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You 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 ha

You 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 ago
I'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 ago
  Remove 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 ago
  On 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.
- r00fus 9y ago
  Have you considered, that the AI is simply trying to greedily close the points on it's knowledge graph? Perhaps having a dense graph is simply more profitable for FB? Sure they won't know who you know, but they can send their messages (ostensibly "on behalf of") that person you know/friended. Sure, poison your personal data (get your Fakebook on), but going out and spamming connections may not exactly hurt FB.
  - reaperducer 9y ago
    > Have you considered, that the AI is simply trying to greedily close the points on it's knowledge graph? No, all I've thought is that the AI sucks and is broken and for a company that's supposed to have the smartest people and unlimited money it should know better. Beyond that, no.
    - r00fus 9y ago
      Sucks for you <> sucks for FB. Facebook (and it's pet AI) likely cares more about it's revenue than it does about you.
- andrestan 9y ago
  Yup and then some other proportion are actually people you know/are friends with. You probably occasionally reach out to the ones you know/are friends with and ignore those who language you don't speak in the countries you've never been to. All of this is of course a designed test to see how accurate the model is, to see how ordering of suggestions influences behavior, to see effects of noise, etc. They aren't stupid and they aren't bad at their jobs. It's just a test.
rhizome 9y ago
Here's a possibility: legislation is passed prohibiting FB (and other websites) from using data that the user has marked as deleted.
- hennsen 9y ago
  Haha good one... and even if that happens, they even follow it by the letter... „we don’t use the data, we just have to search it for illegal activities and therefore our ai needs to parse it... but using it? Noooo!
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
- icantdrive55 9y ago
  "The risk though, is that you could inadvertently friend an ISIS sympathizer in Belgium who get radicalized and does something evil and the next thing you know, Fed are knocking your door down at 3 AM and putting you in cuffs." I understand the fear. When I first started using FB, all my friends were porn stars. I came across this list of their emails, and I immediately friended them. I did it because I really didn't like FB, people who had 500 friends, etc., but looking back it was a good move. I regret unfriending them years ago. I think calculated risks can be pulled off successfully. I really hope companies like FB, and Google are decimated. My hope is all big data companies gets their due.
ulrikrasmussen 9y ago
I like this idea and wonder whether it would be possible to automate this. For it to work, it would have to make random tracking pixel requests 24/7 to prevent Facebook from filtering out the noise. Even then, the individual fake requests would have to be indistinguishable from real ones.
aiven 9y ago
I think that such strategy with data poisoning will not be effective because based on current data your activity will be marked as anomaly and will not go into any dataset. So this strategy is the same as doing nothing. But I agree that it's pointless to delete visible data about yourself, because statistics are already stored somewhere else and you don't have power over it.
- Karunamon 9y ago
  Now there's a business idea.. have an app running on your phone and PC that watches your "normal" facebook activity to establish a baseline, and ever so slightly perverts it over time using the same connection so the IP/location information still lines up. Slowly and methodically so the information doesn't get flagged as bogus. Start with overtly partisan political stuff since that's the easiest to classify. Call it Social Chaff as a Service (SCaaS).
- antsar 9y ago
  I wouldn't say its pointless. What if someone gains access to your account through social or technical means? Sure Facebook/NSA/etc have a copy, but at least Customs agents, hackers, and crooks wielding a rubber hose can't access it.
- pelario 9y ago
  I have been fantasizing as a combination of data poisoning and intervention when the poisoning is actually real: make groups to swap profiles for a while. Without even going back to the original, but just jumping to the next one. As long as you agree through a different medium and swap credentials with someone you somehow trust, it should work.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - mygo 9y ago
    why go through all that? who would go through all that? making your own life more difficult in spite of a company? it's not sustainable note: I know that some people actually would. but philosophically speaking I just don't get it, it's almost like its missing some kind of deeper point.
draw_down 9y ago
Shhhhh.
pishpash 9y ago
Unbundle your real identity from your online identity. The problem was solved already with handles, until FB came along.
- ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
  Was it solved? Just because the marketers don't have your name as "John Argano", they still know everything about your handle "pishpash". Even if its not your name, its not anonymous. The same profile can be targeted by political parties and manipulated in ways that we are coming to see as problematic.
dorgo 9y ago
Some years ago i tried to get Tinder to work on my phone. I needed a facebook account for it. No problem. I had several. I created new accoutns each time I logged into facebook for some reason. Tinder still refused to work. Somebody suggested that my facebook account needs at least 50 friends. I found groups in facebook created specifically for the reason of gaining frieds. The next day I had 50+ friends on facebook. This account was locked later by facebook (too many random friends :-P ). I got Tinder to work years later after they dropped facebook account requirenment.
- eledra 9y ago
  That's the whole point of doing a "simple background check" to determine if an account is real, isn't it. At least I think it is more useful for Tinder users.
LifeLiverTransp 9y ago
What you could do- is create a user ring, in which you exchange identitys between users, trusting one another- that way for example - a family would blur to one huge identity for the advertisers, loosing all distinctivness.
cup-of-tea 9y ago
I don't understand why more people don't understand this. Each "post" is a record with a field called "deleted". You can make that field True. You can't remove that record. "Deleting" only gives the database owner one more piece of information about you: that you wanted to delete that record.
- CelestialTeapot 9y ago
  It's because most people are not computer scientists/hobbyists/engineers. They are laypeople whose knowledge of the internet, and computers in general, is very limited.
  - jsemrau 9y ago
