15 ms·

Never Trust Facebook

533 points by mikecane 13y ago

ten7 13y ago
Perhaps the way to delete the information in the account is to replace the status posts, comments, photos with junk. Words and sentences that don't mean anything; photos that are noise. Perhaps there's a way to do that in an automated fashion. I'd use that.
- switch007 13y ago
  I'm sure that any edit is really a new version which is then displayed. =/
  - ten7 13y ago
    You're probably right. Then what about replacing it with junk? THen doing it again? Then again? Then again?
- ph0rque 13y ago
  Markov chains based on content about facebook privacy intrusions, perhaps ;)?
- walid 13y ago
  Interesting idea! You're making me wonder if someone intentionally violates the TOS by, for example, uploading porn if they would delete the account. Facebook does delete accounts that it considers spam so they might just delete such an account.
Duhck 13y ago
Clearly they have a bug, but as far as actually deleting your data; I am willing to be it'll never be deleted. They couldn't possibly manage the data if you could remove pieces, since everything on facebook is intertwined (likes, comments, shares, etc). aka this doesn't surprise me.
- eblume 13y ago
  I spent a fairly large amount of time trying to completely delete my account - it involved emails, 'hidden' links, and multiple confirmation boxes using a nonstandard UI for facebook. A few days ago I made a brand new account (but using the same email as before) and was greeted with the suggestion to add ALL of my old friends right back again. Clearly nothing has been deleted, and I now feel confirmed that it never, ever will be.
  - ajanuary 13y ago
    Just a theory, but could it be that all those friends have your email in their contact list, and when they've done a bulk import Facebook has remembered that connection so it can suggest them to you if you ever join (and vice versa)? The data isn't on your side, it's on there's. Of course there's a whole other (worthy) debate about that, but it doesn't necessarily mean Facebook didn't delete the data you added.
    - eblume 13y ago
      That's a solid point. Thanks!
mahyarm 13y ago
This is the frustrating thing about facebook. They often have bugs that make things suddenly become public, or settings for visibility of new posts all of a sudden reset to 'all friends' or public. G+ handles this kind of stuff far better. I really wish there was an auto-delete items older than X months. Most of the value of facebook goes away after a month, anything older than that is usually negative history digging and stalking by others.
- ancarda 13y ago
  Except that this isn't a bug. The user asked for the content to be deleted. For it to become public, they must have used a "delete" flag or something similar. The point is they didn't actually delete the content, rather just flag it as deleted.
  - i0exception 13y ago
    Actually deleting content would be a very expensive operation at Facebook's scale. Flagging it as deleted is the most optimal way. What's troubling is that this content somehow got undeleted on its own. Not once, but twice.
    - ISL 13y ago
      Permanently deleting flagged data from all sites on monthly timescales seems like it ought to be possible.
    - guelo 13y ago
      Every operation at Facebook scale is expensive. But they have the resources. They don't do something because they don't want to, not because manipulating their data is hard. They do complicated things to their data all the time.
      - Zelphyr 13y ago
        Agreed. I'm not buying the "its hard/expensive" argument that so many people seem to be submitting in this thread. The fact is, when Facebook gives you the option to "delete" something there is a reasonable expectation that by doing so that post, picture, etc... will be deleted. Removed. Gone. Permanently. If they want to give you the option to retrieve it later in case you accidentally delete something then call it "Flag for deletion" instead. To do ANYTHING else is disingenuous at best. Otherwise known as a lie. This is yet more proof that users of Facebook are the product and will be treated as such. Whoever pays Facebook actual money gets to dictate the terms and they are the people that want Facebook to never delete your data.
dangerlibrary 13y ago
I deleted my Facebook account a few years ago. The whole deal - waited the requisite month or so to ensure that it was gone, and any further login attempts wouldn't re-instate the account. Six months later I signed up with a different email address, and Facebook forced me to confirm my account with my phone number. Javascript Error - that phone number is associated with another Facebook account. I click OK, and I'm redirected to my "new" account with all my old Facebook friends (on the opposite side of the country) showing up as "people I may know." Nothing is deleted from Facebook, ever.
- threeseed 13y ago
  How did you delete your account ? Because no where in Facebook does it allow you to do this. Only deactivate your account.
  - uiri 13y ago
    You can request to have the account deleted. More info here: https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674 https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674
- gohrt 13y ago
  If you used the same computer, Facebook knows that people from your IP tend to communicate with those friends.
pothibo 13y ago
I understand this is not good. I do. But I'm surprised people think entity like Facebook, Google and any other web businesses delete records permanently. It's not worth it on so many level: - People that actually want to retrieve their stuff, - It's harder to implement a full delete than it is to add a flag, - They would have to give up on data-mining assets. I don't endorse, but I understand.
- polymathist 13y ago
  Flagging items as deleted as opposed to actually deleting them is one thing. Of course it's not ideal for someone who wants to revoke facbook's access to their data, but there is more or less no difference from a user perspective. If I understand correctly, what's going on here is that after the posts and other content were flagged as deleted, they were somehow unflagged and became fully visible again. That's different, and really not okay at all.
  - pothibo 13y ago
    I agree with you: It's a bug and it's bad.
    - wilecoyote 13y ago
      Except that a bug implies it was accidental. Everyone deserves the benefit of doubt, but Facebook's history is exceptional in this regard. Similar to the OP, I have ethical concerns with some aspects of what Facebook does, or at least obvious harmful side effects of what they do. But I think for me the reason they bother me more than Google or others often lumped into the same category is the consistent and, as far as I can tell, completely unabashed disingenuousness they display (e.g., the history of public statements made every time this has happened going back almost to their founding days).
novum 13y ago
FB has, over the years, gradually lost my trust until I deleted my account in November 2010 after having been a member since late 2004 when FB was college-only. As a 20-something living in SF, it's a daily thing now: I don't get invited to parties, I don't know about birthdays, I don't see my friends' photos, I don't have any contact with anyone from high school or college anymore. There is a real social cost for someone in my situation to not be on FB. I struggle to quantify the harm, but it's there. I struggle too to explain to my friends why I'm not on FB. And yet I still think I'm better off without it. The whole situation contributes to the isolation I already experience as an introvert and someone who doesn't much care for bars, clubs, or alcohol -- though I suppose I don't need to remind this audience that being alone != loneliness. I guess it doesn't matter much anyway, since FB is still collecting information on me (and other 'shadow profiles' of users not on FB).
- eblume 13y ago
  As a fellow 20-something in SF, I feel your pain. I recently made a FB account that I keep absolutely bare except for my friends to invite me to things. It still results in 'leak' that I'm not fond of, but the alternate choice is to continue to be left in the dust.
  - holri 13y ago
    People that don't understand that I do not like FB are not my friends.
    - a3_nm 13y ago
      I used to think this, but the truth is more complex. Facebook makes it easy for a lot of people to manage very large number of friends. If you're not using Facebook but most people around you are using it, even though your close friends would probably care enough about you to communicate with you through some other means, you will probably be missing out on a large number of distant acquaintances. The usual counter-argument to this is that it isn't worth it to care about such relationships anyway, and that you should only be concerned about close friends. It is true that close friends are important, but it might not be true that the optimal strategy is to care only about them. It may be useful to keeping distant connections with old friends in case you ever run into them again, or to have a large distant social circle with diverse backgrounds and physical locations to get more diverse recommendations, opinions, help, etc. More dramatically, say you arrive in a new city where you don't know anyone and no one knows you, but most people use Facebook: if you insist that people that don't initially know you should use your favorite communication medium rather than Facebook to interact with you online, it might be harder to get things started. This isn't to say that you should use Facebook: I never used it and discourage people from using it. This is to argue that you should be conscious that not using Facebook may come at a personal disadvantage. I personally still think that it is more important to stick to my principles and make an insignificant effort to improve things by not being on Facebook, but I can understand that other people might think differently (though I disapprove their choice).
