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Just had my first look at the Timeline. As part of my "I'm leaving Facebook" project, I've been manually deleting every single submission I've made on Facebook
by nirvana 15y ago
Just had my first look at the Timeline. As part of my "I'm leaving Facebook" project, I've been manually deleting every single submission I've made on Facebook, going back about 5 years. When I finally delete my account, there will be nothing left. This has taken awhile, because it is such a pain that I can only do a short period of time at a time.
However, Timeline actually makes this a lot easier. I can click on 2008 and then see everything in 2008 and delete it all right from the timeline.
The reason I'm deleting it all is because Facebook asks for confirmation of "Delete this post?" for every single one. If I say yes, and they remove it from view, I have, as far as I'm concerned, both a moral and legal right to believe it is actually deleted from their database. Otherwise "delete this post?" would be a fraudulent offer.
Thus, if any information that I've deleted shows up in the future, I will have a claim against them. (Whether its practical to press that claim or not, I don't know. I just want them to be obligated to have deleted it because their software made the promise that they were.)
- samstave 15y agoI would suggest you followup with a request to facebook for whatever information they have on you, once you feel you've completed your deletion. As someone who has never had a facebook account, though just about 99% of the people I know do, I am interested to see what this "shadow profile" of me looks like. My wife and others have logged into FB from my machine, phone and ipad previously - thus I am sure that there were periods of time where my actions were tracked based on the install of their cookies. I'd wonder what the legal basis would be of FB tracking those without accounts, based on the cookies of others.
- junto 15y agoThey will "Facebook delete" it. In other words "hide it" from you and pass it on to the NSA through their priority firehouse feed. ;-)
- jedberg 15y agoTheir ters of service make it very clear that they don't delete things when you choose to delete it. I don't think you'd have much of a claim.
- fl3tch 15y agoI also manually deleted every piece of content that I could find before I deleted my account. The hardest part was finding comments that I had made on other people's posts, because often I would delete the mention of it on my own profile. However, Facebook has a facility to "see frienship", which will dig up these comments. So I actually visited every profile of several hundred people and went to the "see friendship" page, then deleted everything I could find, every comment, photo tag, etc. It took a few weeks to get to the point where I was satisfied that no trace of me existed on Facebook (at least nothing that could be accessed by users), and then I deleted my account. Six months later, I still have no desire to go back.