    One anecdote from my life. In university one of my best friends at the time found the browser function "view source" and was convinces he can now hack the website.
    - JauntyHatAngle 9y ago
      I mean, depending on the quality of the website, he now can.
    - prepend 9y ago
      I’ve probably had to explain at least 1000 times that our software being open source does not mean that people can edit the functionality of the software running on our servers. One thing that is cool about all these pushes to teach every kid programming is that it might help instill “data values understanding.” Or whatever you call the source->object->runtime. And how data works. Too many people confuse software with data “the data is in the app” and confuse it all with a book in a library. You just burn the book and it’s gone. Or you transfer the book from one library to another. This is a good metaphor for usage, but falls apart if you have privacy or security concerns. Logic that seems natural and instinct to whatever you call people who program/use tech, is incorrectly understood by others. Especially “digital natives” who always had computers and Internet. My kid has all of his files in google from forever. This breaks down in situations where Google’s interests are out of sync with his own.
avip 9y ago
A more practical strategy would be not to have a FB account. If you can't beat them, leave them.
411mrc 9y ago
Data poisoning doesn't work. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nvYGi7-Lxo&app=desktop https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nvYGi7-Lxo&app=desktop The gist is social media posts can be used as a unique fingerprint to correlate your whole browser history. Unless you are willing to spam your friends with useless links.... Researchers discovered a politician had a certain medical condition and a judge had "interesting" habits, even in privacy centric Germany. All from publicly available apis and data for sale. They specifically say their algo is immune to data poisoning.
snomad 9y ago
Their is an excellent book called "Into the Whirlwind" about Stalin and the soviet era purges. One of the strategies of those arrested was to name 2 more. While a great concept in theory, it just made the purges worse. https://www.amazon.com/Journey-into-Whirlwind-Eugenia-Ginzburg/dp/0156027518/ https://www.amazon.com/Journey-into-Whirlwind-Eugenia-Ginzbu... I always come back to structural regulation works best. At the end of the day, we just need to make it very costly to keep too much information. We set rates for personally identiftying attributes (e.g storing a birthdate costs x, a partial ssn Y, etc). The charge is per attribute per person per day. This should incentivize the tech companies to develop and store broad scores (e.g scores high for likes sports and classic rock, low for opera) rather than personally identifying info
yorby 9y ago
alternatively, you can block Facebook's tracking (poisoning data might be somewhat easy to spot automatically)
chickenfries 9y ago
The 4th paragraph from TFA: > I know I cannot close the barn door on any data of mine that's already out in the wild, but I can control any further scrapes of my Facebook data by manually removing as much of my Facebook Activity as I can. Unfortunately, and not unexpectedly, Facebook do not give you a simple way to do this.
andrepd 9y ago
>They still have tracking pixels You can block that with e.g. a hosts file blocklist that blocks all Facebook related domains.
jogjayr 9y ago
> They still have tracking pixels. Add-ons like Privacy Badger or Ghostery can block those though, right?
- m-localhost 9y ago
  yes
rad_gruchalski 9y ago
Or sign in only in an incognito mode.
- sundvor 9y ago
  I use Firefox Focus on Android when I don't care about sessions. Works an absolute treat.
misiti3780 9y ago
Unless I am missing your point, if you just add this to your /etc/hosts file facebook can track any pixels: https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporations/facebook/all https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporatio...
baddox 9y ago
What’s the advantage in being associated with a Facebook profile that doesn’t represent your true interests, friends, etc? I suppose it may be nice to see poorly targeted ads and thus be less likely to be convinced to spend money? Or if they’re trying to influence your mood, political views, etc., I suppose it might be preferable to receive essentially random influence rather than influence correlated with your actual attributes.
6t6t6t6 9y ago
Somehow related to your comment, I wanted to post a link to this extension: https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/ What it does is basically to hide the adds from you, but clicking all of them. This is so messed up for add companies, that Google removed it from their App Store.
danso 9y ago
So your skepticism seems to be aimed not just at Facebook but at "the Internet". So you believe that Google is lying/deceptive in its privacy policy? https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/465 https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/465 > When you use Google products and services, we keep some data with your Google Account, like when and how you use certain features. We keep this data even if you delete activity or other items. > For example, if you go to My Activity and delete a search you did on Google, we'll still know that you did a search, but not what you searched for. What you searched for will no longer be stored with your account. > We keep this data as long as it's relevant to meet uses like those above. If you delete your account, we remove this data from it.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
DyslexicAtheist 9y ago
>>The best way I know of to combat Facebook is to poison their data. some strategies for poisoning data sets are described here https://iotdarwinaward.com/post/improve-your-privacy-in-age-of-mass-surveillance/ https://iotdarwinaward.com/post/improve-your-privacy-in-age-...
slededit 9y ago
You know I've heard this over the history of the internet. But there have been lots of things on the internet that have been lost over the years.
unicornporn 9y ago
Article 17 of the GDPR, The Right To Erasure, states: Data Subjects have the right to obtain erasure from the data controller, without undue delay, if one of the following applies: The controller doesn’t need the data anymore The subject withdraws consent for the processing with which they previously agreed to (and the controller doesn’t need to legally keep it [N.B. Many will, e.g. banks, for 7 years.]) The subject uses their right to object (Article 21) to the data processing The controller and/or its processor is processing the data unlawfully There is a legal requirement for the data to be erased The data subject was a child at the time of collection (See Article 8 for more details on a child’s ability to consent) If a controller makes the data public, then they are obligated to take reasonable steps to get other processors to erase the data, e.g. A website publishes an untrue story on an individual, and later is required to erase it, and also must request other websites erase their copy of the story.

