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This highlights a recent episode I went through. I decided to delete everything on my FB account. I didn't want to close, just delete years of photos, posts, l

This highlights a recent episode I went through. I decided to delete everything on my FB account. I didn't want to close, just delete years of photos, posts, likes, comments, etc. Everything. Then these two surprising things happened: Having used Google Takeout many times, with great results, I decided to do the same with FB. For years I used FB as my primary way of storing and sharing photos from my phone (vs my desktop for a DSLR), so there were a lot of photos there that I didn't have anywhere else (pre-Google Photos times). When I downloaded, I was surprised: Facebook downsized all my photos to 90's-era 800x600 pixels, and stripped ALL metadata from it (date, hour, location, camera, etc.). This pissed me off so much. FB wasn't just "not doing a good job", they were purposefully sending me a big "fuck you" letter as I removed my content. FB still had all my images in the original size, and with the metadata, but they chose to give me a shitty version of them. This isn't laziness or incompetence, it's just plain evil. My second surprise was how hard it is to delete content on FB. There's no "delete all", or even a "select and delete". You need to manually click 2-4 times for every single comment, post, picture, etc on a laggy user interface. It almost looks purposefully designed to prevent you from doing so. There are some Chrome extensions that try to automate that, making deleting 1000's of items faster, but FB is constantly trying to break them. So the message is clear: FB doesn't give a fuck about you, and will try its best to fuck you if you want to delete content or even get it back. Don't use FB as content storage, don't expect to have your FB content back. PS: I went ahead and deleted everything anyway. Out of spite.

lwansbrough 9y ago
> PS: I went ahead and deleted everything anyway. Out of spite. Yeah, they still have the photos though. IIRC, when you upload a photo to Facebook you grant them a worldwide unlimited license to your photo, so there's really no reason for them to delete it. I suppose they can even use it for marketing purposes.
EGreg 9y ago
Why not use a Facebook App to extract all your photos and videos? You can have a desktop app get an api key and grant it photo permissions etc. and go to town. Full resolution everything. Also you can remove all your posts and comments this way. Perhaps such an app already exists. But if not, do you think FB would revoke keys of such an app? FOUND THEM: Odrive Fotobounce
- rosser 9y ago
  The existence of workarounds for this behavior on Facebook's part makes it zero less shitty of them. Those images are mine (the general me); Zuck, et al, do not get to leave me a down-rezzed, EXIF-stripped version as a parting gift, in the event I choose not to play in their sandbox any more. Except, of course, that they do. Because we let them.
  - mulmen 9y ago
    But they aren't exclusively your images, you gave them to Facebook when you uploaded them. Facebook is not a free image hosting or backup tool. You should never have had an expectation you could get back anything that you put in.
    - rosser 9y ago
      That argument would be far more (read: "at all") compelling if they weren't keeping the full-rez, EXIF'ed images. At that point, they're de facto acting as a backup service, and obscuring my access to my content [0] in the form in which it was originally submitted. Your argument is the very thing I was referring to with the last sentence in my previous post. "They can do what they want with it, and you're wrong for thinking otherwise" is, besides being factually void, the kind of rationalization that lets FB jerk its users around like this. [0] Yes, in fact, it is my content; I granted them a specifically constrained license, allowing them to use that content, in order to serve my and others' use of it. That's all. There is nothing whatsoever about not having to give back exactly what I uploaded, under any circumstance. From the Fine ToS [1]: > 2. Sharing Your Content and Information You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings. In addition: For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it. Nothing in that snippet, or anything else in the ToS grants them the right only to give back "lesser" versions of the content I uploaded. To suggest otherwise is tantamount to saying that, should I use the tool they provide to download all of my content, I have to suck it up that it will have all vowels elided. [1] https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms
nvch 9y ago
I've deleted all FB content last year (from activity history and timeline) and I regulary find few old posts in my already empty timeline. Looks like they will emerge from some dark corners of database for years.
dane-pgp 9y ago
I wonder if EU data protection law has something to say about this, especially with the GDPR coming into force next May: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-40441434 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-40441434 "We can also demand to know how our data is being used and withdraw consent whenever we like." Combine that with the controversial "right to be forgotten", and I imagine that someone could successfully sue Facebook for lack of a "delete all", and for keeping images around on their servers after deletion.
c_r_w 9y ago
It took me two days to delete all of my old Facebook content.
SN76477 9y ago
Zuckerberg for president!
Eerie 9y ago
> Don't use FB as content storage, don't expect to have your FB content back. Why would you consider using a free service as a content storage in the first place? How naïve can you be?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ucaetano 9y ago
  Thanks for the offensive, useless reply :)
  - Eerie 9y ago
    You are complaining about free stuff. Stop complaining about free stuff.
  - pizza234 9y ago
    I don't think this is useless. A few weeks ago there was a similar case, and surely there are many others. Comments like this should make users think how such use case is radically wrong, for more than a reason.
    - ucaetano 9y ago
      I'm glad to see that most people here disagree with you.