rinon 13y ago
Perhaps FB automatically decided that the deletions were in fact unauthorized tampering with the account and nicely restored the "damage?"
- whaevr 13y ago
  Thats what I was thinking, Im going to go ahead and guess that not too many fb users go through their entire timeline and delete Every.Single.Post. Flagging something like that as hostile and then "restoring" your timeline makes sense. However, I feel like there should be some kind of communication going on in email before something is actually done (for the mass deletes and auto restoring) and a simple "click here if this is what you really wanted to do" would suffice..
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- ancarda 13y ago
  I think those are related articles. The blog seems to have a lot of non-Facebook related content: http://wellpreparedmind.wordpress.com/ http://wellpreparedmind.wordpress.com/
- SecretofMana 13y ago
  It's a bit extreme to say that it "exists for the sole purpose" of that, since if you look at the post categories, the Facebook-related material only encompasses a small portion of the total posts made. Regardless of the author's bias towards Facebook, it's possible that they are telling the truth and wall posts that they "deleted" were suddenly made available again due to a flag being unset in the backend or something similar. This is something to keep in mind when creating content on Facebook.
- eksith 13y ago
  Those are three related posts in a blog with many, many, many more posts. It's chief focus is privacy and your online rights, which extends well into this topic. Look more before making sweeping generalizations like that, please.
- toble 13y ago
  I've had the same thing happen, so it's true. I wiped my profile clean some years back, yet information slowly returns in phases. I don't know if they do it on purpose and are trying to be as subtle as possible, or if they're somehow unintentionally forgetting deletes. Either way it's annoying to repeatedly delete stuff.
- junto 13y ago
  If I hadn't seen exactly the same thing with my own eyes then I would be tempted to believe you. I said this previously in another Facebook related thread: Facebook don't properly delete content that you choose to delete. Photos, check-ins and posts are just archived. I've been through and deleted everything manually on my timeline back to 2007. I noted that certain pages still showed the "counts" of content that had long been deleted: - http://i.imgur.com/zdwTl.png - http://i.imgur.com/27RFG.png Recently I went back to delete some of the newer content. To my surprise, ALL of my previous posts, and comments had returned. I don't think Facebook are playing fair. Delete means delete, and I want to delete it permanently. If they archive the data instead of deleting it, then they should say 'archive' on the damn button. I also no longer trust Facebook at all. I don't post on it, and keep the account only for OAuth testing purposes (and lurking). If my deleted posts mysteriously appear again I plan on updating every single one to gibberish. Maybe quoting loremgibson.com or 1984.
ziko 13y ago
I'll give you a little advice that's been working wonderfully for me so far - don't ever post something that is politically/ethnically/whatever questionable and you'll be fine. Even better than that, it'll play in your favour.
- angersock 13y ago
  You probably have one of the most bland profiles out there. (This may be a good thing.)
  - ziko 13y ago
    Internet's a postcard, not an envelope.
  - ziko 13y ago
    I also run a pretty tight ship on Facebook. Only closest friends and family (13 people in total), visibility to friends only and such things. Father created Facebook account a week ago to keep up with our favourite sports team. I sent him a friend request but he managed to hide it and didn't find it later. Yesterday he received an email saying something in this style: Do you know these people? A list with 13 people was underneath it and these 13 people were my friends. Thankfully he knows most of them so it didn't get awkward but still a massive, massive worry for me.
lukejduncan 13y ago
Facebook has value, but no matter what your privacy settings are set to, no matter what you delete, always assume that anything you write or do on Facebook - in any context - will be embarrassingly public. 1) Because it will and 2) because it just makes life easier. When my wife and I were first dating, for religious and cultural reasons her parents didn't know. Her parents are conservative Muslims and mine conservative Christians. She had a picture of the two of us as her profile picture, and it was set to private (that existed once). More importantly in the picture she wasn't wearing the hijab (the head scarf). One day Facebook removed the ability to have private profile pictures - automatically converting every profile picture to public. Her sister saw the picture and long story short that was the last time she talked to her parents. That was 2+ years ago. Facebook can't be blamed for the cultural and relationship issues at play here, but they can be blamed for how they went about this. And we can be blamed for trusting them. I still use facebook. I don't blame them for trying new things, pushing the boundaries, etc. I have however learned that no matter what that data isn't mine. It's facebooks. And whenever facebook decides to innovate they will do whatever they want with their data to try doing it.
- sneak 13y ago
  > always assume that anything you write or do on Facebook - in any context - will be embarrassingly public. Furthermore, even if you don't use facebook, or use it for reading only, you can always assume that every piece of data your friends give them, from photos with your face in them to the contents of their address book (with your birthday, nickname, private phone numbers, etc) will be stored by them forever. Even if they don't display the data on the public site, don't think they don't mine it for actionable changes to ad targeting. It was recently discovered that they were leaking data that they were collecting from people's address books. Turns out that their app was uploading it for friends-matching but they were (logically) storing it silently alongside your profile. It may well be possible that, via just their mobile app's userbase's contacts, they have the vast majority of the social graph for the entire planet, even their non-users. Those users have volunteered sufficient data that, given that planetary graph, they can infer many attributes (with high accuracy) associated with those who actively avoid them. It's sort of the same concept as how facial recognition technology and traffic analysis can uniquely ID all mass transit users, even those who don't use credit cards (your name's in the magstripe) to pay the fare. Given enough data, they can fill in the holes with sufficient accuracy and encompass everyone.
capkutay 13y ago
Personal story, but nevertheless humiliating and tied to facebook. I was never able to get an explanation or even contact FB's support about it. Within a matter of hours, I lost over 150 facebook friends. Somehow, it was also tied into instagram and I unfollowed all my friends. Not sure how this happened. But you could imagine that it's embarrassing to have to re-friend people on facebook and explain that you didn't do it on purpose. I'm sure there are some people I forgot to refriend who think that I just de-friended them for personal reasons. This just ties into the fact that whatever happens to you on facebook will be broadcast to your entire social network.
shadesandcolour 13y ago
I wonder if this is the case because those wall posts aren't specifically yours. You posted those onto another user's timeline, and thus it's probably not within your power to delete them. I'm not saying that this is the right thing to do, but it fits with the available data. If you removed all your photos and they're still gone, but wall posts are still there, it's an issue with how Facebook view data ownership. If you delete status updates or relationships, work etc, they stay gone too I imagine.
rshm 13y ago
Similar, I deleted my twitter profile picture as well as account in 2008. I had a url of the profile image saved. After five years the the link works and image is still there.
- twistedpair 13y ago
  Clear your cache?
  - shdon 13y ago
    I wager his cache has been cleared somewhere in the past 5 years.
- codezero 13y ago
  This usually happens because the image is stored on a third party CDN, and their delete process probably just touches their local data. Of course they can delete stuff off the CDN, but I can see why this might have been missed. If you contact Twitter support, they can probably fix this.