giarc 9y ago

I'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 ago
Remove 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 ago
On 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.

r00fus 9y ago
Have you considered, that the AI is simply trying to greedily close the points on it's knowledge graph? Perhaps having a dense graph is simply more profitable for FB? Sure they won't know who you know, but they can send their messages (ostensibly "on behalf of") that person you know/friended. Sure, poison your personal data (get your Fakebook on), but going out and spamming connections may not exactly hurt FB.
- reaperducer 9y ago
  > Have you considered, that the AI is simply trying to greedily close the points on it's knowledge graph? No, all I've thought is that the AI sucks and is broken and for a company that's supposed to have the smartest people and unlimited money it should know better. Beyond that, no.
  - r00fus 9y ago
    Sucks for you <> sucks for FB. Facebook (and it's pet AI) likely cares more about it's revenue than it does about you.
andrestan 9y ago
Yup and then some other proportion are actually people you know/are friends with. You probably occasionally reach out to the ones you know/are friends with and ignore those who language you don't speak in the countries you've never been to. All of this is of course a designed test to see how accurate the model is, to see how ordering of suggestions influences behavior, to see effects of noise, etc. They aren't stupid and they aren't bad at their jobs. It's just a test.

rhizome 9y ago

Here's a possibility: legislation is passed prohibiting FB (and other websites) from using data that the user has marked as deleted.

hennsen 9y ago
Haha good one... and even if that happens, they even follow it by the letter... „we don’t use the data, we just have to search it for illegal activities and therefore our ai needs to parse it... but using it? Noooo!

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

icantdrive55 9y ago
"The risk though, is that you could inadvertently friend an ISIS sympathizer in Belgium who get radicalized and does something evil and the next thing you know, Fed are knocking your door down at 3 AM and putting you in cuffs." I understand the fear. When I first started using FB, all my friends were porn stars. I came across this list of their emails, and I immediately friended them. I did it because I really didn't like FB, people who had 500 friends, etc., but looking back it was a good move. I regret unfriending them years ago. I think calculated risks can be pulled off successfully. I really hope companies like FB, and Google are decimated. My hope is all big data companies gets their due.

ulrikrasmussen 9y ago

I like this idea and wonder whether it would be possible to automate this. For it to work, it would have to make random tracking pixel requests 24/7 to prevent Facebook from filtering out the noise. Even then, the individual fake requests would have to be indistinguishable from real ones.

aiven 9y ago

I think that such strategy with data poisoning will not be effective because based on current data your activity will be marked as anomaly and will not go into any dataset. So this strategy is the same as doing nothing. But I agree that it's pointless to delete visible data about yourself, because statistics are already stored somewhere else and you don't have power over it.

