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How I Erased Facebook Comments and Likes
- tammer 9y agoThis is excellent and far more efficient than other tools I've tried.
- hprotagonist 9y agoWhere's the code?
- davidpelayo 9y agoIt didn't get published
- Froyoh 9y agoThen publish it you
- mixmastamyk 9y agoAre the objects actually deleted or just set deleted=true in the db?
- amelius 9y agoYeah, but at least other people (third parties) are less likely to mine your data.
- mtgx 9y agoIt still means Facebook can no longer legally use that data, at least in the EU.
- reaperducer 9y agoIf companies let laws get in the way of making money, there would be no need for enforcement bureaus.
- epc 9y agoI ran one of those greasemonkey scripts to (try to) delete my Facebook profile posts in mid–2016. Some months later I decided to just delete my account entirely. Many of the posts I thought I'd deleted were still in the account archive I downloaded before deleting my account (this was > 30 days after I'd thought I'd deleted them, but less than a year, so it may just be a data retention issue).
- cmurf 9y agoThis would be a really good question to get a Congresscritter to ask a Facebook rep under oath. Maybe it doesn't matter and they'll lie. But I'd still like to get an answer: if a U.S. citizen deletes individual data, or the entire account, is the data retained in any sense? how does this differ for an E.U. citizen?
- merb 9y agowell I'm pretty sure all these ways to delete your facebook stuff will only soft delete it. I mean it's way more sane to do: UPDATE picture SET date_deleted = now() WHERE picture_id = ? instead of actually deleting it, because so you can recreate something if people deleted their stuff by accident. Means facebook probably still has your data.
- PsylentKnight 9y agoDo we know if Facebook stores the revision history of a given status or comment? Would it be possible to programmatically overwrite every status and comment?
- mcny 9y ago> Do we know if Facebook stores the revision history of a given status or comment? Would it be possible to programmatically overwrite every status and comment? Yes. Facebook does. There's a quora question that asks "Why does Facebook provide an edit/revision history for edits made to comments?" https://i.imgur.com/GW0x500.png https://i.imgur.com/GW0x500.png https://archive.fo/EKzQx https://archive.fo/EKzQx One answer says: > I think its simply so you can see what was their originally. People are allowed to edit their comments now and they could write something one minute, get alot of likes and totally switch it to something else. If the comment starts off with something nice like "Have a nice day" and people like it and afterwards the person who wrote the comment comes back and changes it to something negative, then that would make you look bad. So it is there to make sure everyone can see what was originally there. Another answer says > Yes. It allows the audience to keep the content editor accountable for their actions. The transparency in information sets clear expectations for both the content producer and consumer.
- MSM 9y agoYep, this is how pretty much every large data warehouse works as well. It's very useful to be able to say "What was the state of everything at time X", even if it's been deleted you want to be able to see the state at certain times. I also imagine with all the data that FB has, they probably have a legal obligation to keep data as it can be useful in solving crimes or gathering evidence. In fact their TOS explicitly states that they will preserve data: "We may access, preserve and share your information in response to a legal request"
- kevin_b_er 9y agoIt is unlikely facebook deleted anything. Just all the stuff you did is marked as unavailable to the public. It would be kept because it is still profitable to sell the information about your private actions to other corporations.
- jedanbik 9y agoHey Jaruzel, Do you think you will share the code on github or something similar? Great writeup.
- llao 9y agoSeconding this! I wonder if it could be done with some straightforward greasemonkey scripting or something.
- Jaruzel 9y agoIt's just some C# loops, and scanning the DOM for 'a' tags, and then analysing the 'href' attribute on them, and if there's a match, put it in the array. What I wanted to share was the methodology I used to solve the problem.
- dandare 9y agoIs this even necessary in the age of GDPR? I mean, with GDPR Facebook can not just thumbstone your profile, it has to delete every copy of every data that can uniquely identify you, which includes "your" likes and of course comments.
