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Mark Zuckerberg Promised a Clear History Tool Almost a Year Ago

• denzil_correa 8y ago
  The Recode article in December touched an important point about the name "Clear History" [0] > There’s a reason that Clear History isn’t called “Delete History”: Using the feature will disassociate browsing data that Facebook collects from your specific account but it won’t be erased from Facebook’s servers completely, Baser said. Instead it’s just “de-identified,” which means it’s stored by Facebook but no longer tied to the user who created it. [0] https://www.recode.net/2018/12/17/18140062/facebook-clear-history-update-privacy-targeting-data-collection https://www.recode.net/2018/12/17/18140062/facebook-clear-hi...
• andy_ppp 8y ago
  Can I propose that we start on a "noise" tool/browser plugin for these suveillance captialism companies? Not only would this be very interesting to implement it woud help to mess up their profitability by training the algorithm in arbitrary stuff that no-one is interested in. It seems more sensible than trying to block them - instead give them loads of bad data ruining their business model? For instance you could pick which set of noise you wanted to feed Google i.e. convince Google you are single mother from Lithuania... or Facebook you're a 63 year old man from Italy or Instagram you are a Teenager from Korea. Every time a tracker or data point is sent to them to "know" you it could be a lie. This would lead you out of your search bubble too so political ads by Russians being bought to undermine Hillary's black vote might be more clear to everyone. Trusting Facebook or Google to do the right thing against their financial interest won't work will it.
  • janesvilleseo 8y ago
    Might be fun. This would be similar to what recording industry did on P2P sites. At first it was easy to get what you were looking for. Then it got saturated with garbage.
    • bambax 8y ago
      Did it? I didn't notice it.
      • kevas 8y ago
        Think Kazaa(?) days
      • LeftTurnSignal 8y ago
        I barely noticed it back in the day too. I had a friend who was into piracy quite a bit more who complained about getting the wrong movie or getting the wrong mp3s. I don't know if I ran into that issue, but I wasn't really downloading a lot of mainstream stuff compared to him either.
    • RankingMember 8y ago
      I recall the P2P sabotage efforts being pretty feeble. I particularly recall Madonna's record company having an album labled as her most recent album shared on KaZaa that was actually just a bunch of mp3s of her saying "What the fuck do you think you're doing!?". Funny stuff. Edit: Found a copy of the audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU5xC00m-gA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU5xC00m-gA
    • rchaud 8y ago
      I remember that! From around 2001-2003, a good chunk of the Top 40 tunes found on file sharing networks would be one verse, looped over and over so the MP3 duration was equal to that of the actual song. This worked best on mainstream P2P clients like Limewire, Kazaa, Ares (all based on Gnutella I think), because the fake MP3s would propagate more widely. It didn't work as well (or at all), on relatively obscure, community-based networks like Slsk, where people were more likely to share entire albums, and not just the singles.
  • Vinnl 8y ago
    I've been thinking about this as well, after using a manual version of this strategy. Might still implement it one day. That said, it's pretty hard. It's not entirely clear which data points Facebook uses, but it's very likely you can't influence all of them. For example, friends adding you as contacts, or linking your profile to your phone number. If you also want to continue using it as normal, your normal usage will still give a lot of data about what you view; what you interact with; when you use it; that might stand out from the random stuff - and if you don't want to continue using it as usual, the extension will have to visit the website by itself, without interfering with your regular browsing activity, and without relying on your computer being on. I also think that if something like this would get big enough to actually impact the quality of their algorithms, it'd be pretty easy for Facebook to detect abnormal activity. (And of course, it's not even that much of a problem if the algorithm screws up more often, as long as advertisers believe it's accurate.)
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  • tru3_power 8y ago
    I am totally down with this.
  • JackuB 8y ago
    Noiszy does that https://noiszy.com https://noiszy.com
    • andy_ppp 8y ago
      Amazing, but I really don't trust them to browse the web for me!
    • waynecochran 8y ago
      Can anyone vet this? How do I know they are not evil?