devindotcom 13y ago
There seems to be a philosophical difference in how users versus services view ownership of data and posts like this. If you write status "foo" and someone else comments "bar," who owns what? Do you own the comment because it is subordinate to your post? If your post was just a letter, and someone wrote an essay in a comment underneath it, do you own that essay and can you delete it without permission from its creator? No, we shouldn't trust facebook. But no, we also shouldn't pretend that the word delete means the same thing on your personal computer as it does on a shared resource like facebook. It's way more complicated than that. It should be simple, but it isn't, at least not yet. Also, not upvoting this because of the eye-rollingly overdone "merriam-webster defines..." line. God, I can't stand that!
- jarek 13y ago
  When you send someone a letter, you might have a copy and they will have a copy, but the post shouldn't. If you burn your copy, you don't expect the post to send you a backup.
- GhotiFish 13y ago
  >"merriam-webster defines..." line. God, I can't stand that! A Kindred spirit!
baddox 13y ago
While I agree with the gist of the argument (Facebook shouldn't bring back user-deleted posts, and you shouldn't trust Facebook), the semantic arguments over the term "delete" are frivolous. It's not unreasonable for Facebook to keep storing things that I delete. Windows has the Recycle Bin, word processors have undo, databases have backups, etc. The problem is restoring the content without the user's permission. Citing a dictionary definition then overfitting your argument to that specific definition is something I expect from a high school speech class.
cliveowen 13y ago
One thing that has always bothered me it's that if you ever decide to post a comment on a site that uses the Facebook commenting system and you decide not to publish that comment on your timeline, then you have no way of recovering it (and thus deleting it, if you ever decide so). You have to resort to search engines that behave poorly for this kind of things. I admit that after some mishaps Facebook has greatly improved the privacy controls on the site and allowed user to more easily control what they share and with whom, but I guess pretty much everyone would agree that it's not enough yet. We need the ability to delete the very content that we create, everyone has the right to be forgotten should he decide so.
- 0x0 13y ago
  Is it not even present in the "Activity Log" screen?
  - cliveowen 13y ago
    No, it's not. If they're not on your timeline they're gone forever.
- Karunamon 13y ago
  >everyone has the right to be forgotten should he decide so This is going to sound like a devil's advocate post, but it isn't. I don't believe that such a right exists. Why? Because removing all your input from a given medium (a social network, a forum, what have you) destroys context and therefore useful information for other people. Imagine someone who frequented a web forum (say.. Hacker News?) for a number of years, building up a large body of content, helpful posts, etc. They then, for whatever reason, invoke the EU's "right to be forgotten" (pretending that HN is headquartered in the EU), getting all their posts deleted. Those posts gone, every single conversation that user was in is now SIGNIFICANTLY harder to follow. What are those thousands of replies in relation to? Who knows? Those conversations are permanently lost to the sands of time. Putting something out in public should not place any binds on the people who display that information. I believe everyone else's right to learn supersedes the individual's supposed "right to be forgotten". It's easy enough to fix - don't comment in public if you don't want someone else having those words later. That said, this isn't to condone Facebook's behavior of "soft-deleting" things that they say are gone. This is downright fraudulent, IMHO.
mililani 13y ago
Just create a fake FB account for things like authentication, or getting coupons, etc... I don't trust FB, but I do need it for certain things. Keeping in touch with friends/family is definitely not one of them
- benbeltran 13y ago
  In a very creepy aspect of this. I closed my account a while ago, and I opened a dummy one with another email, because I still needed to mod a few communities. The recommendations were the usual: friends of people in the communities and such. About a month ago it started recommending family members, classmates, and friends. Really accurate. It's creepy: I don't have a smartphone from which it could syphon the contacts, I'm not using my real name and I was using an email that I only use for facebook. I have no idea what data it's using. But I was not surprised, I just thought. "Damn it, they found a way"
pyvek 13y ago
Another thing to note is that they don't want their users to delete stuff or do any action that may suggest abandoning the platform. I thought that I deleted my profile 1.5 years ago but I tried logging in last week (after seeing a similar HN thread) and was surprised to find that it was all there. It occured to me that I must have deactivated my profile. Then I tried looking for delete option but couldn't find it anywhere. All I could find was a _deactivate_ button. I had to use a third party (Google) to find out about how to delete my profile. Facebook has made it unnecessarily hard to delete accounts and instead pushes the _deactivate_ option in a very psychologically manipulative way. Even after using the delete option, I'm sure that they're going to retain my data for as long as they like. I still did it for my own sake, prevent myself from using it at all.
talhof8 13y ago
Do you think facebook is going down?
- Helpful_Bunny 13y ago
  Looking at the trends, I suspect Facebook will be the goat in the tech group cull that's being contemplated.[1] The reasons for thinking this are three-fold: a) Extremely poor share performance post-IPO (which has irked a lot of heavy-weights) and demise of Zynga's revenue sources. Although ad revenue is there, there's a lot of industry research showing that $/click return is minimal at best (out of all of these models, FB appears to have the lowest, and easiest to Bot). FB ad revenue has more to do with the current glut in Corporate $cash holdings than real returns, fyi. b) Lack of utility outside data mining / advertising (all others, even dead ducks like Yahoo! have secondary and tertiary utility, not to mention the shining lights like Google who are still willing to push the envelope). By this, I'm not referencing Social Utility, but Business Utility. c) Their ties to NSA / current security concerns go so far beyond the base level of acceptance that it's a given they'll suffer hard blow-back. Those Bilderberg meetings weren't about unicorns and skittles and any serious business should be concerned about having their employees mined so easily (and in certain fields, more open to Social Engineering hacks directly due to this intel). Even as an American company, you'd want this be considering this; for the rest of the world, it's a major concern. You can argue about these, but I suspect as they hit their 10 year mark, there will be a hotter, faster, hungrier and probably more honest model to replace them (i.e. "We will do X with this data - agree, and get Y benefit, or even better - we'll pay you Z for it, and not in Farmville Tokens, or even "pay Z+1 to go dark"). Anyhow, since this is free commentary, YMMV. But, realistically - the age of the "Dumb Fucks" is closing. Wild Wild West is ending, and the Buffalo ain't roaming no more. If you need that explained: a large amount of the cash generated by web 2.0 (e.g. Huffington Post sale) was created by parasitical leveraging of user's ignorance & goodwill. I suspect that's about to change with a newer generation; although, hey, Pop Idol still makes money, so perhaps not - but it will only be farming the ignorant, which is hardly "cutting edge". Face Book as the online Walmart - there's an image to take to heart as you look @ it's stock price over the next 6 months. Full disclosure: Never had a Face Book account, because Privacy / Anonymity is the coolest thing in a connected world, nor do I hold any FB stock, nor am I shorting FB stock in any manner. [1]FT - Real progressives believe in breaking up Google (no link, as it is pay walled). I don't agree with the opinion piece, I'm merely using it to denote a recent trend.
Hyrum_Graff 13y ago
Fuck it. Delete everything. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5846496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5846496
donniezazen 13y ago
Not having facebook makes you look like an anti-social element irrespective of what it does to your mental health and well being. At the end of the day, I feel like make a small circle of friends that engage with you on deep level and not just superficially. What kind of friend it would who couldn't or forgets to text or call you?
- koralatov 13y ago
  That's exactly my feeling on it. Since I left Facebook at the start of 2011, I've seen my friends just as much --- perhaps more --- than when I was on there, and I hear from them at least as frequently. The only difference is that I don't get the occasional, insincere message from people I went to school with who are bored and looking for something to do.
