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I don't trust the "delete" button to scrub it from FB's database. I'd be slightly more confident (slightly) that editing the post might cause the core data in
by AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
I don't trust the "delete" button to scrub it from FB's database.
I'd be slightly more confident (slightly) that editing the post might cause the core data in the db to be updated, however. In which case, I think the more effective script would be one that goes through all of your FB posts and scrambles them, or replaces the text with gibberish.
- luckylion 7y agoOr insert GPT2-generated essays about post-modern privacy models. Regularly. Generate noise, and lots of it.
- flattone 7y agoprobably safe to say that the idea of a user on a platform like Facebook trying to obfuscate their history on the platform... is a short jog from an individual trying to avoid government backed hacking on them. Facebook has many years of pretty smart work, and probably safe to say tens of millions of dollars just in meetings about specifically this (re costs associated with effort of user data retention).
- luckylion 7y agoWhat will be the consequences though? I'm sure they can easily discover that the user is trying to overwrite his history, batch edits are easy to spot - but what will they do about it? Ban him & delete his data? Stop him from editing his own posts? Just throw away all changes that don't pass the smell test?
- flattone 7y agoI would speculate that they have built systems in a way that it would not matter what any user does. any edits to a already existing post probably just append
- snazz 7y agoPost-modern privacy models include those developed by University of Chicago law professor Richard Hasen, who argued the Obama administration could regulate Facebook under the guise of protecting privacy. (He was later fired from his posts.) Other authors have argued that allowing Facebook users to choose what information they share online would weaken privacy, and that if Facebook were able to take over the content management systems of websites and allow people to censor content, that was something the First Amendment should prohibit. https://talktotransformer.com https://talktotransformer.com It’s really good.
- luckylion 7y agoI might have to use this to reply to unclear tasks from now on, great find. There are times when we need to ask ourselves, are our interests really served by having this ability, when so many of us are now doing so much online anyway?
- sj4nz 7y agoThis is pretty good perhaps even for auto-generated absurdities: Seed with: "Why does my dog speak poor English?" > It's possible your dog has a rare genetic condition called dyslexia, which puts him or her at risk for learning difficulties. If the problem has progressed beyond a certain point—say, if your dog has been in the hospital for over a year—and when you go to bring him out of the hospital—not for exercise or exercise training—he may not speak English in the proper way. Your veterinarian will work on the problem while you are in the hospital. What should I do with a dog with dyslexia? It's important to be vigilant and familiar with what is going on with your dog in hospital. If you find that your dog may be learning, take him home and have him trained as soon as possible. It may take a while for your dog to learn to associate the letters of English with words.
- slig 7y ago> I'd be slightly more confident (slightly) that editing the post might cause the core data in the db to be updated, however. Don't be confident. They have [1], or used to, post edit history. Even if the feature isn't there in the UI, I bet they didn't remove it internally. [1]: DDG: facebook post edit history.
- chipperyman573 7y agoIt's currently possible to view previous versions of posts, just click "# edits" in the bottom-right by the "# comments" button (neither of which look like a link)
- traek 7y ago> I'd be slightly more confident (slightly) that editing the post might cause the core data in the db to be updated I'd be much less confident, considering that they explicitly save and make public post's edit history.
- zymhan 7y agoI think that idea is based on how Reddit stores (or stored) comment edits, and how they would overwrite the original value.
- RandomInteger4 7y agoHmm ... I wonder if they have an edit limit where old edits get erased if you keep editing, sort of like that trick someone came up with years ago for pinging the credit bureau so many times so that eventually your credit looked better since old items were erased or not considered for your credit score ... or something.
- gricardo99 7y ago> that trick someone came up with years ago for pinging the credit bureau so many times That sounds hilarious. You don't happen to remember or have a source for that, do you? Would love to read more.
- slumdev 7y agoIt's called "bumpage" or "B*" on forums. People were leery of using the word back in the day because they thought the bureaus might catch on. It doesn't work anymore.
- xur17 7y agohttps://www.doctorofcredit.com/an-introduction-to-b-bumpage-c-choppage/ https://www.doctorofcredit.com/an-introduction-to-b-bumpage-...
- ibeckermayer 7y agoSomebody hire this genius at $300k/yr immediately
- code_duck 7y agoI believe there is zero doubt that somewhere the text has been saved. Not only the original text, but also various results of analysis. Since they store edit history, too, replacing it with other text would simply be an indication that you’re trying to cover it up. I would guess that this has been demonstrated in court.
