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If I could purge some of my Facebook messages after a certain age, I think that would be great. When I downloaded my archive, I had circa-2006 messages with pe
by sct202 8y ago
If I could purge some of my Facebook messages after a certain age, I think that would be great. When I downloaded my archive, I had circa-2006 messages with people who has since deactivated their accounts but their names were labeled "Facebook User."
- fredley 8y agoThis is a problem with almost any online 'space' - everything sticks around forever. You can go left from anyone's Facebook profile picture and see probably the first picture they uploaded to Facebook. Snapchat's USP was that it didn't (not publically) keep stuff around. I think there's a happy middle ground somewhere were I can set an expiration time on anything I post to such a platform (e.g. Facebook/Twitter) so that it goes private after that time - e.g. a year. It wouldn't even harm the bottom line, since all the money is in new content, and I'd still have a private archive of photos if I ever wanted to download them again. All this is moot for me since I don't use services like this at all, but I think there's an opportunity for a company to get this right.
- sct202 8y agoDefinitely is an opportunity I hope that they pursue. Looking back at my first private messages on the platform like 10+ years ago is just full of cringe.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoSo is reading your own journal. And yet people write them. Despite privacy issues, I still think that things sticking around "forever" on the Internet is a good default. Link rot is already a huge problem when you're trying to reference something you read in the past, and that's without auto-expiry.
- jakear 8y agoBut people don’t tend to publish their life’s journals to every random person who recognizes their name in a list of “would you like to friend request X?”
- dhimes 8y agomewe has this as an option on some of its stuff- disappearing posts.
- ameister14 8y agoWere their messages still there, or was the content deleted?
- sct202 8y agoAll the messages were there but the name was scrubbed off (so I could tell who it was by the message content, but it wasn't super obvious), I'm not sure if they deactivated or deleted.
- dv35z 8y agoI've seen this for messages from deleted/deactivated accounts. The text content was still there (!)
- Someone1234 8y agoYou can manually delete conversation histories Visit: https://www.facebook.com/messages/ https://www.facebook.com/messages/ Mouse over a conversation, click the cog, "This will permanently delete all conversation history [Cancel] [Delete] [Archive]." But won't deny Facebook could make this easier/automated.
- psychometry 8y agoBut does that delete it for both parties?
- Someone1234 8y agoNo, each party would have to opt to delete the history. Other platforms have the concept of private/temp conversations.
- likpok 8y agoFacebook now has the concept of both private (i.e. e2e encrypted) and temporary conversations. The UI to access them is a big awkward to be sure. That doesn't help the problem of old messages from before these existed. It's also not super helpful because the retention is no more than a day. Better I think would be like a year -- enough time that you're unlikely to want to refer back to it.
- Someone1234 8y agoFacebook only support them for the Messenger app. You cannot start a temp' conversation from a PC or the web-site.