How to permanently delete your Facebook account
facebook.com
facebook.com
- Imagine, you're living outside of USA/UK/Europe.
- Formally, it's possible to proceed with "Permanently delete my account".
- You will even receive email assuring you that two weeks later profile would be completely deleted.
- Then, couple years later you'll occasionally seen email from facebook that someone tried to log in into your ("permanently deleted") account.
- You'll try to log in, probably restore and change the password among the way.
- And after that you'll be successfully logged in. And the profile's state would be like nothing changes. Nothing. Completely.
- You'll contact Support. Seriously? They'll ignore you.
- Maybe some interaction with 3rd-party websites triggered cancellation of the process, you thought.
- Then, you'll implement blacklist just to avoid any interaction with facebook, something similar to: https://pastebin.com/FAV2f9eA and try to repeat the flow again.
- Then another 2+ years later situation will repeat again. Deja-vu. And again. And again.
There's no way to delete facebook profile if facebook didn't really care about its users.
- I explicitly check to avoid any "disabling".
- The only intent was to permanently delete the account.
- You can believe me or not and I did it really careful.
Here are the changes: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Afaik it's entirely administrative, e.g.:
> ~~an adequacy decision by the Commission~~ relevant adequacy regulations under section 17A of the 2018 Act
('the Commission' being the European Commission, and no longer relevant.)
Because since Brexit, the UK is no longer protected by the GDPR.
As I said above, it was kept with the necessary amendments. That documents title: GDPR - Keeling Schedule. Introductory paragraph:
> This schedule has been prepared by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. It is intended for illustrative purposes only to assist the reader in understanding the changes to be made to the retained General Data Protection Regulation by the Data Protection, Privacy and Electronic Communications (Amendments etc)(EU Exit) Regulations 2019 (as amended by the Data Protection, Privacy and Electronic Communications (Amendments etc)(EU Exit) Regulations 2020 (subject to Parliamentary approval) when these come into force.
The EU and UK GDPRs can also apply to companies in the US, or elsewhere. That's because location of the business (including subsidiaries) OR location of the individuals, are hooks under the GDPR's territoriality tests in Article 3. You usually need one or the other though; the way GDPR Article 3 works, it's pretty hard to imagine it applying to a US-only business in respect of US resident-individuals.
I'm confused. Are you expecting me to spend hundreds of thousands of Euros to get together a team of lawyers and spend years litigating with Facebook?
It's not even clear if I have standing. And what damages would I get? $3.50?
Are you saying that Facebook doesn’t enable full account delete outside of countries that require it by law?
- whether they partially disable functions on purpose
- or there are region-dependant backend code errors.
Given FB's business model, and the fact that they create "shadow" profiles for folks who don't even have FB accounts, I have no doubt that while their UI might pretend that your account has been "deleted", all the data still exists for their use.
Which is why, when I left Facebook in 2014, rather than attempting to delete or disable the account, I posted a goodbye to those on FB that I cared about and explained exactly why I was leaving (their predatory and invasive business model).
I then logged out and haven't returned. I did this because I figured that any activity on their platform would be logged and stored with everything else they'd already collected.
And that was seven years ago. Given what we've seen from them since then, it's pretty clear that I was right.
Just go away and don't look back. Otherwise you'll just give them more data.
They don't even have to pretend to delete your account, they can actually delete it. But through some linguistic slight-of-hand (i.e., lying) they obscure the fact that your account is not all the data they have on you. Your "account", in a strict sense might just be your username and password. It happens to also be associated with the entire pile of data that is a profile. Once a user no longer has an account, it's what you call a "shadow profile".
A likely scenario. Although I'd say that removing a userid and password from their auth db doesn't qualify as "deleting" an account. Rather, that's disabling an account. And IIUC (I'm not in the EU and not familiar with all the details) the GDPR/EU privacy folks would likely agree with that assessment too.
Perhaps someone with more knowledge of the GDPR could weigh in on what sorts of fines could be levied against Facebook for pulling a stunt like that on European citizens?
Edit: Levied is a more accurate term than "leveled".