- llao 9y agoJaruzel wanted to keep their account, but remove their visible activity.
- reaperducer 9y ago>Is this even necessary in the age of GDPR? Yes.
- EB-Barrington 9y agoEmphasis should be on the cessation of commenting, clicking like, or performing any other Facebook activity, or this process would seem to be in vain. (for sure, the process is only a "soft-delete")
- Jaruzel 9y agoIf it is a 'soft-delete' as you and others point out, then at least I know I've done as much as I can without resorting to deleting my account. And yes, I intend to use FB in 'read-only' mode from now on.
- slig 9y ago> And yes, I intend to use FB in 'read-only' mode from now on. If you visit a profile, view a video, open a group or message it's all recorded. I'm betting that they can even tell the probability you read an ad just by seeing if you stop scrolling on it and then start scrolling again.
- monocasa 9y agoEven if you delete your account, that information is still probably kept (assuming that you're in the US).
- allanbreyes 9y agoSome actions are completely out of your control, though. Other people can still tag you (on pictures, locations, etc.), even if you hide it from your timeline. If there's an option to prevent people from tagging you, I haven't found it.
- hycaria 9y agoI wondered how you got that number and you don't explain how to (I don't want to get rid of that piece of memorabilia)
- Jaruzel 9y agoI just had a counter that tracked the DeleteList().Length
- laythea 9y agoShould be titled: "How I Erased A Copy of 5000 Facebook Comments and Likes"
- vikascoder 9y agoOr "How I have additional data to Facebook about my erasures on top of the copy of data I planned to erase".
- avoidit 9y agoUp next: "How I wrote an article that explains how to do something, which actually doesn't do anything, and helps in absolutely no way other than make people feel better they did something rather than nothing"
- coldtea 9y agoUp next: how I wrote a comment hating and contributing nothing to the discussion. Well, it does something: it erases your public comments on FB, and even more so, shows in a few steps how a programmer can go about doing so. Not everything has to be about what FB knows.
- cornholio 9y agoAgree. Facebook might still have them in some log or neural thinggy about you, but it will protect you from direct profiling like the Cambridge Analitica debacle. If it would turn out that deleting the activity still allows Facebook to keep them and sell them to 3rd parties, it would be a company-ending event, so there is at least self-preservation.
- laythea 9y agoWhy do you presume that once you come off facebook, your data is not used? That is not true, the data gets used and pimped around to the highest bidder. What is true, is that as time passes that data has less value (assuming you actually stopped pumping in the data in fb).
- nemacol 9y agoSome friends and I have been talking and we think the better choice would be to write something that would flood your profile with data. Your stuff may still be there but with that much noise it would make the data useless.
- Blackstone4 9y agoI love this idea. Maybe someone could set up a service where you enter your fb password or upload your fb cookie. Then it would just destroy your profile with data. How would it handle historical data? I don't think you can backdate messages and photos.
- slig 9y agoIt'd look like automated spam, and they'd block/flag it on the spot.
- Blackstone4 9y agoWhat would happen to your fb account? Do they only block the account or the spam? Also could you use ML to be more discrete to avoid the spam flag?
- slig 9y agoNot sure about ML, but there're several problems to solve before that. The service would need IP address that aren't from known cloud provier, otherwise it's trivial for them to notice and block. Also it'd have to look like a real user, so a full browser (posting directly to their endpoints will get you flagged). Then, each user can't post too much and the IP would need to be recycled as well. Too much trouble to even start that.
- JetSpiegel 9y agoYou can rent a botnet of desktops from residential IP. For example, the Hola "unblocker" C&C people have this service. https://luminati.io/ https://luminati.io/
- horsecaptin 9y ago"Never delete data. Storage is cheap. Just mark it as deleted."
- drc37 9y agoFunny. I just did the same thing last week.