Karunamon 9y ago
Now there's a business idea.. have an app running on your phone and PC that watches your "normal" facebook activity to establish a baseline, and ever so slightly perverts it over time using the same connection so the IP/location information still lines up. Slowly and methodically so the information doesn't get flagged as bogus. Start with overtly partisan political stuff since that's the easiest to classify. Call it Social Chaff as a Service (SCaaS).
antsar 9y ago
I wouldn't say its pointless. What if someone gains access to your account through social or technical means? Sure Facebook/NSA/etc have a copy, but at least Customs agents, hackers, and crooks wielding a rubber hose can't access it.
pelario 9y ago
I have been fantasizing as a combination of data poisoning and intervention when the poisoning is actually real: make groups to swap profiles for a while. Without even going back to the original, but just jumping to the next one. As long as you agree through a different medium and swap credentials with someone you somehow trust, it should work.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- mygo 9y ago
  why go through all that? who would go through all that? making your own life more difficult in spite of a company? it's not sustainable note: I know that some people actually would. but philosophically speaking I just don't get it, it's almost like its missing some kind of deeper point.

draw_down 9y ago

Shhhhh.

pishpash 9y ago

Unbundle your real identity from your online identity. The problem was solved already with handles, until FB came along.

ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
Was it solved? Just because the marketers don't have your name as "John Argano", they still know everything about your handle "pishpash". Even if its not your name, its not anonymous. The same profile can be targeted by political parties and manipulated in ways that we are coming to see as problematic.

dorgo 9y ago

Some years ago i tried to get Tinder to work on my phone. I needed a facebook account for it. No problem. I had several. I created new accoutns each time I logged into facebook for some reason. Tinder still refused to work. Somebody suggested that my facebook account needs at least 50 friends. I found groups in facebook created specifically for the reason of gaining frieds. The next day I had 50+ friends on facebook. This account was locked later by facebook (too many random friends :-P ). I got Tinder to work years later after they dropped facebook account requirenment.

eledra 9y ago
That's the whole point of doing a "simple background check" to determine if an account is real, isn't it. At least I think it is more useful for Tinder users.

LifeLiverTransp 9y ago

What you could do- is create a user ring, in which you exchange identitys between users, trusting one another- that way for example - a family would blur to one huge identity for the advertisers, loosing all distinctivness.

cup-of-tea 9y ago

I don't understand why more people don't understand this. Each "post" is a record with a field called "deleted". You can make that field True. You can't remove that record. "Deleting" only gives the database owner one more piece of information about you: that you wanted to delete that record.

CelestialTeapot 9y ago
It's because most people are not computer scientists/hobbyists/engineers. They are laypeople whose knowledge of the internet, and computers in general, is very limited.
- jsemrau 9y ago
  One anecdote from my life. In university one of my best friends at the time found the browser function "view source" and was convinces he can now hack the website.
  - JauntyHatAngle 9y ago
    I mean, depending on the quality of the website, he now can.
  - prepend 9y ago
    I’ve probably had to explain at least 1000 times that our software being open source does not mean that people can edit the functionality of the software running on our servers. One thing that is cool about all these pushes to teach every kid programming is that it might help instill “data values understanding.” Or whatever you call the source->object->runtime. And how data works. Too many people confuse software with data “the data is in the app” and confuse it all with a book in a library. You just burn the book and it’s gone. Or you transfer the book from one library to another. This is a good metaphor for usage, but falls apart if you have privacy or security concerns. Logic that seems natural and instinct to whatever you call people who program/use tech, is incorrectly understood by others. Especially “digital natives” who always had computers and Internet. My kid has all of his files in google from forever. This breaks down in situations where Google’s interests are out of sync with his own.

avip 9y ago

A more practical strategy would be not to have a FB account. If you can't beat them, leave them.