- davvolun 7y ago> Since they store edit history, too, replacing it with other text would simply be an indication that you’re trying to cover it up. It's text you wrote, why would there be any problem "covering up" your own text? Note that, I'm not arguing you should have a right to use Selenium to scrape their site and replace the text, but if you went through every post in a non-automated fashion and changed the text, from a perspective of "covering up" the text, the purpose would be the same. Facebook almost certainly has an interest in keeping 100M users from scraping with Selenium, that's a separate thing entirely.
- code_duck 7y agoIf you’re trying to hide the content from someone who has access to the edit history, editing it is ineffective and simply shows that you wish for it to be hidden. When would this be an issue? In court. It’s true that editing could serve to hide it from other users, but privacy settings could do that also.
- davvolun 7y agoI'm still not following -- in court for what? This is information that you originally put out, wrote down on Facebook, so it's not that you're hiding something you didn't want anyone to know originally. If it was libelous or something so you wanted to delete it after the fact, it's still likely possible to get it back -- even if Facebook deleted the actual message in the database, there's likely a number of methods -- server logs, db logs, cached resources, db backups, or even a simple screenshot -- that would likely be sufficient proof.
- blunte 7y agoSomething like this is probably against some terms of use that you implicitly agree to as a Facebook user, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they would auto detect it and ban you.
- nkingsy 7y agoIf I’m banned will they stop sending me email finally?
- ravenstine 7y agoSounds like a feature for the user. I might even prefer to be banned.
- inetknght 7y agoIf I'm banned does that mean that the advertising profile built around me is poisoned too?
- ionised 7y agoIf you're mass-deleting your Facebook posts I imagine you don't care about a ban.
- devtanna 7y agoI'm pretty sure they use some sort of event store for their backend in which case all versions/changes/updates/deletes are stored as a separate revision alongside the original content.
- echelon 7y agoI suspect this is the case as well. All the big companies are doing immutable, append-only event logging and probably have no mechanism to expunge this data. All because storage is cheap and they need to hold on to everything for testing or whatever future need that might arise. What a pitiful dystopia we're living in.
- kerng 7y agoGDPR required companies to add features to append only systems to allow for true deletion (usually with something like a 30 day delay). Not sure how many actually did that, but to be compliant append only does not fly. I was on a product that did exactly that for data lakes.
- wybiral 7y agoI wonder how that works with Facebook's Blu-Ray cold storage [1]. Are optical disks treated like paper documents or is it still considered electronic storage? [1] http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/meetings/documents/storage14/Kestutis_Patiejunas_Facebook_FreezingExabytesOfDataFacebooksColdStorage.pdf http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/meetings/documents/storag...
- kerng 7y agoAh, that's interesting. If they store customer data on BlueRay disks I assume Facebook took the necessary steps to delete/destroy records according to GDPR requirements when customers request deletion....
- jefftk 7y ago> All the big companies are doing immutable, append-only event logging and probably have no mechanism to expunge this data. All because storage is cheap and they need to hold on to everything for testing or whatever future need that might arise. This is not true at all. Here's a recent HN discussion that talks about how Google handles this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19809259 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19809259 (Disclosure: I work for Google, but I'm speaking for myself)
- wdr1 7y ago> I'd be slightly more confident (slightly) that editing the post might cause the core data in the db to be updated, however. FWIW, I believe this is still true of reddit. Deleting a post doesn't actually delete it. It just no longer shows on the webpage. To really remove it from the database, you need to edit the post/comment, replace the contents with something simple (e.g., the character "a"), save it, then delete it.
- andreygrehov 7y agoUPDATE users SET is_deleted = true WHERE user_id = ?
- hu3 7y agoI think FB goes to great lenghts to never erase data. Including using Blue-ray discs to store stale data: https://datacenterfrontier.com/inside-facebooks-blu-ray-cold-storage-data-center/ https://datacenterfrontier.com/inside-facebooks-blu-ray-cold...
- dx034 7y agoBasically tape backups but with a different medium. I'd be surprised if they didn't have any offline backups.
- glenneroo 7y agoTape backup is re-writable though isn't it? I had inherited one in the 90s and could re-write, granted it was painfully slow. Or are you saying that Blu-ray is re-writable too? The first iteration I used a few years ago could only write once.
