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Ask HN: Know a good tool to purge all posts/likes/photos from Facebook?
Hi HN! I want to reduce my footprint on FB, i.e. delete all posts and photos, unlike all likes, etc. I'd like to keep the account active, so simply deactivating isn't the way to go (yet?)
I did some digging and there seems to be some Chrome extensions that - according to reviews - can give mixed results.
Most of what I could find - including past posts to HN - were 4 or 5 years old. So my question: is there a recent, go-to tool that you know of which can help me achieve the above? Or should I try my luck with the random years-old tutorials you can find online?
Thanks!
- ecesena 10y agoTo my knowledge fb doesn't allow apps to delete data. Or, better, an app can only delete data it created in the first place. This is the reason, I guess, there are no such "server-side" services. I don't know the status of client side, sorry.
- pedro2 10y agoFacebook detects automated activity or scraping and tries to stop it. That being said, only this one seemed to partially work for me: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/timeline-cleaner-facebook/ooimeknpoejjpkmgeibojeklnklcjchf?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/timeline-cleaner-f...
- gtk40 10y agoThanks! I've tried similar tools without success, but this one is sort of successful. It has completely cleared things a few times, but I've had to keep re-running it since yesterday as they re-appear. This morning I was down to only things from 4 years ago or more showing up so I'm running it for a fourth time.
- danwinters 10y agoThey introduced the ability to restrict those who can view your past posts quite recently, which might be useful. A link to news article is here: http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2016/07/28/facebook-remove-old-posts/#gref http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2016/07/28/facebook-remove-ol... That news article also mentioned: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/facebook-post-manager/ljfidlkcmdmmibngdfikhffffdmphjae https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/facebook-post-mana...
- greyfox 10y agoAnyone know a tool to stop people from being able to tag you (in their posts)? this shit is getting out of hand..
- shogun21 10y agoYou can change your privacy settings so you have to approve everything before going on your wall/feed.
- pasbesoin 10y agoThat's what I've done. Just to be clear to the grand-parent, you are still tagged. It just doesn't appear under... I've lost track of the FB terminology: On your "wall", profile, whatever. It will still show up in your "newsfeed" of other posts -- the thing you typically browse. It's an example of a dark or semi-dark pattern from FB. You can't really stop it, nor others' actions with respect to it. You can only limit some of its propagation and perception. You on FB? You get tagged.
- sotojuan 10y ago> That's what I've done. Just to be clear to the grand-parent, you are still tagged. That hasn't happened to me... I don't approve some photo tags my friends added and they're not on my profile at all. The photo/post does appears in my newsfeed because well, my friend posted it. Unless I unfollow them it'll show up, right?
- djloche 10y agoAnd worse, their auto-tagging algo is not good enough to differentiate between similar siblings. I am routinely tagged as me, in photos of my brother, on my brother's timeline.
- sotojuan 10y agoThis has been around for years. It's interesting how many people complain about Facebook allowing oversharing and tagging when at this point, they give you more options to handle and restrict your interactions than ever.
- angry_octet 10y agoNuke them from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
- angry_octet 10y agoAliens references aside, you can't actually 'purge' anything, deletes don't actually delete. Apart from marking stuff as private you can increase the noise. Like lots of stuff you don't like, add photos of people you don't know. Randomly unlike stuff. Eventually you will have washed your profile.
- SoreGums 10y agoFunnily tonight I've spent about 3hrs going through and marking everything "only me" which leaves everyone that was tagged or has commented on it with access. So it is completely doable through a chrome extension, would just take time to do. Plus now the site is all react based it should be fairly simple. My goal was to reduce my public footprint and each month I'll go through and close out the previous 2nd month of content.
- doc_holliday 10y agoNot sure how possible it is, but i've used Javascript from the web console to do some interaction with Facebook, perhaps they have restricted this though? But if that is allowed that could be one route, getting all the elements by Xpath that are posts. Otherwise automation with Selenium or similar could work?