  - donniezazen 13y ago
    Also it is more fun to hear about them face to face and not read a generic message on facebook and they tend to have more things to say to you.
deleted 13y ago
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speeder 13y ago
I just remembered a very interesting tale. There is a social networks for some stuff that you don't want known (for example, sexual fetishes, or gay stuff, or anti-government stuff, and so on). I know a case where someone (that was never found out who, although there are some suspects) in one of those social networks started to attack some other people there. Until things started to get out of hand, with the person finding the Facebook profiles of those involved (even if they had completely fake profiles) and posting on that network, and then getting their profile in that network and posting back on Facebook... Then the attacker posted on the niche social network the Facebook profiles of children of the victims, stuff escalated to the point of people hiring private investigators and professional assassins (some of the victims were soldiers and/or military police shock troops, and were not amused at all at threats toward their family... and happily supported plans for a assassination). Happily the attacker suddenly gave up, and things de-escalated... But it made me much more aware that social networks can be VERY dangerous... Of course (considering the tone of social networks here, professions of those involved, and that people wanted to do illegal stuff) I cannot explain better or give more information.
- PavlovsCat 13y ago
  "To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem." ― Douglas Adams
hamoid 13y ago
I wonder if I could get my account really deleted and my data put offline by breaking the terms [1] (posting ads and logos or sharing my password for example). I'm afraid it would not work, though. Probably they delete the recent content, leave the rest online, and refuse me to log in... Did anyone try? [1] https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms
ultimoo 13y ago
I wonder what facebookers who are HNers have to say about this. Do you guys have any opinions about this -- it is by design? Are there ways around it? Will there be ways around this?
shmerl 13y ago
Just use better alternatives like Diaspora.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
marknutter 13y ago
I've had similar issues with Facebook. After it became clear they were using my "likes" and profile information (favorite movies, books, tv shows, etC) to serve me ads I removed every single "like" I had ever done and all information from my profile. Yet I still get targeted adds based on that information.
- pjbrunet 13y ago
  That info has been resold 100 times already ;-)
kailuowang 13y ago
Thank you. I didn't know that you can actually delete your facebook account until I saw you post. The only option I knew was to deactivate the account. From the UI, I couldn't find any other option, but a single Google point me to the delete account form. Thanks!
kimlelly 13y ago
Is this real life? Do you really think it's still necessary to state that you should not trust a company that works with the NSA? Does anybody do any thinking after reading the news? What exactly do you need to wake up? EDIT: :-D just keep downvoting and burry your heads deep in the sand...
h2ohno 13y ago
I did the very same thing with my account, and also noticed everything that I deleted still showing up in the timeline. Pissed me off. Need I remind everyone that Zuckerberg himself said people were "dumb fucks" for trusting him with their data?
grandalf 13y ago
I think this is far more likely due to incompetence on the part of Facebook than malice.
- codezero 13y ago
  Yep. My guess is that when you deactivate, FB marks your posts as deleted to remove them from view, then when you reactivate, it unmarks them, but doesn't make a distinction between whether the user manually deleted them, or whether it was automatically done as part of the deactivation process.
- claudius 13y ago
  I tend to be more lenient of malice than incompetence. If your goals don’t align with mine, fine, maybe we can still work something out. But if you are in the data-handling business (Facebook, Google etc. are) and you fail to handle data properly, you should rather die today than tomorrow.
- gohrt 13y ago
  To users, there is no distinction.
yid 13y ago
I find rants like this quite interesting, especially when they end with lines like this: > That is why I may delete my Facebook account. And that is why you should too. "May". In spite of this pretty egregious behavior/bug, it's still a "may delete my Facebook account". That alone says something about the longevity of the business.
- Tyrannosaurs 13y ago
  I suspect they have a pretty good idea of exactly how far they can push it without losing significant numbers. For every outcry they'll know the impact on usage, account deletions and so on and I suspect sadly for the most part it's negligible.
- baddox 13y ago
  It says something about the immense social utility that Facebook provides.
  - a3_nm 13y ago
    ... because everyone is using it. It says nothing about the difference in social utility between the current state of the world and an alternate state of the world in which everyone would be using a federated social network. Facebook is a local optimum from which it will be hard to move away.
    - baddox 13y ago
      I completely agree. However, when my mother wants to locate an old friend from her childhood, my description of a currently non-existent widely-used federated social network is of little use to her, but Facebook seems to serve her quite well.
- threeseed 13y ago
  That alone says something about the longevity of the business. That and the fact that the people that are leaving are the geeks of the world. Which typically have a lower friend count, lower engagement and fewer connections to the popular 'tastemakers' in society. Facebook will start to see problems when the popular people leave and drag their social networks with them. But these people are the ones that don't care so much about privacy, security or whether Facebook deletes data now, in the future or not at all.
nadahalli 13y ago
The only reason I am on Facebook and also not use AdBlock on Google Search is, I am in the internet business. And if you are in the internet-business, you do have to be a part of the system: all in. I do not want to mull over a social media monetizing idea and wonder if Facebook has already figured it out. I just need to be there and know it myself. Sad reason, but that's the way it is.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
3327 13y ago
wow after reading this I went and closed account.
Arnor 13y ago
Regarding: >> Or is it? If Facebook doesn’t understand what should happen when I delete my wall posts, who’s to say that if I delete my account, it won’t come back too? I thought I had deleted my account in 2009, but I was curious when I saw this. It turns out I can still log in. Curious...
jmandzik 13y ago
Facebook lost me a while back when the Android app first came out. Logging into the site and finding contacts that had no account in my facebook "phonebook" felt like a breach of trust. I figured they'd act in good faith and enrich Android contacts with facebook data. I did NOT think they'd yank my contacts the other way, doing who-knows-what with it. Shame on me for not reading the app permissions with more scrutiny. Leaving facebook removed a distraction I did not realize I was weary of. At risk of sounding dramatic, it felt like I got a few minutes a day of my life back.
eyeareque 13y ago
So if you break their T.O.S. bad enough, will they delete you for real?
- baddox 13y ago
  Why would they do that when they could just lock you out of your account?
boi_v2 13y ago
I bet when you "delete" something facebook (and many others) just marks it as "hidden" so you will think it is gone. The same happen to me but with yahoo, I had an old account that was long unused, because I didn't want to lose any contact that could happen I redirected it to another email, then, after a couple of years, I decided to delete the account because only spams were being redirected. A year later I notice that emails started to come from this "deleted" account again and so I tried to login and for my surprise it was active. So don't expect to "delete" anything, and I think we shouldn't expect to have our rights respected, these companies provide a service that is not really for us.
- pjbrunet 13y ago
  Supposedly I don't have a Yahoo account, deleted it several years ago. It was very difficult to delete. They make you talk to the fraud/abuse dept, ask you personal questions to prove who you are, ask you over and over again are you absolutely sure, it's a long process. Same with Amazon, it's a long, frustrating process. Then I get an Amazon gift card. To claim the money I signed up for an account (used a different email address) and surprise, surprise, they had all my data saved, old purchases, etc. This should be illegal and I bet there are some countries that don't tolerate it. Germany?
dysinger 13y ago
I just went and looked too and all my content going back to 2007 which a painstaking hand deleted is back(!) I hope mark zuckerberg ends up broke doing LAMP consulting.
