How to archive and delete all your Facebook messages | Hacker News Reader

How to archive and delete all your Facebook messages

cihatimamoglu.blogspot.com

39 pointskolistivra12 comments

One thing to note is that deletion of a message on your end does NOT remove it from the person you sent it too. I have a second test account I attempted this with and the received messages were still accessible by the recipient, even if they were gone from the senders.

This is correct.

They are also certainly not deleted from your record either. I have requested a copy of my data from Facebook, and it contained messages that both parties have been deleted. That's to be expected though.

This happens to be the opposite of the way Twitter direct messages work though.

Any idea how to do this with your photos/wall posts too? I'd love e.g. a IFTTT action or a script that once a month would archive and delete anything on my Facebook that's older than, say, a year.

this sort of goes against one of the philosophies/purposes of 'timeline,' namely a journal of your life along with all the related connections you may have made. you may be able to hack something, but is the gain/ROI really worth it?

It depends what you want your Facebook to be. I want it to be a way to keep in touch with my friends. I don't want it to be a publicly-accessible journal of my life. It's as simple as that.

Considering Facebook has been around for quite a few years now, I don't think it's that rare for people to look at what they posted five years ago and decide they'd rather keep that in the past. Especially since they had no idea at the time that timeline was going to happen.

Do you think everyone is an extrovert and likes that idea? Do you want your life to be an open book to all of your family and friends for all the way back to when you joined?

Gotta say, it really bugs me to know that people would willingly download a script they don't understand and run it against their private data.

Sure the javascript is open source, but how many people will actually read and understand it before running it?

Not saying that this specific script or post has any nefarious intent, but it's obvious how easy it would be to trick a bunch of otherwise intelligent people to give away access to their facebook account by posting something that claims to protect privacy.

Same goes for a lot of things really.

Cydia, most linux repositories, any browser extension you find. Most of the time you are just hoping that the author wasn't malicious, and that somebody else has audited the code before you ran it.

You can use http://jsbeautifier.org/ to read the script.

Alternate title: How to self-XSS your Facebook account.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com