- mgberlin 10y agoIt's impossible. A few years ago I manually went through and "deleted" all content. It probably took me five or six hours all told. A year or so later someone was showing me something on their profile, and I noticed a picture that I thought was gone. Digging around, everything I marked for deletion had re-appeared publicly. I've since "deactivated" my account (there's no apparent way to actually delete it) and refuse to use the service, much to my family's chagrin. tl;dr: Even if you delete things, they will eventually reappear.
- logfromblammo 10y agoI log on around my birthday anniversary and 6 months before and after, to reassure people that I'm still alive and to conceal (nothing on Facebook is "deleted") the previous 6 months of activity. You can't reduce your Facebook profile to zero, because a large part of it is composed from friend activity, and some of your friends will be on Facebook without privacy concerns as severe as yours. And you can't control the things that other people do.
- merpnderp 10y agoI ran a greasemonkey script that tried to delete everything. What ended up happening was everything was switched to hidden from timeline. I don't know if something was wrong with the script (looked good to me) or if facebook just doesn't want to delete anything. But I was truly bummed to see that it is impossible to delete anything.
- WmyEE0UsWAwC2i 10y agoWhat I did was to feed them noise. I clicked the like buttom on popular things, followed popular people. It is kind of a chore, and it can prompt their anti-bot measures (like asking me if I'm interested in pig (the animal?)). This, of course, has its drawbacks.
- vemy 10y agoThere is a way: https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674 https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674
- aw3c2 10y ago
- juskrey 10y agoSelenium driver and manual clicking through history.
- beachstartup 10y agodelete it. that uncomfortable feeling in your gut is telling you something important.
- raverbashing 10y agoAnother idea would be to flood your page with a lot of stuff: like everything that FB suggests (unless it's controversial or possibly illegal), create posts with random content (you can make it visible to "Just Me", reshare everything that pops in your timeline, etc
- VLM 10y agoThat's just going to insult people given that about 10% of FB users do that while thinking its the correct way, and mistakenly believing that behavior is "socializing". I don't want the fallout from Bill and his friends thinking I'm parodying or imitating Bill, ditto jackie and angela and richard and becky and denise and
- bsbechtel 10y agoThis is tangentially related to this, but apparently their mobile app now automatically downloads all the photos on your phone if you give permissions to access photos? My wife and I recently had a child, and when I opened up the app to post one single photo of our child, Facebook was showing in my newsfeed a video they made with all of my photos I had taken. This seems like a gross violation of my privacy. Is there any way to prevent this aside from deleting the app and no longer sharing photos with family and friends via FB?
- Tharkun 10y agoYou're using FB. Talking about a 'gross violation of privacy' is almost laughable.
- icebraining 10y agohttps://www.facebook.com/help/409007099162779/ https://www.facebook.com/help/409007099162779/ Apparently the feature is opt-in and will be sunsetted soon anyway, but you can disable it.
- bsbechtel 10y agoI think what I'm talking about is something different. I never opted in, and I also can't adjust the settings at the location the help page directed me to.
- danfromberlin 10y agoIf you care at all about maintaining control over this kind of data, consider abstaining from facebook and running your own service e.g. owncloud or nextcloud.
- philh 10y agoOn android, there are unofficial apps which act as shells on the mobile web interface (the ones I have are "Tinfoil for Facebook" and "Swype"). IIRC these are capable of uploading photos, but they won't upload any that you don't explicitly choose to upload.
- 10y ago
- bungie4 10y agoMy plan is to corrupt my data. I'll warn my friends that if they see stupid stuff going on with my profile, it's just me. If they won't delete it, might as well make it useless.
- JTon 10y agoI'm curious about this. How do you plan to corrupt your _existing_ data? (i.e. stuff you've done/uploaded in the past)
- bungie4 10y agoFB does allow you to edit >:)
- kpcyrd 10y agoI doubt this is actually overwriting anything, it just adds more data to facebook's database.
- bungie4 10y agoThat's fine. It just means I've become a bi-coastal, transgendered, red headed, left handed bag pipe player with a speech impediment. Regardless, the data is corrupt at that point, and that, is the point.
- paraxisi 10y agoI feel like this is a very naive way to look at this. As kpcyrd said, you're simply adding to their data, not 'corrupting' anything you've previously shared. If anything, you're sending up a big red flag from suddenly changing your gender, location, etc all at once.