It might be much easier to extend account entity with something like:
- is_deleted (boolean)
- deleted_time (utctime)
- is_suing_us (boolean)
- legal_case_id ...
I assume that when you do it all at once they will just disable you and keep the old snapshot in their facebook graph.
Anyway how would filling in garbage help in deleting Facebook account?
If you do not bring new evidence or ideas, please refrain from exaggerated accusations.
- that someone who takes over your "garbage" account
- could fake someone else (on your behalf)
- with a traces on corporate servers that will lead authorities to you in the future.
It might be highly unlikely to happen, though.
This is also why many sites and apps offer verification programs as well in my understanding... Verifying a user's ID has been a practices for ages now, but it did nothing to stop the growth of disinformation because that's not what verification was for IMO.
An unregulated private company asking you for official government documentation and your real name is definitely tracking you in my opinion. Even friends commenting with your name and family associations/connections on your account can easily ID everyone.
They are not a government agency with the authority to ask people for government ID, but somehow they convinced everyone to use their real name, and it didn't stop the decay of conduct decorum on the platform, it only served to track information more accurately.
Even people who have never registered for FB are indexed by them based on tagged photos and in posts that others have made about them using their names.
They also track people based on interactions across other apps entirely not associated with FB... That's IMO why certain sites slowed and faulted mysteriously when their domain went offline.
I am willing to bet that they have a really interesting splunk (or similar tech) dashboard they can look at and search any time they want full of analytics based on almost every human on earth.
Account privacy settings have always been a very ambiguous "shell game" with FB and other social apps, and often do not work properly, what makes anyone think a "delete account" request would ever be honored by such a company that manipulates it's user base?
I also suspect that each of the major social platforms do the same type of info gathering to varying extents as well.
This is some serious "James Bond island cave villain" stuff, and whatever congressional action comes next (if anything does) may tell us where the future is going for our privacy and personal info rights... :|
This is nothing unusual? It’s extremely common for a private company to request identify verification
The same is the case with social media. They don't need your government ID, and they're not authorized to demand it like the health care industry is.
A casual reading of the terms and conditions might lead a person to object, that it says they don't sell your data. A close reading notes that it says they don't sell to "third parties". But they leave out the fact that any other company the store does business with is not a third party. They technically don't sell your data to them, they provide your data to other companies during the normal course of transacting business with them. Thus, your data flows through the system, unchecked.
This is how Scientology tracked me for almost three decades even after I changed addresses a dozen times. I bought something from them once on Visa, and they constantly got updates on my personal info.
How are you OK with VISA and not OK with ID on a social media site when the former is far worse than the latter?
We've already given up privacy.
Please help me understand if I'm wrong. I'd like to not be so cynical.
In contrast to social media, where there is not any substantial regulation yet, it's the wild west with your information right now... They can sell your phone number, anything saved on your phone, everything you post, and even possibly run a keylogger from their mobile app on your device...
Mobile (installed) apps can collect precise location data on you once you install their app... Credit card companies can potentially track you and gather personal data as well if you install their (native) mobile app. As phones evolve, it will eventually become normal to be tracked and to not be able to opt out if regulation (laws) aren't made and enforced to protect individuals from privacy invasion.
This is why I use web sites instead of installing single-use apps, but also why certain companies want to end support for browser based sites, and why some services can only accessed via installed apps.
This is a good point. Even though they are ignored, there at least is something to use in litigation.
> and even possibly run a keylogger from their mobile app on your device...
Like the Emoji apps that were doing this years ago.
> instead of installing single-use apps,
I keep my app use extreeeemmely limited.
We need serious regulation on social media sites that collect this much personal information, meaning stuff people post that is intended for a very limited, controlled audience, and not wall posts that are public to everyone. (Like HN.)
I think the problem is what someone pointed out to me yesterday: tying DMs to a "real" identity. Purchases are already tied to who we are, and so are every form we sign that has significance. Phone companies know whos in our address books. Email is 100% insecure, always has been. The last thing to protect is the DMs.... which is probably too late.
There is no governing body that determines who is and who is not "authorized" to request ID in the United States.
Edit: I thought of two more: airlines and banks. But I assume both of those industries are required to by regulation.