jorgecastillo 13y ago
Every time this sort of articles come up, I feel glad I don't have a Facebook account. As I see it if you care enough about somebody, you have their phone number and their address.
diminoten 13y ago
For the 100th time, the only reason any of us are on Facebook and not Google+ or MySpace or Friendster or whatever is because all of our friends are on there with us. Facebook can and will do whatever it wants to abuse this fact, and as long as they provide the most convenient way to communicate with other people, there is nothing we can do about it, period. So rant away, my Internet friends, it's all we can do anyway.
- pjbrunet 13y ago
  -1
PavlovsCat 13y ago
I am not going to waste time deleting all of my content a third time. I did that once, there's a Firefox extension (the name escapes me at the moment sorry) you can use to create macros. Sure it's useless in a way, but it's also fun in a way :D If it pops back, it's macro time again -- better than nothing, right?
- gtirloni 13y ago
  I used one of the userscripts.org extensions for that and it caused my FB account to get locked for 24h. When I came back all my content had been restored (I know that because while the script was working, I had another window opened checking the progress). Now the extension does not work anymore (the button it adds to the setting pages is not showing).
D9u 13y ago
I stopped using FB over a year ago, and I deleted my account there last December. Once you delete your FB account your profile remains visible for another two weeks, provided you don't login during the interim. Today I can happily say that I am no longer on the publicly-available Facebook site, but who knows if FB maintains an LEO version of the site for use by the fascists (spies) and other government entities...
marcelocamanho 13y ago
It is probably issues with cache and/or data replication.
alariccole 13y ago
"That is why I may delete my Facebook account. And that is why you should too." We should also do something that you're not even certain you're going to do yourself?
- koralatov 13y ago
  Previously on the same blog (and linked to at the bottom of the post no less!): ``Don't Be Fooled Facebook Is Forever''[1]: I stopped using Facebook because I distrusted them, and what I discovered yesterday only confirms that I was right. and ``Facebook --- The Last Straw''[2]: All this may take a while, but I’m going to remove myself from Facebook and I’m going to do it on my terms, not theirs. [1]: http://wellpreparedmind.wordpress.com/2012/10/24/dont-be-fooled-facebook-is-forever/ http://wellpreparedmind.wordpress.com/2012/10/24/dont-be-foo... [2]: https://wellpreparedmind.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/facebook-the-last-straw/ https://wellpreparedmind.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/facebook-t...
sgrenfro 13y ago
My name is Scott Renfro, and I’m a software engineer at Facebook working on security and privacy. I thought I'd post the comment I submitted on the original blog post here as well. We’ve put a lot of work into making deletions permanent, so I can imagine how frustrated you must be. I’m pretty sure those story deletions are permanent, and I can’t think of any place where we can or do automatically restore user-deleted content months later. If you happen to have any more details about specific stories that reappeared, I’d love to try and figure out exactly what happened. Admittedly, that may be difficult now that several months have passed. As one of the other commenters mentioned, your Activity Log is a better place to get a full list of your activity and delete it item-by-item. It also shows posts that Timeline omits and includes other types of content such as likes and comments. This help page may be useful https://www.facebook.com/help/activitylog https://www.facebook.com/help/activitylog and you can find your Activity Log at https://www.facebook.com/me/allactivity?privacy_source=activity_log&log_filter=all&filter_onlyme=on https://www.facebook.com/me/allactivity?privacy_source=activ... I couldn’t tell from your description, but one possibility is that you only saw and deleted the stories rendered on your Timeline, which is just a summary of your activity.
- Steuard 13y ago
  As long as you're here, any comment on the (current) top-rated comment by lukejduncan? How can we trust that our private information today won't be similarly exposed by a settings change tomorrow? (I hope that nothing I've posted would endanger my relationship with my family, but I know others aren't as safe.)
  - sgrenfro 13y ago
    I'd like to think we wouldn't need to make such a fundamental change again in the future, but if we did decide it was necessary, I hope that we would give everyone plenty of time to make whatever change to their account was necessary to avoid painful outcomes like that.
    - snth 13y ago
      "I hope" isn't much comfort.
johnjlocke 13y ago
I always think back to that time when Zuck was on stage a couple of years ago, and he was talking about user-generated content, and he slipped, and referred to it as Facebook's. There you go. Anything you put on their site is their property, to do with as they like. I really think their days are numbered. Not anytime soon, but eventually, they are going to become as obsolete as Friendster, Bebo, and MySpace are now, but first a new social network that is built in that same style must emerge.
tedsanders 13y ago
I think the title is an overreaction. Just because something can and has violated your trust doesn't mean you should never trust it. Never is a very strong word.
randartie 13y ago
Timeline shows only popular posts you make. If you delete the posts on timeline then only a subset of your posts are deleted AND they will get replaced by other less popular posts you made in the past. You'd need to go into user settings and delete items directly from the activity log. This clearly isn't a huge usecase (1 by 1 item deletion). This is just another case of user misunderstanding/error which gets blamed on facebook.
readme 13y ago
And Google doesn't delete your emails, either. Even if you click delete. They own you.
sidcool 13y ago
I read other posts by this guy and he really seems pissed of at FB.
vog 13y ago
In this context, it's worth noting that as a Facebook user, you are not their custumer, but their product.
yaix 13y ago
In the EU, there was a law in the makeing around "the right to be forgotten". Looks like we really need it, probably for Google as well.
mtgx 13y ago
Facebook always does this. Everytime there's a privacy policy change in some way, they restore everything to default (public) again.
workbench 13y ago
"My name is Scott Renfro, and I’m a software engineer at Facebook working on security and privacy. We’ve put a lot of work into making deletions permanent" Had to LOL at this comment
faizanaziz 13y ago
Thats exactly the reason why we built http://pixter.in http://pixter.in . Facebook's incentive is to get as much data of you and retain it. Our incentive is to build the best product. If your incentive's are clear and aligned things like this won't happen.
davexunit 13y ago
Ditch Facebook and join Diaspora. It's a great project that Rails/Javascript devs can contribute to. http://diasporaproject.org/ http://diasporaproject.org/
smutticus 13y ago
"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." It's simple folks. If you still trust FB with anything at this point you're going to get hurt. If you do trust them with something and they burn you then it's your fault.
jgeerts 13y ago
There is one part of this that I agree with, that is the part where you say that if you delete all items one by one (why don't they have a delete all?) you want them never to be visible for anyone again. The part I don't agree with is that you expect that the data is physically deleted from the server. I think and expect that big companies don't wipe all your data on command, they simply set a flag for deleted records. Really deleting the data also has a technical impact for them, it probably depends on the company's policy. It would be great if they did wipe all data but I really think most of them don't and have some sort of an aging process or really never delete your data.
ssw1n 13y ago
Sequel to the article incoming: "OMG! I deleted my Facebook account two months ago, and my friends just told me that they wished me birthday on my timeline last night. OMG! Facebook, I trusted you! Why!? OMG!" Seriously, I love the last sentence of the article: "That is why I may delete my Facebook account. And that is why you should too." If Facebook will not delete the posts on the Timeline, why is the author still believing that deleting the account will genuinely delete the account? The data you disclosed to the social network is here to stay. The only way you can stop is to not give it more.
antitrust 13y ago
Should you enter your real information on any internet site? It's kind of like when stores ask for your phone number: there's no real obligation to them to not use it for spam or re-sell it. I always give a fake and ask them to email.
gtirloni 13y ago
Yesterday I started deleting all my FB content. My FB account got locked and released 24h later. When I logged in, all my content was restored. I'm still trying to understand why.