    • lozaning 8y ago
      I've used this for quite some time, and can verify it works on some level. Generally after running it my google now suggested cards on Android are all out of right field and totally irrelevant to anything i'm actually interested in.
  • nurettin 8y ago
    They will detect your noise. Then you will end up being one of their "noise client" datapoints, associating you with the actions and behaviors of a person who would pay for privacy and thus they will try to serve you ads according to your behavioural patterns as usual.
    • Misdicorl 8y ago
      I think the goal would be to get a sufficient percentage of the entire internet to generate noise, without having to be aware of it. In a world where Firefox and Safari were the major internet browsers, this wouldn't actually be that hard since it could be built into those browsers directly and would already align pretty nicely with their respective parent company ethos
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      • pixl97 8y ago
        "You cannot log onto Facebook with this web browser, please use Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge to continue" --FB
        • Misdicorl 8y ago
          Yes, that is one potential countermeasure. I wonder if it would be effective or if it would be the beginning of the end for fb.
          • pixl97 8y ago
            >In 2015, it is expected that 70.1 percent of Facebook users worldwide will access the social network through their mobile phone. What I don't know if that means browser or App. Not effective at all if most people use the app.
        • Misdicorl 8y ago
          Circling back again, the more likely warpath FB would pursue is making FB work very poorly on non-cooperative browsers and excellently on cooperative ones. Then users will blame the browser for being trash rather than FB.
  • r3bl 8y ago
    AdNauseum[0] hides all the ads from you, but clicks them in the background to increase noise ratio. As you might assume, it's not available in the Chrome's extension store. I've used a similar add-on for Google search (the add-on made some human-like Google searches in the background), but I can't remember its name now. Facebook would be a pointless exercise, since the <div> names are automatically generated. You can't even hide the sidebars you never use using CSS because they'll all change their <div> IDs on refresh. That and the murkiness of what exactly is an ad on Facebook makes even the most thorough adblockers struggling to work properly even in an otherwise-ideal situation (a desktop browser with an adblocker). [0] https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • badfrog 8y ago
      > Facebook would be a pointless exercise, since the <div> names are automatically generated. Also: > all ads are supposed to contain the word “sponsored” as part of a mandatory disclosure, so users can distinguish between ads and their friends’ posts. Our tool recognized ads by searching for that word. Last year, Facebook added invisible letters to the HTML code of the site. So, to a computer, the word registered as “SpSonSsoSredS.” Later, it also added an invisible “Sponsored” disclosure to posts from your friends. https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-blocks-ad-transparency-tools https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-blocks-ad-transp...
      • r3bl 8y ago
        On top of that, Facebook and I have a different view on what constitutes as an ad. A Facebook page that I'm following paying money to reach me is an ad according to Facebook. To me, that's extortion. On the other side, we have notifications about friend suggestions. You can't turn them off in the notification settings. That to me is an "ad" for Facebook itself, even if nobody payed them money. It's an undesired content that pulls my attention away from what I came there to do in order to promote a product.
  • optymizer 8y ago
    I have been using this strategy for years. I can't really tell if it works or not, but it makes logical sense. One issue is that there's data about you that's not generated by you, but by people you know (i.e. John adds me as a contact into their phone along with my birthday and address, Jane friends me on VK and keeps tagging me in pictures that have location data, etc). I suspect that right now, companies give higher importance to data that you've entered about yourself, but once they realize you're feeding them noise, they can adjust their algorithms to trust other people's data about you (if they're not already doing that), which would significantly decrease the effectiveness of feeding them noise about yourself. It will still work for all data points about you that can't be collected from other people (like browsing habits, your phone's location, etc)
    • CharlesColeman 8y ago
      > they can adjust their algorithms to trust other people's data about you (if they're not already doing that), which would significantly decrease the effectiveness of feeding them noise about yourself. Maybe some people can inject noise about their friends, instead. For instance: 1. install the FB app on a phone with an address-book full of garbage and share it with the app, 2. inject fake geotag data in the photos you tag your friends in, 3. put the actual tag on strangers in the background, 4. tag your friends in stock photos, etc. Some of these you obviously can't do with friends who don't consent, since they may get annoyed by all the fake tags, but others would be transparent to most social media users.
