimal fraction of facebook users try to delete anything What does that tell you about the majority of ppl?

> Facebook makes money from your data by showing you ads. If you stop using facebook, you stop generating any revenue and your data becomes a liability, not an asset. That's just what you think you know. What about psychological profiling, law enforcement etc.?

Also did you hear about the "shadow profiles" about users who don't have an account? The moment you're surfing into their net (as we know even through embedded like buttons etc.) you'll be milked like a dairy cow.

> What reason would there be to lie about it? What reason is there not to be honest about it? The recent events have shown very clearly that they don't have to fear much.

Or they can just claim, again, that they accidentally forgot to delete copies of these posts from their backups. It just completely slipped their mind.

However at Facebook's size, and given they're known for 0 privacy, they likely track all changes anyway.

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.

It's text you wrote, why would there be any problem "covering up" your own text?

Note that, I'm not arguing you should have a right to use Selenium to scrape their site and replace the text, but if you went through every post in a non-automated fashion and changed the text, from a perspective of "covering up" the text, the purpose would be the same. Facebook almost certainly has an interest in keeping 100M users from scraping with Selenium, that's a separate thing entirely.

https://talktotransformer.com

It’s really good.

Facebook has many years of pretty smart work, and probably safe to say tens of millions of dollars just in meetings about specifically this (re costs associated with effort of user data retention).

Unless that is built by design. I happen to also work on a large scale SaaS where we take this stuff very seriously and I can say it is possible to protect this data. However I will agree that this adds considerable complexity, but for some organizations, that is totally worth it.

> need to retain data to fulfill government requests

That's a choice, not a requirement. If you encrypt the data and purposely don't store the keys yourself but instead have the customer store them, then you don't have anything of value for the government.

> internal auditing

Personally Identifiable Info is not something we want to peruse. In fact we purposely don't want to see it because that eliminates a potential for mishandling.

> it's all backed up in some "data lake" somewhere to do internal ml or analytics on

That kind of application shouldn't give carte blanche to disregard retention policies. You can run those applications against replicated shards of the original data; and when the original gets reclaimed, so does the replica.

> hundreds of copies in database backups from different times

Storing useless data forever is not cheap, especially at scale. Better store what needs to be stored and free up what can be freed when retention policies kick in (or user requests it).

> internal logs that contain the data

That's ground for failing certain compliance audits. Logs should never contain PII in the first place, that's an operational failure.

> it's already been analyzed and aggregated into learning products and models that aren't going to be recomputed

That's a tricky one, but if those are actual models instead of giant lookup tables, one could assume the data is not reconstructible. However, that needs to be a design consideration of the models themselves, to prevent user data from persisting.

See also: Myspace accidentally dumping everything pre-2015 https://www.engadget.com/2019/03/18/myspace-lost-12-years-mu...

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 text posts.

Edit: had to disable 2FA to get it to work.

People change. I had friends who would post tireless political rants that just post memes now.

There was just nothing, or so little, that 'improves my life' as you put it, nor anything close. Just shit and drivel.

And it's not made for it. Quality doesn't equal traffic, nor even engagement in a monetisable sense. If it were, it would very quickly have learned that I didn't want to see memes, full stop. Nope, feed continued to be full of valueless memes.

For a brief period I considered I might be 'missing out', but it doesn't take long to realise that if you're missing out through not being on the right social media platform... who or what exactly are you missing out on.

I also don't really scroll the feed anymore, so I'd rather just keep it to people I want to keep tabs on (close family, professional contacts)

Traceback (most recent call last): File "./deletefb.py", line 3, in <module> from seleniumrequests import Chrome ImportError: No module named seleniumrequests

Any idea what's to be done?