533 points by mikecane 13y ago

ten7 13y ago

Perhaps the way to delete the information in the account is to replace the status posts, comments, photos with junk. Words and sentences that don't mean anything; photos that are noise. Perhaps there's a way to do that in an automated fashion. I'd use that.

switch007 13y ago
I'm sure that any edit is really a new version which is then displayed. =/
- ten7 13y ago
  You're probably right. Then what about replacing it with junk? THen doing it again? Then again? Then again?
ph0rque 13y ago
Markov chains based on content about facebook privacy intrusions, perhaps ;)?
walid 13y ago
Interesting idea! You're making me wonder if someone intentionally violates the TOS by, for example, uploading porn if they would delete the account. Facebook does delete accounts that it considers spam so they might just delete such an account.

Duhck 13y ago

Clearly they have a bug, but as far as actually deleting your data; I am willing to be it'll never be deleted. They couldn't possibly manage the data if you could remove pieces, since everything on facebook is intertwined (likes, comments, shares, etc). aka this doesn't surprise me.

eblume 13y ago
I spent a fairly large amount of time trying to completely delete my account - it involved emails, 'hidden' links, and multiple confirmation boxes using a nonstandard UI for facebook. A few days ago I made a brand new account (but using the same email as before) and was greeted with the suggestion to add ALL of my old friends right back again. Clearly nothing has been deleted, and I now feel confirmed that it never, ever will be.
- ajanuary 13y ago
  Just a theory, but could it be that all those friends have your email in their contact list, and when they've done a bulk import Facebook has remembered that connection so it can suggest them to you if you ever join (and vice versa)? The data isn't on your side, it's on there's. Of course there's a whole other (worthy) debate about that, but it doesn't necessarily mean Facebook didn't delete the data you added.
  - eblume 13y ago
    That's a solid point. Thanks!

mahyarm 13y ago

This is the frustrating thing about facebook. They often have bugs that make things suddenly become public, or settings for visibility of new posts all of a sudden reset to 'all friends' or public. G+ handles this kind of stuff far better. I really wish there was an auto-delete items older than X months. Most of the value of facebook goes away after a month, anything older than that is usually negative history digging and stalking by others.

ancarda 13y ago
Except that this isn't a bug. The user asked for the content to be deleted. For it to become public, they must have used a "delete" flag or something similar. The point is they didn't actually delete the content, rather just flag it as deleted.
- i0exception 13y ago
  Actually deleting content would be a very expensive operation at Facebook's scale. Flagging it as deleted is the most optimal way. What's troubling is that this content somehow got undeleted on its own. Not once, but twice.
  - ISL 13y ago
    Permanently deleting flagged data from all sites on monthly timescales seems like it ought to be possible.
  - guelo 13y ago
    Every operation at Facebook scale is expensive. But they have the resources. They don't do something because they don't want to, not because manipulating their data is hard. They do complicated things to their data all the time.
    - Zelphyr 13y ago
      Agreed. I'm not buying the "its hard/expensive" argument that so many people seem to be submitting in this thread. The fact is, when Facebook gives you the option to "delete" something there is a reasonable expectation that by doing so that post, picture, etc... will be deleted. Removed. Gone. Permanently. If they want to give you the option to retrieve it later in case you accidentally delete something then call it "Flag for deletion" instead. To do ANYTHING else is disingenuous at best. Otherwise known as a lie. This is yet more proof that users of Facebook are the product and will be treated as such. Whoever pays Facebook actual money gets to dictate the terms and they are the people that want Facebook to never delete your data.