- deckard1 9y agoYou can't "delete" anything from the Internet. Despite Snapchat saying you can. Or a big button that says "Delete". Furthermore, Facebook doesn't need you to have an active, visible profile for it to collect data on you. They still have tracking pixels. "Erasing" comments and likes doesn't do anything or get to the heart of the issue. The best way I know of to combat Facebook is to poison their data. Which means taking the effort to "friend" strangers across the world, "like" random things, visit websites you don't care about and basically blur your profile to the point that Facebook can't tell who you are or what your actual interests are. It's quite an effort over years. But no. Everyone wants a button. Which is how we ended up in this situation to begin with.
- giarc 9y agoI've always wondered about Google Drive. If you right-click on a file, you'll notice it says "Remove" instead of the more common "Delete". Perhaps this is a Material Design spec, but I always felt like that was their way of keeping a copy of the file to add to your personal data file.
- ggg9990 9y agoRemove and delete are distinct actions in shared file systems. “Remove” gets it out of your Google Drive. But if it’s a shared file, it’s not yours to delete, or if your company has a retention policy, you may not have the permission to delete it.
- djhworld 9y agoOn the web UI they have a "Bin" option, which is sort of like the recycling bin on Windows. In the Bin folder, right clicking a file gives the option "delete forever"...whether that is actually the case or not I don't know.
- reaperducer 9y ago> Which means taking the effort to "friend" strangers across the world Easy enough. More than half of the people that Facebook recommends to be as "friends" are people whose language I don't speak in countries to which I've never been. Nice AI, Zuckerbean.
- kristianc 9y agoThe data is already gone. It's on a developer's server, a developers laptop, or has been laundered and is back in Facebook. Even Facebook has no way of tracking what has been done with the data.
- giarc 9y agoJaruzel - in using Facebook since this purge, what have you noticed? Less relevant ads? Bad friend suggestions? Other?
- Jaruzel 9y agoI've literally just done it (yesterday), so I've not seen anything different yet.
- woudsma 9y agoDoes someone have a script for this? #interested I'm on the verge of deleting my Facebook account, but for the same reasons as given by OP i'm hesitant. Facebook is the only platform with i use to connect to some of my closest friends on the other side of the planet. Also staying up to date with events/parties. If there was an alternative for these, i would've ditched Facebook yesterday. I've wasted too many hours of my life scrolling through the feed, being subjected to all kinds of psychological manipulation. Not to mention that Facebook probably knows more about me subjectively than any other person. I'm done.
- cwkoss 9y agoWould be cool to make a script that just deletes everything older than 30 days. Then most of your friends wouldn't notice anything unusual about you in their news feed, but you wouldn't be making as much a large dataset for advertising and political marketing
- HankB99 9y agoWere I FB, I would make sure that the deletion only made the data invisible to the user and kept it for their customers. After all, we "gave them permission" in the first place so this would not violate that. If they're smart, they're already doing that.
- naspinski 9y agoThat is surely what is happening - a general (not always, I know!) rule in programming is to never delete anything, just mark it as deleted/deprecated/etc. and do not show it.
- ascendantlogic 9y agoYeah, I'm pretty sure deleting doesn't really take the data from Facebook. Really all you can do is stop the flow of new data to them.
- cwkoss 9y agoThis leaves two possibilities: If they don't let advertisers query deleted data - my original proposal would be effective at preventing third parties from getting your data. If they DO let advertisers query deleted data - you can 'poison' you account by posting and deleting a huge volume of misleading advertiser-relevant data.
- hw 9y agoI asked this a while ago, but when you delete something on FB, the data's probably not completely deleted. There's likely data retained in backups (unless they have some way of pruning your data from backups), and it's likely that your data already sits on an external platform OUTSIDE of Facebook. Unless Facebook requires apps that you connect to to delete your information gathered from Facebook when you delete your FB account or when you disconnect an app, you're likely to have your personal data and likes and comments already somewhere else.