  • sm4rk0 8y ago
    Something like this? https://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/ https://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/
    • ghobs91 8y ago
      Is this similar to what PrivacyBadger does, or would they complement each other?
      • sm4rk0 8y ago
        Not similar at all. TrackMeNot runs as a low-priority background process that periodically issues randomized search-queries to popular search engines, e.g., AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and Bing. It hides users' actual search trails in a cloud of 'ghost' queries, significantly increasing the difficulty of aggregating such data into accurate or identifying user profiles. https://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/ https://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/ Privacy Badger is a browser add-on that stops advertisers and other third-party trackers from secretly tracking where you go and what pages you look at on the web. If an advertiser seems to be tracking you across multiple websites without your permission, Privacy Badger automatically blocks that advertiser from loading any more content in your browser. To the advertiser, it's like you suddenly disappeared. https://www.eff.org/privacybadger https://www.eff.org/privacybadger
  • efsavage 8y ago
    If you don't like Facebook/Google/etc., wouldn't you be better off just not using them rather than spending time trying to hurt them? How will data vandalism make your life better?
    • the_snooze 8y ago
      You can't meaningfully opt out of Facebook/Google/etc. They're embedded in tons of websites, and your friends will almost certainly give your information to those companies.
      • andy_ppp 8y ago
        And they fingerprint and track you regardless of you having an account!
      • efsavage 8y ago
        You can block trackers pretty easily, or just not visit those websites. You'll probably be a happier person if you just don't visit foo.com than spending any portion of your brief time on Earth trying to trick an ML model into thinking you're a single mother from Lithuania. Also, if your friend gives someone else information about you, do you expect that you should be able to control it? I'm pretty sure many of the details of my life appear in other people's emails, voicemails, journals, etc. that will never have a "forget me" button. I'm mainly suggesting that there are lots of ways to improve this situation, from market forces to legislation, and it's sad to see people wasting time on things that won't work.
        • JohnFen 8y ago
          > You can block trackers pretty easily, or just not visit those websites. And since they're buying data from non-internet data brokers such as credit card companies, retailers that track you in their stores, etc., blocking the trackers and avoiding the websites doesn't actually stop the spying. To stop them from spying on you pretty much requires that you stop engaging in large swaths of real-world society.
      • 8y ago
  • mhuffman 8y ago
    This might work. I vaguely remember Google actually panic-pulling a chrome extension that invisibly hid and clicked on every ad of every page visited. So I think they identify this as a tough to protect weakness as well.
  • dontbenebby 8y ago
    >Can I propose that we start on a "noise" tool/borwser plugin for these suveillance captialism companies? It's been done :) http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1873/IWPE17_paper_23.pdf http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1873/IWPE17_paper_23.pdf https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/wiki/FAQ https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/wiki/FAQ
    • waynecochran 8y ago
      I read through a lot of this. I think it is still worth another try -- they approach it more from an obfuscation point of view -- I want to take it to the next level and "drown them" in noise. Don't just say "It's been done" and then decide it will never work. It may take several failures to find the best methods -- much like search was a major failure until the right recipe was found.
  • WRONgG 8y ago
    I think the largest issue would be hiding the plugin from their eyes. Like youtubeDL sort of being a secret. The noise creating plugin can't be advertised as such because then the new history is easily un-noiseable. The tool would need to be something like a color picker that has a hidden command to run headerless searches in a tab of your browser. This (sort of) worked for teenagers hiding pictures on a fake calculator app on smartphones years ago, but your mom wont try to pry at your facebook obfuscation. Just a thought
  • freethemullet 8y ago
    We could choose to cease to have preferences, limiting what there is to target.
  • bussiere 8y ago
    i ve done an app with a friend that generate random phone number and add it to your adress book. And my pleasure is to let all the social network to siphon my adress book.