lwansbrough 9y ago

> PS: I went ahead and deleted everything anyway. Out of spite. Yeah, they still have the photos though. IIRC, when you upload a photo to Facebook you grant them a worldwide unlimited license to your photo, so there's really no reason for them to delete it. I suppose they can even use it for marketing purposes.

EGreg 9y ago

Why not use a Facebook App to extract all your photos and videos? You can have a desktop app get an api key and grant it photo permissions etc. and go to town. Full resolution everything. Also you can remove all your posts and comments this way. Perhaps such an app already exists. But if not, do you think FB would revoke keys of such an app? FOUND THEM: Odrive Fotobounce

rosser 9y ago
The existence of workarounds for this behavior on Facebook's part makes it zero less shitty of them. Those images are mine (the general me); Zuck, et al, do not get to leave me a down-rezzed, EXIF-stripped version as a parting gift, in the event I choose not to play in their sandbox any more. Except, of course, that they do. Because we let them.
- mulmen 9y ago
  But they aren't exclusively your images, you gave them to Facebook when you uploaded them. Facebook is not a free image hosting or backup tool. You should never have had an expectation you could get back anything that you put in.
  - rosser 9y ago
    That argument would be far more (read: "at all") compelling if they weren't keeping the full-rez, EXIF'ed images. At that point, they're de facto acting as a backup service, and obscuring my access to my content [0] in the form in which it was originally submitted. Your argument is the very thing I was referring to with the last sentence in my previous post. "They can do what they want with it, and you're wrong for thinking otherwise" is, besides being factually void, the kind of rationalization that lets FB jerk its users around like this. [0] Yes, in fact, it is my content; I granted them a specifically constrained license, allowing them to use that content, in order to serve my and others' use of it. That's all. There is nothing whatsoever about not having to give back exactly what I uploaded, under any circumstance. From the Fine ToS [1]: > 2. Sharing Your Content and Information You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings. In addition: For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it. Nothing in that snippet, or anything else in the ToS grants them the right only to give back "lesser" versions of the content I uploaded. To suggest otherwise is tantamount to saying that, should I use the tool they provide to download all of my content, I have to suck it up that it will have all vowels elided. [1] https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms

nvch 9y ago

I've deleted all FB content last year (from activity history and timeline) and I regulary find few old posts in my already empty timeline. Looks like they will emerge from some dark corners of database for years.

dane-pgp 9y ago

I wonder if EU data protection law has something to say about this, especially with the GDPR coming into force next May: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-40441434 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-40441434 "We can also demand to know how our data is being used and withdraw consent whenever we like." Combine that with the controversial "right to be forgotten", and I imagine that someone could successfully sue Facebook for lack of a "delete all", and for keeping images around on their servers after deletion.

c_r_w 9y ago

It took me two days to delete all of my old Facebook content.

SN76477 9y ago

Zuckerberg for president!

Eerie 9y ago

> Don't use FB as content storage, don't expect to have your FB content back. Why would you consider using a free service as a content storage in the first place? How naïve can you be?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ucaetano 9y ago
Thanks for the offensive, useless reply :)
- Eerie 9y ago
  You are complaining about free stuff. Stop complaining about free stuff.
- pizza234 9y ago
  I don't think this is useless. A few weeks ago there was a similar case, and surely there are many others. Comments like this should make users think how such use case is radically wrong, for more than a reason.
  - ucaetano 9y ago
    I'm glad to see that most people here disagree with you.