- parliament32 9y agoProbably not, but how much does that really matter? The main point of these erasures, IMO, is so 'analytics' providers can't sift through it... and I doubt FB makes their backups available to such providers.
- t1o5 9y agoThat's very clever. I tried to do something along those lines. On a second thought, why bother, its just a flag for them.
- narven 9y agoI'm pretty sure you also erased all the 2000000 backups that fb makes every minute
- dudul 9y ago"How I flipped a couple booleans to `is_deleted=true` in Facebook's DB"
- nikolay 9y agoDeleting anything given the limitations of Facebook, is very irresponsible. I've invested hours of commenting on stuff. The way Facebook is designed if people delete their comment or posts on which I commented, my content gets wiped out, too. Other systems have handled this gracefully in the past. I hate when somebody decided to wipe all evidence out and put hours of life into the trashcan. If you want Facebook to be responsible, set an example, and be responsible and respectful of other people's time and effort!
- anon1979 9y agoIs this a joke? Comments on Facebook are not "effort". They are a waste of life.
- bitL 9y ago"How I set the hide flag on all my comments and likes while doing nothing about actually deleting them."
- riebschlager 9y agoFWIW for anyone trying to permanently ditch Facebook, adding these entries to your hosts file is also a good step. https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporations/facebook/all https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporatio... At the very least, it helps break the habit of visiting Facebook.
- 411mrc 9y agoWow, thanks for this.
- eterm 9y agoDoes the "right to be forgotten" extend to Facebook? If I can write to google to not appear in google search results, would it be possible to write to google and ask not to appear in their results when people search my name?
- hokus 9y agoMost harmful is to delete the most recent material. Say everything after 2016. Nothing makes a "social" site look more dead than abandoned accounts.
- thrwaway0564564 9y agoWe need to solve the problem of companies gobbling up consumer data by means of "connectors". Remember back in the day when social was just a place to write on walls. Now people use it as their identity/email on the internet. It's like Walmart in that regard, the giant mega corp is just all too convenient to resist. We need more innovating ma' and pop shops on the internet if anyone other than ourselves will be stewards of our data in the future.
- downandout 9y agoIronically, this kind of automated activity is a violation of the TOS and may get your account suspended.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jumpinalake 9y agoHate to break it to you but you essentially just hid all that shit from the UI.
- nstj 9y agoYou could just not give any 3rd party app permissions to see your stuff and achieve the same thing?
- davewasthere 9y agoHa... I did exactly the same. Automated mbasic to delete/hide from timeline/remove reaction to everything older than the last 30 days. Also deleted all albums and photos that I could. (leaving a few cover photos and a single profile picture) I know there'll be backups and it's probably just a soft delete. But it was still an enjoyable process. By default, facebook should allow you to keep a tailing delete of everything older than XX days if wanted.
- gizmodo59 9y agoWhen you delete something, I think its not even setting true to the deleted column but just a display:none /s
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- gerardnll 9y agoDo you really need to crawl an html? There's APIs to do that already, right?
- ktpsns 9y agoSo much people here mention it would be pointless to poison the profile data with noise. This is giving up before trying. In the end it's a fight of our algorithms against Facebooks. I'm quite confident who wins.
- johnnyOnTheSpot 9y agoBuyer's remorse is the new meme.
- katebrooks 9y agoI found some websites that do the detective work to find your online traces but don't know if they are that useful. I believe, once the information gone online it's backed up somewhere even if the website deletes your data. For me, that's big data, lol. I learned a new tip today. Thanks.
- GnarfGnarf 9y agoI'm not a big fan of Facebook. It's a huge black hole sucking up your time. However, I recently had great success crowd-sourcing a new software feature from a closed FB group. The people were great: informed, smart and helpful. Over a couple of weeks, I was able to release a cutting-edge chart that innovates genetic genealogy. Just never publish anything you wouldn't be comfortable sharing with the World.
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