  • frereubu 8y ago
    Reminds me of the good old days of meetups organized by the UK email newsletter NTK (Need To Know) where people would swap supermarket loyalty cards - ideally as far apart in demographic terms as possible, such as a single guy and a mother of two - to fk with the data. Edit for extra nostalgia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_to_Know_(newsletter) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_to_Know_(newsletter)
  • rhizome 8y ago
    You know, anybody can submit an "Ask HN" post rather than hijacking the comments of another.
  • soared 8y ago
    https://hello-kill.github.io/ https://hello-kill.github.io/
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• thisisweirdok 8y ago
  What exactly are engineers and designers at Facebook doing? There are thousands of them! I've seen teams of 10 ship more (granted, no one is delivering on Facebook's scale)... I know most of them are likely working on backend stability and performance... but come on.
• SilasX 8y ago
  It probably just takes a long time to develop! I mean, keep in mind, Facebook's app doesn't even support landscape mode. It's hard to find the development bandwidth for advanced features.
• ori_b 8y ago
  Well, you see, people didn't leave Facebook in the numbers anticipated, so the project got deprioritized.
• happppy 8y ago
  No matter what fb is, I would still love to join fb and work for them and prey on you using your data.
• smallgovt 8y ago
  The problem is that privacy tools like this will severely hurt Facebook's business. Facebook uses its pixels to track purchase and browser history. This purchase and browser history is a crucial part of their lookalike audience technology, which in turn is one of the most critical components of their advertiser tool suite. Without this data, advertisers will be less effective at targeting their ads, which means lost ad revenue. It's not surprising to me that Facebook is backtracking on this and vying for other privacy improvements that don't hurt their fundamental business as much (like letting users view how advertisers got their contact info, or letting users view page ads).
  • FilterSweep 8y ago
    Building shadow profiles for people who don’t use your service is inexcusable. Perhaps their “business” would need to be rescaled if they were honest about serving ads to their users.
• spieglt 8y ago
  I made one: github.com/spieglt/fb-delete
• elamje 8y ago
  Taking the approach of a scientist, i.e. a data scientist, this is a hard problem to solve. Not only does Facebook have to implement the simple user.delete.all.data(), but think about the number of internal products that are machine learning based. In order to preserve the usefulness of those models and the hundreds of millions in R&D spent to develop them, you have to carefully understand exactly what products and algos will be affected by just deleting a single record. The sheer number of records per user is probably astounding, and facebook has to figure out a way to understand exactly how thousands of records per user, being deleted, will affect it's models. Thought experiment: Imagine, all of the hacker news community and other privacy minded people go right into the tool and delete everything. That is an entire community and classification of people that facebook has to figure out how to reconcile the loss of data for, and fix its machine learning models. The difficult part is since so much current AI logic is based on historical data, a user deleting data, will be nearly impossible to untrain from the model. I know there are more nuances here, but I think there are some challenges Facebook has in implementing this, and business wise it's a drain on resources that will hurt them. It's easy to think it would be so simple for FB to just call user.delete.all.data(), but the reality is the loss of data could seriously mess up their algos.
  • demygale 8y ago
    It might be a difficult problem to solve, but there’s no evidence that Facebook is working on it or that they ever intended to work on it. The easiest explanation is that Zuckerberg was lying. We could give him the benefit of the doubt but since he’s always lying it makes more sense to save time and assume he’s lying about this as well.
    • elamje 8y ago
      Based on your use of the word always to describe Zuckerberg as a liar, I infer that you are upset by FB, understandably. I would add that I am not a fan of FB and I am deactivated, but unless you work at FB, making comments on if they are working on it or not is just speculation. I would say a more probable speculation is >=1 employee is working on this tool.
  • 8y ago
• HelloFellowDevs 8y ago
  I probably wouldn't be amongst the first in line for any 'tool' facebook would be offering to completely own your data. I feel as if there would be something that would be underpinning the tool which would make in itself useless.
  • beatgammit 8y ago
    Yeah, like the "delete your account" option. It's hard to find (disabling is easy to find, but also completely reversible, so useless), and I'm sure it doesn't actually delete anything, but it made me feel better than just leaving my Facebook account active/disabled. I didn't have much of value there anyway. I would love more transparency here, but we're not getting that without government intervention, and that's unlikely to come anytime soon (and what gets passed may be worse than the current situation).