I always chose to never use my real name on any social media accounts, if it was required I'd probably elect to not sign up, but their EULAs frequently are revised to serve whatever purpose they want because there is no meaningful regulation in place to limit their data mining practices on pretty much anyone because others post info about you in some way over time, even if you don't have an account.
Sometimes it's a legal obligation (under KYC), sometimes it's pressure from credit card companies, and sometimes it's just websites making shit up to enforce their own rules.
Twitter requires ID and personal information (i.e. your phone number) for verification even from users that are not involved in any sort of purchasing or income scenarios.
Reddit started out not caring about who anyone was, but over time IP based tracking and other things started to creep in...
Private companies that aren't regulated nor involved in conducting regulated business should not be asking for any government issued ID nor personal user data if you ask me.
There is no good argument for making it a *requirement*. If the platform has issues moderating its content, then there are solutions other than requiring their users to identify themselves. Plus, as we saw, asking for ID does not help fight against problematic content and its spread. The root of the problem may lie elsewhere, e.g. in the system which boosts user-generated content which draws clicks (clickbait) and likes (outrage and fake news). Asking for ID is only good for the targetted advertisement business, telling otherwise is a decoy.
- Remove all photos and replace them with other images (nothing illegal)
- Change all data relating to your person
- Create several posts with unrelated data
- Like as many pages as you possibly can
Technically, with GDPR you only need to visit the EU to delete your account... So I suppose one might a vacation out of deleting Facebook, LinkedIn etc accounts?
In a very real sense, "you" still exist in Facebook. That's why when, weeks, months, or years later, when you login, Facebook recognizes you. You create a new "account", and Facebook very conveniently associates everything it knows about you (which it never forgot) with your new account.
Which leads me to think that Facebook passwords might just be stored as searchable text rather than hashes. Granted I'm no cryptography expert though.
It's not stored in searchable text rather they simply have some heuristics that they modify the password submitted and retry automatically.
Not located in US/UK/Europe, however my deleted account is fully deleted. Can't even 'reset' the password on it since there's no email found when I try to use the reset.
I don't like Facebook, but I don't think there's a point in getting riled up by one person's comment on HackerNews. It reminds me of the thread where someone was claiming they were under surveillance for using ProtonMail.
It might be the case, sure.
Last email (as of today) about permanent deletion was one year ago. During next year I will give it another try: log in and come back to you, then.
Like I said, there's a number of reasonable reasons why your account didn't get deleted, all of them pass the Occam's Razor test a little better than "Facebook just didn't delete my account/is not deleting accounts in secret".
You're making a statement which, if true, is huge -- that Facebook is secretly retaining accounts after deletion, despite multiple credible sources (IE: TIME) running detailed articles to the contrary. On top of that your anecdotal evidence is contradicted by my anecdotal evidence. So I hope you understand if I don't take this at face-value.
Deleting WhatsApp, while annoying for me personally, has resulted in many people I know joining Signal or Telegram — the network effect can be broken by being belligerent.
If you don’t want to have a conversation about why you deleted WhatsApp, simply say it’s a moral issue, nobody wants to know.
People get _offended_ when you tell them that you don't have Whatsapp. But I let them hold that hot coal themselves.
Cause what parent described is common in EU + LATAM
People who do have WhatsApp, probably have it, because most of the people they know have it.
So there is precedent for this, but we live in very different times now.
That's a wonderful idea. In fact, we've had such a standard since 1999 (protocol codified in 2004[0])
It's called XMPP[1]
In fact Google Talk, Facebook Messenger and Skype were all either based upon, or supported XMPP...and now don't. Slack used to support IRC and not doesn't. There's a term often credited to Microsoft that also applies here: embrace, extend, extinguish.
You're completely right that messaging clients is regional, but it's even more regional than just "Europe". I'm always confused when people claim that WhatsApp is huge in Europe, because I know literally only two people who use it. They only use WhatsApp because they have friends outside Europe.
I think we need to think in terms of single countries when talking messaging apps. Again take WhatsApp. Pretty big in Germany and Spain, but almost non-existing in Denmark (who instead rely more on Facebook Messenger or iMessage).
