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Comment by yawaworht1978 | Hacker News Reader

yawaworht1978

The EU lawmakers are doing what the gutless paid for and owned US lawmakers cannot or will not do. The US congress balooneyd around with Zuckerberg, he took the piss out of them.

The EU politicians are a little bit less shameless and do something to protect the population(not even the local electorate, they have the ability to see beyond the box).

Facebook and Instagram are designed to keep people more "engaged"(addicted) , in order to collect more data and push ads down everyones throat and retarget those who do not want any business with them. Tried to delete FB, ig or WA account completely? Every imaginable Ui obstruction and retention trick will bother you on the way out.

The mother ship wants all the data intermingled to be more efficient. Hell no, team EU lawmakers all the way.

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> Tried to delete FB, ig or WA account completely? Every imaginable Ui obstruction and retention trick will bother you on the way out.

Deleting WhatsApp is Settings -> Account -> Delete My Account -> Delete My Account

Deleting Facebook is Settings -> Account Ownership -> Deactivation and Deletion -> Delete Account (With a very clear choice between deactivation and permanent deletion) -> Delete Account

Compare that to unsubscribing from the New York Times...

It is true that subscription s and re occuring payments are much worse, but we are talking "freeware" here. Especially IG you have to do in the browser.

Except that's not really what happens with Facebook. I deleted my account there ages ago, and discovered later when checking haveibeenpwned.com that the email address I used there was part of a data dump from Facebook. So, do I believe that FB really delete your data when you request to permanently delete it? Nope, not in the slightest.

The last published DPC audit found that it does [1]. There's really no reason to subject themselves to huge fines and lie about it, a very small fraction of facebook users delete anything.

The "data dump" you're referring to was probably scraped from public facebook pages before you deleted the account. There has never to my knowledge been a case of private data becoming public that was exfiltrated from facebook proper.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20171218060100/https://www.datap...

I know of two instances:

1) Facebook had a "View as" bug that allowed anyone to view anyone else's private page as that person.

2) Cambridge Analytica in which Facebook shared private information with third-parties under an NDA.

As I recall, the 'View As' was a feature, allowing you to see your own profile and posts as would be seen by another person, so you could make sure your post privacy/visibility settings were set up the way you wanted. I used the feature quite often and was quite annoyed when they disappeared it one day. Do you have more info on this?

Here's some info on the View As bug posted by Facebook:

https://about.fb.com/news/2018/09/security-update/

Facebook have (had?) this clause of "if you reconnect in the following 30 days the account deletion will be cancelled" instead of deleting it immediately. Which is indeed one of the trick mentioned by GP.

Not sure they still do this, but when I deleted my Facebook account (some years ago) there were numerous dark patterns designed to get me to relent, including at one point showing me pictures of some of my friends and saying "Are you sure you want to do this? <person's name> will miss you" etc. It was incredibly manipulative.

If you buy thru Apple you can cancel NYT with a button press at least

You still have to make a literal phone call to unsubscribe from WSJ.

This is why every time I hear someone complain about GDPR i gently remind them that it’s the exact type of legislation people say they want to protect their data. People are so short sighted.

People also allocate the blame in weird directions. Like when the topic of the popups and privacy controls comes up people often blame lawmakers for making 'annoying' laws, when really they should blame the companies for violating privacy. The annoying popups exist because the companies are data hungry, the laws just require them to make it transparent.

I want them to be safe with my data! I don't care about my customer's data!

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