    • notafrog 8y ago
      A few days ago my fiancée asked me to delete her Instagram profile. There's no user friendly way to do it. You have to go to help.instagram.com or search Google to find the link.
    • cyphar 8y ago
      > I would love more transparency here, but we're not getting that without government intervention, and that's unlikely to come anytime soon (and what gets passed may be worse than the current situation). The GDPR (General Data Privacy Regulation -- an EU regulation that came into force last year) provides for this and has potentially very large fines to back up the regulation. Obviously it only applies to EU residents (or businesses) but I've heard that California is getting their own version of GDPR -- though I haven't looked into it. Facebook implemented the "delete your account" option that actually works in response to this, as well as giving explicit and opt-in consent to whatever tracking they use.
  • Frost1x 8y ago
    The only way to clear history with Facebook is to create no history to begin with. If you want to "clear" history to delude yourself that revenant Facebook information is gone (or at least make it difficult to obtain from your own account), there's plenty of options for that.
• Spooky23 8y ago
  From the FB statement generator: We promised a history tool and have not delivered it. We are deeply sorry. We founded Facebook to connect the world and facilitate relationships. We remain committed to doing things.
  • tru3_power 8y ago
    “We wanted everyone to be connected so we gave the world herpes. Thank you. Sorry. Thank you.”
  • ravenstine 8y ago
    We had no idea we weren't developing it.
  • pfortuny 8y ago
    It won’t happen again.
    • mtgx 8y ago
      We'll do a better job (in the future™).
  • giancarlostoro 8y ago
    They really like to do the BP oil spill apology approach, it's getting old though. You can only continuously say sorry so many times before people get sick of hearing it.
    • mscasts 8y ago
      Maybe it's time for south park to do another one of these, but with Zuckerberg as the star: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15HTd4Um1m4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15HTd4Um1m4
    • chosenbreed37 8y ago
      True. But I expect the statement from BP would have sounded a bit more like it had been written by a human being :-)
• BucketSort 8y ago
  It's in Development™
  • chosenbreed37 8y ago
    > It's in Development™ Probably somewhere in the backlog :-)
    • mtgx 8y ago
      Move fast and break things. It's mostly in the "break things" phase, though.
• blocked_again 8y ago
  Zuckerberg did promise Winklevoss twins to build their social network as well.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
• Bolgar 8y ago
  A Clear History Tool was tested and it cleared itself from the history. So...
• EGreg 8y ago
  When Facebook releases a tool to clear your history, how will you know it’s really cleared? It will probably work as well as these instructions you can already use to remove your digital fingerprint from Facebook and several other sites: https://youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0 https://youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0
  • ncallaway 8y ago
    As someone else said, if you're in Europe you can send a subject access request after sending the deletion request. That will tell you what data they still have about you. You can't _know_ they've deleted everything if the subject access request comes back empty, but it puts then in the position of having to actively break the law to lie about whether they've deleted your data.
    • JohnFen 8y ago
      > it puts then in the position of having to actively break the law to lie about whether they've deleted your data. True, but I don't think Facebook is too bothered by that sort of thing.
  • EGreg 8y ago
    I should also point out that most of the linked video quotes a statement by Facebook about what they promise to do with your data.
• AlexandrB 8y ago
  It's clearly not a priority. Such a tool was a nice rhetorical device to deflect some heat during the congressional hearings, but there's no way to monetize it or use it to "increase engagement" so it's languishing in some Facebook backwater. I think it was naive to think that it would turn out otherwise. And to be clear, I'm not saying that Facebook has necessarily been malicious or lied. It's just that a product manager faced with the choice to prioritize this vs. some new engagement enhancing widget is going to pick the widget every time unless there's constant pressure from above. Edit: This is why legislation is required. So privacy issues can't be ignored simply because they don't contribute to the bottom line.