dangerlibrary 13y ago

I deleted my Facebook account a few years ago. The whole deal - waited the requisite month or so to ensure that it was gone, and any further login attempts wouldn't re-instate the account. Six months later I signed up with a different email address, and Facebook forced me to confirm my account with my phone number. Javascript Error - that phone number is associated with another Facebook account. I click OK, and I'm redirected to my "new" account with all my old Facebook friends (on the opposite side of the country) showing up as "people I may know." Nothing is deleted from Facebook, ever.

threeseed 13y ago
How did you delete your account ? Because no where in Facebook does it allow you to do this. Only deactivate your account.
- uiri 13y ago
  You can request to have the account deleted. More info here: https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674 https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674
gohrt 13y ago
If you used the same computer, Facebook knows that people from your IP tend to communicate with those friends.

pothibo 13y ago

I understand this is not good. I do. But I'm surprised people think entity like Facebook, Google and any other web businesses delete records permanently. It's not worth it on so many level: - People that actually want to retrieve their stuff, - It's harder to implement a full delete than it is to add a flag, - They would have to give up on data-mining assets. I don't endorse, but I understand.

polymathist 13y ago
Flagging items as deleted as opposed to actually deleting them is one thing. Of course it's not ideal for someone who wants to revoke facbook's access to their data, but there is more or less no difference from a user perspective. If I understand correctly, what's going on here is that after the posts and other content were flagged as deleted, they were somehow unflagged and became fully visible again. That's different, and really not okay at all.
- pothibo 13y ago
  I agree with you: It's a bug and it's bad.
  - wilecoyote 13y ago
    Except that a bug implies it was accidental. Everyone deserves the benefit of doubt, but Facebook's history is exceptional in this regard. Similar to the OP, I have ethical concerns with some aspects of what Facebook does, or at least obvious harmful side effects of what they do. But I think for me the reason they bother me more than Google or others often lumped into the same category is the consistent and, as far as I can tell, completely unabashed disingenuousness they display (e.g., the history of public statements made every time this has happened going back almost to their founding days).

novum 13y ago

FB has, over the years, gradually lost my trust until I deleted my account in November 2010 after having been a member since late 2004 when FB was college-only. As a 20-something living in SF, it's a daily thing now: I don't get invited to parties, I don't know about birthdays, I don't see my friends' photos, I don't have any contact with anyone from high school or college anymore. There is a real social cost for someone in my situation to not be on FB. I struggle to quantify the harm, but it's there. I struggle too to explain to my friends why I'm not on FB. And yet I still think I'm better off without it. The whole situation contributes to the isolation I already experience as an introvert and someone who doesn't much care for bars, clubs, or alcohol -- though I suppose I don't need to remind this audience that being alone != loneliness. I guess it doesn't matter much anyway, since FB is still collecting information on me (and other 'shadow profiles' of users not on FB).

eblume 13y ago
As a fellow 20-something in SF, I feel your pain. I recently made a FB account that I keep absolutely bare except for my friends to invite me to things. It still results in 'leak' that I'm not fond of, but the alternate choice is to continue to be left in the dust.
- holri 13y ago
  People that don't understand that I do not like FB are not my friends.
  - a3_nm 13y ago
    I used to think this, but the truth is more complex. Facebook makes it easy for a lot of people to manage very large number of friends. If you're not using Facebook but most people around you are using it, even though your close friends would probably care enough about you to communicate with you through some other means, you will probably be missing out on a large number of distant acquaintances. The usual counter-argument to this is that it isn't worth it to care about such relationships anyway, and that you should only be concerned about close friends. It is true that close friends are important, but it might not be true that the optimal strategy is to care only about them. It may be useful to keeping distant connections with old friends in case you ever run into them again, or to have a large distant social circle with diverse backgrounds and physical locations to get more diverse recommendations, opinions, help, etc. More dramatically, say you arrive in a new city where you don't know anyone and no one knows you, but most people use Facebook: if you insist that people that don't initially know you should use your favorite communication medium rather than Facebook to interact with you online, it might be harder to get things started. This isn't to say that you should use Facebook: I never used it and discourage people from using it. This is to argue that you should be conscious that not using Facebook may come at a personal disadvantage. I personally still think that it is more important to stick to my principles and make an insignificant effort to improve things by not being on Facebook, but I can understand that other people might think differently (though I disapprove their choice).

rinon 13y ago

Perhaps FB automatically decided that the deletions were in fact unauthorized tampering with the account and nicely restored the "damage?"

whaevr 13y ago
Thats what I was thinking, Im going to go ahead and guess that not too many fb users go through their entire timeline and delete Every.Single.Post. Flagging something like that as hostile and then "restoring" your timeline makes sense. However, I feel like there should be some kind of communication going on in email before something is actually done (for the mass deletes and auto restoring) and a simple "click here if this is what you really wanted to do" would suffice..

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

ancarda 13y ago
I think those are related articles. The blog seems to have a lot of non-Facebook related content: http://wellpreparedmind.wordpress.com/ http://wellpreparedmind.wordpress.com/
SecretofMana 13y ago
It's a bit extreme to say that it "exists for the sole purpose" of that, since if you look at the post categories, the Facebook-related material only encompasses a small portion of the total posts made. Regardless of the author's bias towards Facebook, it's possible that they are telling the truth and wall posts that they "deleted" were suddenly made available again due to a flag being unset in the backend or something similar. This is something to keep in mind when creating content on Facebook.
eksith 13y ago
Those are three related posts in a blog with many, many, many more posts. It's chief focus is privacy and your online rights, which extends well into this topic. Look more before making sweeping generalizations like that, please.
toble 13y ago
I've had the same thing happen, so it's true. I wiped my profile clean some years back, yet information slowly returns in phases. I don't know if they do it on purpose and are trying to be as subtle as possible, or if they're somehow unintentionally forgetting deletes. Either way it's annoying to repeatedly delete stuff.
junto 13y ago
If I hadn't seen exactly the same thing with my own eyes then I would be tempted to believe you. I said this previously in another Facebook related thread: Facebook don't properly delete content that you choose to delete. Photos, check-ins and posts are just archived. I've been through and deleted everything manually on my timeline back to 2007. I noted that certain pages still showed the "counts" of content that had long been deleted: - http://i.imgur.com/zdwTl.png - http://i.imgur.com/27RFG.png Recently I went back to delete some of the newer content. To my surprise, ALL of my previous posts, and comments had returned. I don't think Facebook are playing fair. Delete means delete, and I want to delete it permanently. If they archive the data instead of deleting it, then they should say 'archive' on the damn button. I also no longer trust Facebook at all. I don't post on it, and keep the account only for OAuth testing purposes (and lurking). If my deleted posts mysteriously appear again I plan on updating every single one to gibberish. Maybe quoting loremgibson.com or 1984.

ziko 13y ago

I'll give you a little advice that's been working wonderfully for me so far - don't ever post something that is politically/ethnically/whatever questionable and you'll be fine. Even better than that, it'll play in your favour.