Want to get a delivery? You'll be told about it via WhatsApp. Want to order food online? WhatsApp. Want to pick up your laundry? WhatsApp. etc. It's everywhere here and totally dominant. Deciding not to use it would make your life significantly harder.
Now I've got so many messaging apps. I just want one. Only one.
(based in the UK)
And what's with all the downmods and downright flags lately? I'm trying to be funny here.
In this case the joke wasn't even related to the discussion, since neither Signal[0] nor Telegram are self-hosted anyway.
[0] You can sort of self-host Signal, but last time I looked there was no way to change the URL in the client without rebuilding it, and it's not federated, so that's pretty pointless unless you also get all your friends to install your new version too.
The discussion was about some people getting offended because some other people don't have whatsapp accounts.
I selfhost xmpp (ejabberd) and matrix (synapse) servers for my friends and family. When someone asks - and this happens fairly often - how come I don't have [insert evil big tech IM company here] account, and how can I be contacted, I say I can be contacted by means of open federated protocol like xmpp or matrix, using open source apps like conversations or element, having account on one of many xmpp or matrix servers, including ones that I administer.
Most people say 'ok whatever man', but some say tell me more and get to get in touch with me.
Because of my knowledge and skill to avoid Evil Greed, and because I am actively working on liberating people from it, I think of myself as a better man than those who argue whether Signal is better than WhatsApp or Viber or whatever. And at the same time I remind myself I am no better than anyone or anything else in the Universe. And I am quite auto-ironic about it.
Is this enough lines of explanation?
If people need to send me some information they text me. If sending a text is too much for them maybe I did not really need to know what they wanted to send. If I want to communicate with my friends and family I call them like we used to do in the 20th century.
Allows you to connect to/chat with WhatApp users using Matrix/Element.
Why ? for recent transaction, they need to keep it for tax purposes but they have no legal need to keep old records.
I wouldn't call 10 years "recent transactions". Heck, for most of the online shops, it's more like "forever".
The GDPR/CCPA/etc. likely has different requirements here, and probably requires deletion after they're no longer needed (for tax purposes or whatever).
But I personally have financial records going back decades, so I can't fault a company for wanting to do the same thing.
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/refo...
They could unlink it from your purchase history, but they would still have to maintain the record of the purchase. I believe this is effectively what 'Archiving' order does.
Network effect is irrelevant for pure messaging services. If someone needs to talk to you, they'll send a pigeon if they have to.
Then I guess they weren't very good friends, were they? If they were, they might make an effort, no?
A good point. I can't (and don't pretend to) speak for anyone else, but I want to be around people who want to be around me. And not all of those.
Take from that what you will.
> many people I know joining Signal or Telegram — the network effect can be broken by being belligerent
Did you not use the same network effect to get people to join Signal/Telegram? While I agree that Signal is morally better (being a non-profit and all), it is still a closed garden, which makes such network effects possible. And this in itself is a moral issue, I think. Personally I would like to use a system like, where everyone can choose his own server. But nobody in my social circle uses it, so I'm stuck with walled gardens...
[1]: https://element.io/
This practical application of your advice depends on where a particular person sits in their social hierarchy.
E.g. an influential person that's a "hub" or "connector" in their social circle can switch from WhatsApp to Signal ... or insist on email only ... or insist on no email and only hardcopy snail mail (Donald Knuth) -- and others will follow their lead or accommodate them.
On the other hand, if you're one of the folks at the "spokes" or "edges" of social graphs... being defiant by deleting WhatsApp doesn't accomplish anything because others don't care to switch to reach you.
The above difference in social influence happens in Asia countries where many use WhatsApp beyond personal relationships for business to sell items or find work. If the business contacts you depend on for getting income use WhatsApp, you deleting WhatsApp just means you get $0 because they'd rather deal with other vendors who don't force them the hassle of switching to Signal. Power and leverage in social graphs matter.
I’m no influencer, but i do have a big family and lots of very close friends. I’m very lucky.
Many people are isolated and struggle to make and maintain friendships — especially over the last year. They don’t have the luxury of being able to take a stand.