- javajosh 10y agoIt may not hide anything from FB, but it will hide from anyone using FB to observe you, which seems like what the OP wants.
- libeclipse 10y agoAs far as I can tell, the only surefire way is to delete your Facebook account permanently.
- fred_is_fred 10y agoI had good luck with a greasemonkey script but it was 5 years ago and it no longer works. I did have to run it several times. Maybe see if there's an updated one.
- pwenzel 10y agoThere is the "Limit Past Posts" feature under the privacy settings. It doesn't delete your stuff, but it does make it less visible. Not ideal, just a start. Go to "see more privacy settings"... then look for 'Limit the audience for posts you've shared with friends of friends or Public?'. It will present a "Limit Old Posts" button.
- nibnib 10y agoIf you are outside of the US or Canada you are entitled to request all data Facebook holds about your account. This may be useful in determining what is actually deleted. http://www.europe-v-facebook.org/EN/Get_your_Data_/get_your_data_.html http://www.europe-v-facebook.org/EN/Get_your_Data_/get_your_...
- awinter-py 10y agothe court system
- javajosh 10y agoIt's not clear that FB is required to delete your content if you ask them to, especially if it says in your terms that you explicitly give up this right (and I haven't actually read it, but I'd not be surprised if this was the case). I suspect you could claim someone stole your account and posted things that libeled you, and FB would be a party to the harm. But that's not quite the situation for the OP.
- erdevs 10y agoReading all the comments on how little control users have over their data on fb. Isn't this kind of messed up? How is FB still able to get away with this? Especially when Apple and Google are pushing for more privacy and user control over data, I'd think FB would get called out more.
- hnrodey 10y agoThere is an app Xpire that should do what you're looking for. I have it for iOS.
- hnrodey 10y agoThere is an app Xpire that should do what you're looking for. I have it for iOS.
- syphilis2 10y agoI've found that there are old messages of mine that Facebook will not let me delete. I took the manual approach of scrolling through my history and deleting every post I no longer wanted, and I found that some of my early posts produce an error when I try to delete them. I believe it has something to do with them being on a friend's wall, but I really am not sure. It's frustrating to not be able to remove my own content.
- roninb 10y agoIt's definitely on purpose. They've done the same with "Likes". I've been trying to unlike all the dumb pages I liked when in high school ("When you flip your pillow to get to the cold side ;]", "Brock Obama", "texting late at night", "peeling plastic off of new electronics", etc...) and once I got my 2k likes down to about 300ish, they stopped showing me my likes when I look at my profile. It literally says "326 likes" on the tab itself but it's just not populated with anything. Every once in a while, a defunct page will post again and I'll have the opportunity to unlike "Tiger Blood", but the infrequency kills me. Just wish I could firewall <22 year old roninb from >22 year old roninb.
- syphilis2 10y agoI remember the "likes" counts always being incorrect. Specifically for categories of things such as how many movies, bands, TV series, etc I had liked. Back around 2010 I cleaned up my list of liked movies and experienced the same thing: the count displayed was not synchronized with the number of movies appearing on my page. I wonder if this isn't something akin to the YouTube "subscribers" bug. Users could repeatedly subscribe then unsubscribe to a channel. Only the unsubscribe actions were counted, and the channel's subscription count could be driven down to 0. That bug was around for over a year before being addressed.
- spike021 10y agoWouldn't surprise me if there are bugs. There are some weird issues with facebook.
- palerdot 10y agoA related personal experience. I deleted my facebook account few years ago. Much Later (actually around 2 years later), when I wanted to check something related to facebook sdk, I created a fake account but gave my original mobile number. Surprise! Surprise! Facebook was recommending all the people from my deleted account magically to my newly created account which has nothing in common with my old account except for the mobile number. For all those sharing content in FB, worrying about your privacy is pointless and a total waste of time. My personal opinion is that, Google somehow values people privacy more than Facebook, that why its social networking attempts are failing. On the other hand, Facebook is just ruthless when it comes to handling people's data and that is why it is having much success as a social networking platform.