- dx034 7y agoMaybe disks are cheaper, even if you can't reuse them. As an added benefit, you can also restore info from the more distant past if you recognize errors too late.
- saddlerustle 7y agoLots of people in this thread are claiming that it doesn't based on gut feeling, but consider: - Facebook publicly claims it does [1] - Mark Zuckerberg testified in-front of congress and stated they do [2] - Multiple government regulators have specifically checked that it does in their privacy audits. [3] They might be lying and actively conspiring to not delete it, but they'd have to have a very good reason to take on that much legal risk. Now, consider: - A infinitesimal fraction of facebook users try to delete anything. - Facebook makes money from your data by showing you ads. If you stop using facebook, you stop generating any revenue and your data becomes a liability, not an asset. What reason would there be to lie about it? [1] https://facebook.com/help/250563911970368 https://facebook.com/help/250563911970368 [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/10/transcript-of-mark-zuckerbergs-senate-hearing https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/10... [3] https://www.pdpjournals.com/docs/87980.pdf https://www.pdpjournals.com/docs/87980.pdf
- 40four 7y agoI wouldn't be surprised if it's not being scrubbed from FB database, but that's not the author's goal. The README states the intent is to clean up publicly facing content. It's meant to tidy up internet presence to the general viewing public, not escape the grip of FB's data vacume. I'm a big fan a Selenium, and this is great usage of it! Scripting a boring, repetitive browser task, that would take a large amount of time & effort to do manually.
- jlg23 7y agoOP explicitly states that he cannot make that guarantee.
- o10449366 7y agoIf you use Reddit and want to delete your comment/post history I would recommend Shreddit[0] for the reason you mentioned[1]. It's important to do this frequently because there are quite a few sites out there that cache Reddit content periodically. [0] https://github.com/x89/Shreddit https://github.com/x89/Shreddit [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/1dhw2j/reddits_privacy_policy_has_been_rewritten_from/c9qgbbb/ https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/1dhw2j/reddits_privac...
- RhodesianHunter 7y agoRead it at least gives you every opportunity to remain anonymous.
- ori_b 7y ago> I don't trust the "delete" button to scrub it from FB's database. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Delete what you can, then shut down your account.
- SkyMarshal 7y agoThere was a post a long time ago on HN on how to taint your FB data over time so that it's difficult to tell where your real data stopped and your fake data began. I can't find it now, but part of the advice was don't replace your real data with gibberish, but rather with non-gibberish - public domain texts for example, or better yet AI generated text). And don't do it all at once but spread it out over a year or so.
- stoppergoo 7y agoProbably will want to scramble multiple times, each one randomly with realistic looking sentences (better yet - just take about 100 preprogrammed sentences and permute a subset of them), and making sure there is a random spread to the total number of edits for each post
- russfink 7y ago>replaces the text with gibberish. ... similar to the outcome of a ransomware attack (gets backed up, archived, overwrites old legit data): brilliant!
- jaabe 7y agoIf you edit comments you’ve made, people can sometimes click them to see the previous versions. So I wouldn’t be too sure about that.
- benbristow 7y agoI believe they keep a history of edits. They do for comments. The gibberish thing would be useless
- anticensor 7y agoDeleted comments and comments from removed posts go. No guarantee about bodies of removed posts.
- balladeer 7y agoI had deleted all my posts and photos. Even my profile photos. Then I disabled my account. After a year I enabled it back. Facebook used to prompt me to add some photos - both before disabling and after reenabling. The eerie part? It used to show faded thumbnails of my photos that I had deleted more than a year ago in Photos section when prompting me to add my pics.
- bb101 7y agoWith Facebook's distributed data stores, I'd be really surprised if any deletion was immediate. It's more likely that they tombstone a post. That's where they store a "this post has been deleted" flag in their database. Using this style of deletion, the post and the tombstone would be eventually removed from the data store when it is periodically compacted.
- rmtech 7y agoI think the benefit of this is that other people can't easily see what you posted. For example recruiters for jobs, journalists or activists trying to publicly doxx or embarrass you, stalkers, people with a grudge against you, etc. If FB has this data squirrelled away somewhere in cold storage then in order for anyone to harm you with it, FB has to admit to keeping it (which would be a scandal) and it has to get out into the wild. That is a reduction in risk compared to someone just looking at your profile.
- tripzilch 7y agoYou'd have to scramble your friend connections and your location data and likes and all the other things that aren't text, too.