I don't think it is worth holding contact in that case. Contrary to popular belief is that you don't miss out on anything.
Business contacts are another matter, but every professional understands if you want to use other channels. Same principle applies. If they don't make the effort, it wasn't a good contact anyway, although there are side effects because convinience is important. A bit of excentricity isn't a deal breaker, on the contrary.
Clout chasing is exactly the angle social media tries to satisfy.
That's a common counterargument that's similar to "then I guess they weren't very good friends, were they?!?" -- but oversimplifies the complexity of social life. It's not a simple binary dichotomy between "very good friends" and "no friends".
People also have an in-between status of "weak ties" that are mutually beneficial : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpersonal_ties
These types of relationships are more fragile and easier to "lose" by putting up barriers to communication. It's not realistic to impose a condition of "either you follow me to the Signal network or you weren't really my friend at all" on the whole world. Everybody doesn't have same weight of importance to everyone else and that's ok. Dunbar's Number may also be relevant here.
>, but every professional understands if you want to use other channels.
No they don't if you're one of hundreds of "disposable vendors" in Asia or other parts of the world using WhatsApp for business. The other business professional (with more leverage) just ignores your excentricity and works with others who don't inconvenience them.
>, although there are side effects
If the "side effects" are $0 income, that's a really big deal. It seems like you swept this aside.
>Clout chasing
It's not about about chasing "clout". Unfortunately, I used the word "influential" and I forgot that it has been tainted by recent phenomenon of "social media influencer". I couldn't think of a better word for "significant connector node on a social graph" other than "influential". (I think it's irony that by Donald Knuth insisting on USPS snail mail for correspondence -- and people actually getting past that friction to contact him -- that actually proves he has clout.)
In any case, I think your perspective is shaped by your experience in Western Europe so you really can't empathize with how some people (farmers, etc) depend on WhatsApp for their livelihood. They don't use it like a TikTok type of social network.
I disagree. It accomplishes at least one thing -- WhatsApp isn't tracking/recording your messages any more. That's what I would care about.
You're absolutely right. Because there's no such thing as other messaging apps, email, social media platforms, SMS/MMS, telephone, written correspondence or discussion over a beer/coffee/meal. Only WhatsApp exists.
Gee, I wish someone would invent some or all of of those things -- I'm so lonely! /s
I deleted Facebook/Messenger awhile ago, and asked that people use Signal to communicate with me. All of the people I cared to speak to use Signal to message me, and many of them have used it for other purposes as well. That hasn't precluded them from using whatever they were using before. This only applies to the personal sphere of my life, conducting business with WhatsApp may be a different issue entirely.
WhatsApp first value proposition has been to enable cheap ("free") messaging while, at least here in Argentina, SMS would still cost a lot of money. The Android SMS experience is bad, too - or at least it's not a nice one.
Add groups, multimedia, audio calls with no long-distance fee, or even video calls (I don't think the phone system offers an alternative, at least here), and all of that being "cross-manufacturer" (we have 92% Android users here, so you still don't want to leave your two iOS friends out) and it's pretty much clear why WhatsApp works best.
Signal & Telegram could have make it, too - but WhatsApp was probably first, and they offered support for some feature phones back then when they still were around.
I'm probably showing my ignorance around SMS and iMessage, but why can't SMS simply use your data allowance? Doesn't iMessage do this?
iMessage is a proprietary messaging system
That was the state of affairs in the US until fairly recently; most carriers (in the US at least) offer a pretty standard plan that includes unlimited texting.
Is this really true? I do a smattering of weird/non-conformist things for moral reasons, and people are always _overly_ interested. IME, if you say "I don't do X for moral reasons" to someone who does X, they take it as a personal attack. It's closely related to the concept of "anticipated reproach". While they may pay lip service to it, most people aren't fundamentally able to understand the concept of moral pluralism/relativism, and won't be satisfied with "I think it's wrong but it's no black mark on you if you don't think it is".
I find it interesting that I don’t think I’ve ever come across any discussion about Facebook (and I read a lot of them) where anyone is defending them. Either people are strongly against the company, or at most they admit grudgingly that they do use Facebook services because everyone else they know uses it.