• marmshallow 8y ago
  In the all hands meetings they would talk so much about establishing or re-establishing trust, and I always wondered why they don’t just have a “clear everything from high school and college” option. People would _love_ that option, and it would make so many more people comfortable with using the platform again. Their loss.
  • rchaud 8y ago
    People would love an option to unsubscribe from magazines/newspapers online too. There's a reason they make you call their support line to do it.
  • cbsks 8y ago
    A few months ago I went through and deleted all of my Facebook content from 2005 through 2010, except for a few pictures. It took 5+ hours to delete each item individually. A tool to assist this would be very helpful! I’m sure I’m not the only one who wrote a lot of stupid posts and uploaded a lot of embarrassing (and some slightly incriminating) photos to Facebook in college that they don’t want saved forever.
    • pca 8y ago
      I did the same thing, and yet every couple of years some of those deleted items reappear on the news feed of my second account that I only use to double-check my privacy settings. It's an European account and I'm wondering if only marking the content as deleted, instead of actually deleting it, violates the GDPR.
      • Rafuino 8y ago
        Can you report that to the privacy regulator in your European country? The "mark as deleted" versus actual deletion is an important distinction. I can't do anything as a non-European...
        • pca 8y ago
          I was planning on looking into how to best document it the next time it happens, and whom exactly to report it to (i.e. the national or European data protection authority). Not sure if there is anything else I could do.
• rock_hard 8y ago
  There is a great interview with him that was recorded a couple days ago where he talks about the status of the history tool: https://youtu.be/WGchhsKhG-A https://youtu.be/WGchhsKhG-A
  • hnthrow0693 8y ago
    I like how the only comment that isn’t highly speculative gets immediately downvoted.
  • dave5104 8y ago
    Any highlights or links to specific segments from that 1 hour and 43 minute video?
    • kretor 8y ago
      He starts talking about it at 1:04:08: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGchhsKhG-A&t=1h4m8s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGchhsKhG-A&t=1h4m8s
  • dwighttk 8y ago
    is there a money timestamp or is the whole interview about the history tool?
  • czr 8y ago
    Summary of Zuckerberg's statements: * They're still working on Clear History, and think it is worth implementing (Zuckerberg is the one who introduces the topic–the interviewer hasn't asked him about it). It's important that users have a tool like this, even if it makes their experience "worse" (i.e. less personalized). * Clear History is nontrivial to implement, because Facebook was not built with this functionality in mind. And they want a user interface that is more capable than just a single "delete everything" button, because their research has shown that users frequently want to clear only certain aspects of their data (e.g. data shared to a specific service or app via Facebook), so this adds complexity. * (In the context of a Facebook subscription service, which they were discussing before Zuckerberg mentioned the Clear History tool)–having Clear History is a prereq for any sort of subscription service, but they want Clear History (and all privacy controls) accessible to all users, not as a privilege for certain users.
• donquichotte 8y ago
  Also, the "View As" functionality has been "temporarily" disabled months ago because of a security issue, never to appear again. "View As" was a vital tool to assess what data is shared with whom, and guarding one's privacy is harder without it.
  • jolesf 8y ago
    wondered when or if they would bring this back
  • TallGuyShort 8y ago
    I even just wish they had a simpler "View As non-friend" feature.
    • rhizome 8y ago
      I wouldn't be surprised if FB doesn't have a concept of "non-friend." People are either friends or friends you haven't met yet.
      • anticensor 8y ago
        FB does have a concept of enemy, though. Which is implemented as communication embargo.
        • acct1771 8y ago
          Nah, those are "old friends".
          • anticensor 8y ago
            You can also block people who are not your friends.
      • chaostheory 8y ago
        Yeah Google+ had that when it asked you to categorize your contacts into friends, coworkers, family, and acquaintances.