411mrc 9y ago

Data poisoning doesn't work. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nvYGi7-Lxo&app=desktop https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nvYGi7-Lxo&app=desktop The gist is social media posts can be used as a unique fingerprint to correlate your whole browser history. Unless you are willing to spam your friends with useless links.... Researchers discovered a politician had a certain medical condition and a judge had "interesting" habits, even in privacy centric Germany. All from publicly available apis and data for sale. They specifically say their algo is immune to data poisoning.

snomad 9y ago

Their is an excellent book called "Into the Whirlwind" about Stalin and the soviet era purges. One of the strategies of those arrested was to name 2 more. While a great concept in theory, it just made the purges worse. https://www.amazon.com/Journey-into-Whirlwind-Eugenia-Ginzburg/dp/0156027518/ https://www.amazon.com/Journey-into-Whirlwind-Eugenia-Ginzbu... I always come back to structural regulation works best. At the end of the day, we just need to make it very costly to keep too much information. We set rates for personally identiftying attributes (e.g storing a birthdate costs x, a partial ssn Y, etc). The charge is per attribute per person per day. This should incentivize the tech companies to develop and store broad scores (e.g scores high for likes sports and classic rock, low for opera) rather than personally identifying info

yorby 9y ago

alternatively, you can block Facebook's tracking (poisoning data might be somewhat easy to spot automatically)

chickenfries 9y ago

The 4th paragraph from TFA: > I know I cannot close the barn door on any data of mine that's already out in the wild, but I can control any further scrapes of my Facebook data by manually removing as much of my Facebook Activity as I can. Unfortunately, and not unexpectedly, Facebook do not give you a simple way to do this.

andrepd 9y ago

>They still have tracking pixels You can block that with e.g. a hosts file blocklist that blocks all Facebook related domains.

jogjayr 9y ago

> They still have tracking pixels. Add-ons like Privacy Badger or Ghostery can block those though, right?

m-localhost 9y ago
yes

rad_gruchalski 9y ago

Or sign in only in an incognito mode.

sundvor 9y ago
I use Firefox Focus on Android when I don't care about sessions. Works an absolute treat.

misiti3780 9y ago

Unless I am missing your point, if you just add this to your /etc/hosts file facebook can track any pixels: https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporations/facebook/all https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporatio...

baddox 9y ago

What’s the advantage in being associated with a Facebook profile that doesn’t represent your true interests, friends, etc? I suppose it may be nice to see poorly targeted ads and thus be less likely to be convinced to spend money? Or if they’re trying to influence your mood, political views, etc., I suppose it might be preferable to receive essentially random influence rather than influence correlated with your actual attributes.

6t6t6t6 9y ago

Somehow related to your comment, I wanted to post a link to this extension: https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/ What it does is basically to hide the adds from you, but clicking all of them. This is so messed up for add companies, that Google removed it from their App Store.

danso 9y ago

So your skepticism seems to be aimed not just at Facebook but at "the Internet". So you believe that Google is lying/deceptive in its privacy policy? https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/465 https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/465 > When you use Google products and services, we keep some data with your Google Account, like when and how you use certain features. We keep this data even if you delete activity or other items. > For example, if you go to My Activity and delete a search you did on Google, we'll still know that you did a search, but not what you searched for. What you searched for will no longer be stored with your account. > We keep this data as long as it's relevant to meet uses like those above. If you delete your account, we remove this data from it.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

DyslexicAtheist 9y ago

>>The best way I know of to combat Facebook is to poison their data. some strategies for poisoning data sets are described here https://iotdarwinaward.com/post/improve-your-privacy-in-age-of-mass-surveillance/ https://iotdarwinaward.com/post/improve-your-privacy-in-age-...

slededit 9y ago

You know I've heard this over the history of the internet. But there have been lots of things on the internet that have been lost over the years.

unicornporn 9y ago

Article 17 of the GDPR, The Right To Erasure, states: Data Subjects have the right to obtain erasure from the data controller, without undue delay, if one of the following applies: The controller doesn’t need the data anymore The subject withdraws consent for the processing with which they previously agreed to (and the controller doesn’t need to legally keep it [N.B. Many will, e.g. banks, for 7 years.]) The subject uses their right to object (Article 21) to the data processing The controller and/or its processor is processing the data unlawfully There is a legal requirement for the data to be erased The data subject was a child at the time of collection (See Article 8 for more details on a child’s ability to consent) If a controller makes the data public, then they are obligated to take reasonable steps to get other processors to erase the data, e.g. A website publishes an untrue story on an individual, and later is required to erase it, and also must request other websites erase their copy of the story.