The only people I ever hear championing Facebook are Zuckerberg and other top management.
I don’t have a Facebook account, so possibly all the positive discussion is on Facebook itself and I’m not seeing it.
However, they absolutely love the fact that they've been able to keep in contact with family, old friends, and see the value of the human connection they are able to get through Facebook as far greater than the negatives.
Stuff that's running phpbb or other similar software.
At least from my friends, everyone hates it, left, center and right-wing alike.
I work for FAANG. I generally dont comment on HN but recently I read every thread about FAANG to have a thread that read like you should be ashamed to work there. I replied, Even before i worked there, I used their products to keep in touch woth my family/friends, at a startup I worked at we used open source tech from these companies, I also have always benefited from owning the stock in my retirement account via index funds. So why is it that working for the company is not ok but being a consumer, investor etc ok. And also asked if there's an acceptable list of companies to work at without moral judgements. Pointed out that people have strong feelings about big tech, big pharma, big oil etc etc. As you'd imagine, I was downvoted pretty soon and you realize trying to convince a stranger on the internet is pointless and gains you nothing.
In our modern market, I don't believe that my owning FB stock is contributing to their success. If I were to work for them I would be.
Your work count. Really.
So your work should be as much as possible aligned with your moral values. Lot of people blind themselves with the salary and weak justification. I find that complete hypocrisy.
Now, is the company you are working for aligned with your own moral values?
Only you can answer that ;-)
Anyway, the irony is interesting, some people on HN unable to control the urge to tell a stranger on the internet that he/she is morally inferior without considering how it makes them feel, while blaming another platform for similar effects and how it negatively impacts people.
What they say is "I would feel bad for doing it".
Which is quite different.
Using another example, I'm against war and violence too, but that doesn't make me a hypocrite for paying taxes that go on to buy bombs, and paying taxes that fund war is just not the same thing at all as me working for Blackwater directly.
And, lets also agree that being employed a company is bad, the argument still seems to breakdown soon enough. Generally, the engineers are to blame because they make enough money and could choose other options, but not others capacities of employment e.g. a driver, cleaning staff, cook at one of their food courts etc. at the same company. They could've found other options too if they really wanted. Should a person making minimum wage now look into a company and its moral decisions in the past/present before taking up a job. Generally seems to come down to, oh its wrong but beyond a $ amount (an arbitrary line I just drew for myself), which just seems a very inconsistent moral position to me. Well, if you still think its a reasonable position to say its wrong but when the benefit you reap is > $x, can one of you tell me above what $ amount do the moral values apply?
We don't like to admit it but the HN demographic is a self-reinforcing "filter bubble" on some topics such as Facebook, Uber, Apple. Outside of HN, almost all non-techies I interact with don't complain about them.
I remember seeing a lady's gardening channel on Youtube and wondered how she got so many lucrative sponsorships since her subscriber count and view counts seemed too low. I later learned it's because the majority of her gardening fans' interactions and video views actually come from Facebook and not Youtube. Same for demographic of sewers for quilts & clothes.
So the Venn Diagram with one circle being female gardeners/sewers and the other circle being HN commenters have virtually no overlap. Hence we're in a filter bubble. The gardeners/sewers aren't complaining about Facebook because it's a positive in their lives and HN commenters never see that. I also read somewhere that Pinterest and Instagram are also more heavily skewed towards females.
(Because I don't have a Facebook account and got a lot of my info about FB from HN, it made me ignorant of the various communities that use FB in positive ways. I often wonder what other ways HN distorts my views that I'm totally unaware of.)
It seems nobody is very happy with Facebook. I have family members who will always agree that Facebook is full of uninformed opinions and everyone always seems to be disagreeing/arguing and it's full of complaining and political posts. And yet people continue to use it.
In my experience the people complaining about the junk content on facebook have checked out from using facebook very much years ago. Among my millenial peers at least engagement across all social networks has dropped like a stone. FB just exists to dump wedding photos now.
Right now we are required by law to remove user data upon request (Europe). That law is strong enough to cover those who need it.