• throwaway_9168 8y ago
  "Oh, we actually meant advertisers/governments/Bing and other partners will have a tool which will provide a clear view of your internet history"
• simias 8y ago
  I think "big data" companies realized that people simply were unaware of the extent of the tracking and showing them how much they're being tracked would make for terrible PR, potentially much worse than any publicized data leak. It turns the tracking from some abstract concept into a very tangible list of actions being recorded potentially forever. Take that guy who managed to get a dump from his Spotify data thanks to the GDPR for instance: https://twitter.com/steipete/status/1025024813889478656/ https://twitter.com/steipete/status/1025024813889478656/ I'm sure we all knew Spotify tracked us but seeing how much they track is pretty crazy to me even though I'm pretty sensitized to these privacy issues. I expect that a full dump from Facebook would be at least as verbose if not more. I don't think they want the users to see how the sausage is made.
• nfRfqX5n 8y ago
  the memories feature makes for a nice deletion tool, but i know the posts are just being hidden
• xrisk 8y ago
  This gets me wondering. What kind of incident would be required to provoke public outrage over Facebook? Something that would bring public awareness re their data collection policies? Or is Facebook Just Too Big To Fail™ anymore?
  • samat 8y ago
    Private dicks posted all over the place? (See Snowden’s interview by John Oliver)
  • SpicyLemonZest 8y ago
    Massive public attention has already been brought to Facebook and its policies. If the public isn't as outraged as you expect them to be, that's because they don't think Facebook's data collection is a big deal, not because they're somehow unaware.
    • CharlesColeman 8y ago
      > If the public isn't as outraged as you expect them to be, that's because they don't think Facebook's data collection is a big deal, not because they're somehow unaware. No, the public who's aware isn't outraged because they don't think there's anything they can do to stop this. Resignation is very different from thinking it's "[not] a big deal."
    • JohnFen 8y ago
      > Massive public attention has already been brought to Facebook and its policies. Not so much, really. Outside of techie types, my experience is that very few people are aware of this stuff.
• digitalneal 8y ago
  Pardon my ignorance here, never worked on this kinda program before, but isn't is actually hard on complex databases like Facebook to actually remove data, better just to mark it as unviewable?
  • cheschire 8y ago
    It's not just complex databases, but any database that uses indexes (basically any production database). Deleting a record from a table can cause a re-index, which is very intensive. It's much easier to flag a column in a record as "deleted" or whatever, and then run a cleanup during off-peak hours. I'm sure there are clever ways around that with proper knowledgeable DBAs on your team, but as I'm a web dev for smaller audience projects, I don't touch solutions that require those types of optimizations that I'm sure Facebook has implemented.
    • misterman0 8y ago
      》Deleting a record from a table can cause a re-index As will adding new data and FB loves the story of adding to their profiling DB. This is not an indexing issue but a "we love adding data but hate removing it" issue.
  • zoul 8y ago
    Long story short, no. If that data were a liability instead of an asset, it would be done yesterday.
    • mda 8y ago
      Why? Google has the option for many years, it is hard but definitely doable.
  • trevor-e 8y ago
    I'm sure there's some technical reason they could come up with, but to me, that's admitting they didn't design the database with that use-case in mind. Disclaimer: Have no experience with databases at that scale so maybe this isn't entirely unreasonable.
• nkingsy 8y ago
  My biggest issue with metrics and general "data" focus, is that it's incredibly hard to generate data about goodwill. eg we can prove that call to cancel reduces cancelations by 20%, but we have no way to measure how many customers now hate your company and tell their friends never to use your company, how many people would have returned but now won't, how many people just cancel 3 months later. In Facebook's case, we know they're seeing huge hits in active, engaged users, but their whole metrics ecosystem is built to optimize micro-engagement. Taken as a whole, those micro-optimizations are killing goodwill and turning off users, but it's much harder to measure that. So many decisions are made because variant b "won", without any discussion of the layers upon layers of factors that aren't easy to measure.
• rchaud 8y ago
  FB won't change unless major advertisers do. And even then, there are plenty of fly-by-night companies selling utter garbage (think tshirts/hoodies with dynamically generated text labels) that will continue to find customers on the platform because of FB's targeting ability. I hate to say it, but it's probably too late anyway. FB has billions in the bank and are likely working on much bigger-picture projects with their surveillance tech. Why bother with a B2C product that brings tons of PR grief when you can enter billion-dollar contracts with militaries and governments where secrecy is the default MO?