- randomgyatwork 10y agoIts bazar to me that the ruthless company usually wins, why does this happen so consistently?
- unclenoriega 10y agoIn my opinion, the most likely answer is that the ruthless company will be more profitable, and most customers either don't care or don't understand (don't care to understand?) the implications of the ruthless policies.
- matthewmacleod 10y agoSurprise! Surprise! Facebook was recommending all the people from my deleted account magically to my newly created account which has nothing in common with my old account except for the mobile number. Do bear in mind that many of those people likely have your phone number, and will have integrated Facebook with their smartphone's contacts list; they could easily find loads of people just from that. I'm not saying that they have deleted your old account, but it is possible that there are other explanations.
- palerdot 10y agoIt is possible. So, if we want to completely get out of FB, we need to ditch our other online persona like email, phone number? In any case, recommending the people from old account does not make sense. What if that mobile number was now owned by different person?
- webwanderings 10y agoJust deactivate first and forget about it. Your life does not cease to exist because you are not on Facebook anymore. If there are people out there who genuinely care for you, they'll know how to get a hold of you. You can then share your life with them, if you care for them. The world has existed like this for thousands of years.
- Kinnard 10y agoPeople would pay for this!
- triangleman 10y agoDid you know it's impossible to disallow comments on your facebook posts? You have to allow them and then remove them manually. FB is like a poorly-featured blog.
- Shish2k 10y agoIf you think FB is bad as a blog, just try using it as a source code management system, it's really bad at that. And don't even get me started about the lack of ray-tracing support! Worst. 3D modelling app. EVER.
- mr_O 10y agoYou could take a look at testing with spock & groovy. With those you can instantiate browsers and control their behavior with just some lines of groovy code. Haven't heard of any tools that still work and do the job right, so though it might seem a bit of an overkill, it may just be worth the effort and you learn something cool ;-)
- fimdomeio 10y agoI did this once for fun. At the time I used Sikuli (it just controls your mouse / keyboard and find things on screen). easy to code it, takes quite a while to run and makes your computer useless to do other things.
- merpnderp 10y agoI'm trying this right now and it appears to be working. Although it looks like it will break once the timeline scroll gets too large. Maybe a page refresh will fix it. https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/9106-facebook-timeline-cleaner https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/9106-facebook-timeline-cle...
- merpnderp 10y agoLooks like Facebook undeleted all the stuff from the last time I ran this. Last time I made it to 2014 before my browser locked up. But now I'm seeing stuff from early 2016.
- geggam 10y agoI wonder if you could breathe life into this and perhaps mold it to do what you want ? http://fbcmd.dtompkins.com/ http://fbcmd.dtompkins.com/
- keyboardhitter 10y agoSlightly unrelated to OP's question... but something I just thought of, how would trying to reduce one's footprint impact the algorithm? i.e. would a lot of removals of likes invoke Facebook to suggest radically new content different than the thing which was removed? Or would it continue to suggest similar content? For example, if someone unliked and removed every post and/or action that had to do with goats. Would they still get suggested content about goats or animals in the same family; would they get more animal-based suggestions than someone who'd never liked goat content? Or would those kinds of suggestions drop off entirely and change to common trends? I have not used Facebook in a long time, so I'm curious if anyone has insight into the behavior.
- mattstrayer 10y agoThere was an app that did something related to this called facewash (renamed to simplewash) https://www.facebook.com/simplewash/ https://www.facebook.com/simplewash/, but it seems to since have been shut down. May be worth it to shoot them a message
- Namrog84 10y agoNot a tool and Maybe not for photos. But I'd recommend doing potential edits instead. Where possible (comments and text posts). As this will screw with a lot of the undelete aspects and archiving. I do this in a variety of places and is far better than "delete" in most scenarios. Tl;dr; better footprint reduction method than delete: Replace all text posts with a single letter or word.
- kzar 10y agoThere's https://github.com/chander/social-network-cleaner https://github.com/chander/social-network-cleaner which more or less worked for me when I deleted my account. (Over a year ago now.)
- xenosapien 10y agoChange your name to another language (another alphabet). All of your history will appear that way and will be rather useless.