I've worked both for companies that fall under extra scrutiny by government due to market position and for companies that deal with data that has strict retention limits. Yes, it increases complexity, but the laws that seek to protect people's privacy are far more important than any inconvenience to companies.
(And yes: in both cases there were regular audits and any lack of compliance had very real consequences)
> Are you suggesting that not inconveniencing developers
> is more important than a right to privacy?
The better way is to create a solution where users have control over data and the apps interact with data. This should have been the model from the beginning but now I guess it will never happen. Even if someone successfully implements this it will be just as hard IPv6 to adopt if not more.
(And yes, I've worked for companies that deal with lots of data that has strict retention limits by law, and oh boy were there audits and oh boy are you in trouble if/when you screw up)
As for your proposed solution: I don't think I understand what you mean. Could you expand on it?
Regarding the solution I was talking about check out Solid by Tim Berners Lee
That's not going to be true for all companies, but it will be true for many companies. Especially if they have any form of economic activity within some jurisdiction. Then it is up to the users to choose services that are under some acceptable regulatory control.
The fact that it can't be made perfect with one move doesn't matter. If things can incrementally be made better for the users whose data is used to generate immense revenue, that's a step in the right direction.
Decentralized models are interesting, but surprisingly hard to do, let alone do well. Not only from a technical point of view, but from a business point of view. There is also the challenge that just about every incumbent today has a vested interest in making sure these ideas do not get traction as it would rob them of what makes companies valuable.
It's probably by design, but from experience most people will need non-trivial discipline/hacks to get around the 30 day window and avoid reflexively logging in. Would be curious to know how many people who try deleting their accounts follow through to the end
I imagine if you are hooked on the whole 'social interaction' thing, the 30 day sliding window is ... unhelpful.
Update: I decided to finally try logging in and thankfully it said it could not locate an account under my email. So I guess that's a good thing. I do wonder if it triggered something else though, just by my trying to login.
I own a very short gmail.com address which I'm (far too) proud of but it does receive a lot of other people's mail; there are apparently a lot of people called Steve who don't understand how email addresses work.
Someone created and then permanently deleted a Facebook account with my address. Which has permanently locked me out of ever using my email address with Facebook (they block +alias addresses and gmail/googlemail.com too). I use Facebook casually to keep in touch with family/friends and have had to keep an old email account alive just for it. Facebook support are no help.
/rant
People often claim anonymous platforms are doomed to fail but I think social media is the main problem currently.
However if you search HN via the Algolia search link at the bottom of this page, you can still find my old posts under my old username.
Not to mention the 1,000s of self-hosted HN scrapers out there.
People have changed the users on old comments they no longer want associated with themselves and such. There was discussion a while back about it (I haven't taken advantage of this myself).
Only within a certain timeframe. Unlike reddit eventually your comments are no longer deletable or editable by you, and you have to email the webmaster in this case to ask for an old comment to be manually deleted, its not even an automated mechanism.
Unlike Facebook, Hacker News has no Personally Identifiable Information on you, didn’t ask for any, and isn’t trying to gather any. Email address might be the lone exception, but you can use any throwaway email you want. So you might have chosen to share some, but other than email, HN has no way to index it or even know that it’s personal to you. There’s no network, no photos, no credit cards. There are no ads that HN is selling your PII to. Unlike FB, HN doesn’t do any EU specific business or target EU residents in any way, so combined with the complete lack of PII, it’s very likely GDPR does not apply to HN. Comments aren’t enough, they don’t act as a catalog of PII.
That said, have you tried emailing HN to see if they’ll happily delete your comments? If there was a legitimate problem that you needed to erase, if your identity become known against your will, I’d bet the mods here would be happy to help you.
So, if we want to join in on the Halloween trail, need to know about it on there. Christmas window displays? Yep, on Facebook.
It's kinda annoying, and I figure they probably know who I am - but at least I'm not directly giving them info :/
I exited their whole ecosystem 2 years ago. Never found the urge to go back.
Leaving all of the fake-ery of Instagram and noise of Facebook behind has improved my day to day life immensely.