• philipov 8y ago
  What the king says is what the king says, but what [facebook] stands for is undying opposition to [clear history tool].
• lapnitnelav 8y ago
  Question to the HN crowd : Would having event data & PII-ish data decoupled be an acceptable compromise to privacy granted that you can wipe the PII stuff and the only data left is completely anonymous (just a UUID that leads to nothing in case of deletion)? Is anonymity in the eye of the beholder?
  • JohnFen 8y ago
    > Would having event data & PII-ish data decoupled be an acceptable compromise to privacy That depends on how you define "event" and "PII" data. The normal industry and legal definitions of PII leave out huge swaths of actual PII, after all. Personally, I'm not even at the point where I can consider what is or is not acceptable for companies like Facebook to keep. I'm still stuck at the point of stopping them from collecting data about me without my permission in the first place.
• rdiddly 8y ago
  Facebook's behavior is highly analogous to, and best viewed in terms of, narcissistic personality disorder. Thus when people bring up their legitimate concerns about how FB screwed them in one way or another, Facebook thinks the problem is the "beating" they're taking in the press. I really don't want to read a single word about the "beating" they're taking. It helps Facebook by exaggerating the harm done to them, and it pats the press on the back for its supposed effectiveness. Facebook keeps growing and doing the same shit, that's how effective it is. "Maybe if we just had more facts!" says the well-meaning fool who then loses to a Zuckerberg or a Trump. Dream on, the world doesn't run on facts and virtue. By way of contrast, if Facebook executives had to suffer an actual beating, Rodney King style, things would be fixed in a hurry. I confess I would love to be holding one of the night sticks too.
  • jamiek88 8y ago
    Your larger point is caught in the hyperbole but the point of ‘the world doesn’t run on facts’ (meaning, I think, political world) is a good one. FB get the appearance of pain and attrition. Press get more views and plaudits. Nothing changes. They need actual pain to their organization (not violence to individuals of course) before a proper change will come. Think Microsoft pain in the 90’s. It seems Europe will again lead the charge on this.
    • rdiddly 8y ago
      Yes, the political world, the one in which Mark Zuckerberg is a player and in which almost none of us commenting here are players, unless maybe we were to unite into one bloc. That world (and to the extent that "that world" runs "the world," "the world" too) has little use for facts. I'm not saying it's great or that we should give up. (Or that they can escape the facts permanently.) But it is a fact. And each downvote of that fact, proves the world doesn't run on facts!
• spurcell93 8y ago
  Anyone with a background at Facebook definitely needs to be spoken with regarding their integrity. Obviously only a small subset of FB employees make the shitty decisions we see in the news, but it's very concerning to me that engineers still go to work there. There are at 2 or 3 other BigCos that pay comparably, and many others that pay a level down that don't require you to be complicit in unethical behavior of this scale.
  • JohnFen 8y ago
    > it's very concerning to me that engineers still go to work there Me too. And, although it may be unfair, I have to admit that I view engineers who are still willing to work for them as suspect.
• Rafuino 8y ago
  There's also the issue of 100s, if not 1000s of random businesses having added my contact information for advertising purposes, and I can't remove them all without manually clicking each and every one. Anyone should be able to remove these advertisers who have no business having my info (random car dealerships and real estate agents 1000s of miles away, typically). Questions asked in the help forum have gone unanswered for months.
• vkaku 8y ago
  When beta testing, they used that tool to clear Zuck's history. Thus Zuck forgot about it.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• variable11 8y ago
  Sociopaths lie, I am tired of captive agencies giving these criminal rackets free reign. Put him in prison now for ordering the theft of billions of contact info right of cellphones. If some teenager goes to prison for hacking NASA, Zuck, Sandberg, the senior execs, the direct managers and engineers involved in this all belong in prison too.
• millzlane 8y ago
  You have to do it manually. I did it using a plug in and meticulously doing each section at a time. likes, comments, posts, pictures, etc...
• HereComesDatBoi 8y ago
  One really shouldn't believe anything that man says.