Many of my Whatsapp contacts had already begun to move to Signal so that helped. Some of the rest I talk to through Twitter. With the viable rest I call or use sms.
A lot of them I just let go (were dead relationships already).
I kept my social media accounts even though I stopped using them. If someone ever impersonates me, I can use these inactive accounts to say those are definitely mine.
Facebook made me wait two weeks before giving me the option to delete it and now it's just stuck on "deleting". Bing emails me weekly saying I need to update my listing yet I've tried 3 times to mark it as closed to no avail.
The only one I've been able to remove it from has been Google so far. It's quite frustrating.
1. Create a VPS 2. Install one of those Facebook scraping tools 3. Use your account credentials and start scraping. 4, Facebook will freak out, lock you out and ask for passport and ID cards. Do not provide any.
During their next account purge, they will remove your account.
This is why we need whistleblowers. It could be very easy for Facebook to knowingly keep this information and just make it a trade secret. The risk of being exposed for lying probably doesn't matter since there are so many ways around it without "lying".
But who am I kidding. I would love to know which private company has the most personal info:
- Lexis Nexis,
- West Law,
- Cellphone companies,
- TRW (credit rating companies)
- VISA (Amex, Mastercard), or
A dormant account with rubbish data is the best way to hinder their profits.
I abhor Facebook, I never log on, I haven’t used WhatsApp or Facebook messenger, etc. for several years, So I don’t feel like I’m giving them any information, but deleting my account only hurts me by giving away a free option? What am I missing?
I don't find a problem with WhatsApp.
They don't want you to be able to do this, so they make pages unusable.
I tried to delink Facebook and Instagram recently. They make you re-sign into FB via Insta... and it refused to sign me in (I was 100% using the correct password and tried many times). The sign-in just kept failing, until I was like "This is intentional, and Facebook will not let me de-link the apps." and gave up.
Really time for the FTC and DOJ to take Facebook all the way to trial for this sort of stuff. No more settlements!
Brandon will miss you. Catherine will miss you. David will miss you. Kevin will miss you. Sarah will miss you.
One of the things required by the GDPR is a way to export your data and even import it (article 20, right to portability). So you should implement a way to do that.
Then when users ask to delete their account, create an export, encrypt it with a one-time use key which you mail to the user, store this encrypted dump and remove the rest of the data. Now if the deletion was an error the user can get their key in their email and get their account reinstated. And no one in your company can access the data in the meantime.
If there's ever a breach, for example someone steals the key and then accesses the data, the fine will be super high given that the company has retrained data after the user asked to delete it.
To mitigate such risk, the company would at least need explicit consent of the user, at which point it's just as simply asking the user to not really delete their account.
A viable option, legally speaking, could be to send the dump to the user, in a way that can be easily imported back if the user ever wants to login again.
It was why I schemed it so the key is sent to the user but not kept by you. Someone steals the user key? They can ask for a restore but they won't have access to the data unless they've got the user login info too. An employee steals the encrypted data? Enjoy the time spent cracking the cryptography.
A little like one of the solutions for deletion in Event Sourced systems but instead of completely losing the keys, you give it to the user first.
Also, are they still doing the shadow profiles thing where they create "accounts" for your name in order to entice other people to join Facebook? And if you join, people you might know are conveniently already waiting for you. That always seemed shady as hell.
Not entirely surprising.
nextdns.io does a good job of blocking facebook. They base their block on https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists which has this list https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporatio...
Or just use this RPZ policy (add *.<domain> wildcard entries as well, omitted for brevity):
instagram.com. *.
cdninstagram.com. *.
messenger.com. *.
facebook.com. *.
fbcdn.com. *.
fbcdn.net. *.
fb.com. *.
fb.me. *.Nobody is holding a gun to your head to log back in to the account any time soon. I think the last time I actually did log in was > 12 months ago.
He? By how, showing a cookie window in EU and not even respecting the settings in there?
I'm not concerned about which "friends" can see my posts, it's the platform hoovering up every keystroke.
Which in-app privacy controls can stop that?
People have sleepwalked into a nightmare and nobody is really honest enough to admit it. Banana republics pretending their are sophisticated and caring societies.