angersock 13y ago
You probably have one of the most bland profiles out there. (This may be a good thing.)
- ziko 13y ago
  Internet's a postcard, not an envelope.
- ziko 13y ago
  I also run a pretty tight ship on Facebook. Only closest friends and family (13 people in total), visibility to friends only and such things. Father created Facebook account a week ago to keep up with our favourite sports team. I sent him a friend request but he managed to hide it and didn't find it later. Yesterday he received an email saying something in this style: Do you know these people? A list with 13 people was underneath it and these 13 people were my friends. Thankfully he knows most of them so it didn't get awkward but still a massive, massive worry for me.

lukejduncan 13y ago

Facebook has value, but no matter what your privacy settings are set to, no matter what you delete, always assume that anything you write or do on Facebook - in any context - will be embarrassingly public. 1) Because it will and 2) because it just makes life easier. When my wife and I were first dating, for religious and cultural reasons her parents didn't know. Her parents are conservative Muslims and mine conservative Christians. She had a picture of the two of us as her profile picture, and it was set to private (that existed once). More importantly in the picture she wasn't wearing the hijab (the head scarf). One day Facebook removed the ability to have private profile pictures - automatically converting every profile picture to public. Her sister saw the picture and long story short that was the last time she talked to her parents. That was 2+ years ago. Facebook can't be blamed for the cultural and relationship issues at play here, but they can be blamed for how they went about this. And we can be blamed for trusting them. I still use facebook. I don't blame them for trying new things, pushing the boundaries, etc. I have however learned that no matter what that data isn't mine. It's facebooks. And whenever facebook decides to innovate they will do whatever they want with their data to try doing it.

sneak 13y ago
> always assume that anything you write or do on Facebook - in any context - will be embarrassingly public. Furthermore, even if you don't use facebook, or use it for reading only, you can always assume that every piece of data your friends give them, from photos with your face in them to the contents of their address book (with your birthday, nickname, private phone numbers, etc) will be stored by them forever. Even if they don't display the data on the public site, don't think they don't mine it for actionable changes to ad targeting. It was recently discovered that they were leaking data that they were collecting from people's address books. Turns out that their app was uploading it for friends-matching but they were (logically) storing it silently alongside your profile. It may well be possible that, via just their mobile app's userbase's contacts, they have the vast majority of the social graph for the entire planet, even their non-users. Those users have volunteered sufficient data that, given that planetary graph, they can infer many attributes (with high accuracy) associated with those who actively avoid them. It's sort of the same concept as how facial recognition technology and traffic analysis can uniquely ID all mass transit users, even those who don't use credit cards (your name's in the magstripe) to pay the fare. Given enough data, they can fill in the holes with sufficient accuracy and encompass everyone.

capkutay 13y ago

Personal story, but nevertheless humiliating and tied to facebook. I was never able to get an explanation or even contact FB's support about it. Within a matter of hours, I lost over 150 facebook friends. Somehow, it was also tied into instagram and I unfollowed all my friends. Not sure how this happened. But you could imagine that it's embarrassing to have to re-friend people on facebook and explain that you didn't do it on purpose. I'm sure there are some people I forgot to refriend who think that I just de-friended them for personal reasons. This just ties into the fact that whatever happens to you on facebook will be broadcast to your entire social network.

shadesandcolour 13y ago

I wonder if this is the case because those wall posts aren't specifically yours. You posted those onto another user's timeline, and thus it's probably not within your power to delete them. I'm not saying that this is the right thing to do, but it fits with the available data. If you removed all your photos and they're still gone, but wall posts are still there, it's an issue with how Facebook view data ownership. If you delete status updates or relationships, work etc, they stay gone too I imagine.

rshm 13y ago

Similar, I deleted my twitter profile picture as well as account in 2008. I had a url of the profile image saved. After five years the the link works and image is still there.

twistedpair 13y ago
Clear your cache?
- shdon 13y ago
  I wager his cache has been cleared somewhere in the past 5 years.
codezero 13y ago
This usually happens because the image is stored on a third party CDN, and their delete process probably just touches their local data. Of course they can delete stuff off the CDN, but I can see why this might have been missed. If you contact Twitter support, they can probably fix this.

devindotcom 13y ago

There seems to be a philosophical difference in how users versus services view ownership of data and posts like this. If you write status "foo" and someone else comments "bar," who owns what? Do you own the comment because it is subordinate to your post? If your post was just a letter, and someone wrote an essay in a comment underneath it, do you own that essay and can you delete it without permission from its creator? No, we shouldn't trust facebook. But no, we also shouldn't pretend that the word delete means the same thing on your personal computer as it does on a shared resource like facebook. It's way more complicated than that. It should be simple, but it isn't, at least not yet. Also, not upvoting this because of the eye-rollingly overdone "merriam-webster defines..." line. God, I can't stand that!

jarek 13y ago
When you send someone a letter, you might have a copy and they will have a copy, but the post shouldn't. If you burn your copy, you don't expect the post to send you a backup.
GhotiFish 13y ago
>"merriam-webster defines..." line. God, I can't stand that! A Kindred spirit!

baddox 13y ago

While I agree with the gist of the argument (Facebook shouldn't bring back user-deleted posts, and you shouldn't trust Facebook), the semantic arguments over the term "delete" are frivolous. It's not unreasonable for Facebook to keep storing things that I delete. Windows has the Recycle Bin, word processors have undo, databases have backups, etc. The problem is restoring the content without the user's permission. Citing a dictionary definition then overfitting your argument to that specific definition is something I expect from a high school speech class.

cliveowen 13y ago

One thing that has always bothered me it's that if you ever decide to post a comment on a site that uses the Facebook commenting system and you decide not to publish that comment on your timeline, then you have no way of recovering it (and thus deleting it, if you ever decide so). You have to resort to search engines that behave poorly for this kind of things. I admit that after some mishaps Facebook has greatly improved the privacy controls on the site and allowed user to more easily control what they share and with whom, but I guess pretty much everyone would agree that it's not enough yet. We need the ability to delete the very content that we create, everyone has the right to be forgotten should he decide so.

0x0 13y ago
Is it not even present in the "Activity Log" screen?
- cliveowen 13y ago
  No, it's not. If they're not on your timeline they're gone forever.
Karunamon 13y ago
>everyone has the right to be forgotten should he decide so This is going to sound like a devil's advocate post, but it isn't. I don't believe that such a right exists. Why? Because removing all your input from a given medium (a social network, a forum, what have you) destroys context and therefore useful information for other people. Imagine someone who frequented a web forum (say.. Hacker News?) for a number of years, building up a large body of content, helpful posts, etc. They then, for whatever reason, invoke the EU's "right to be forgotten" (pretending that HN is headquartered in the EU), getting all their posts deleted. Those posts gone, every single conversation that user was in is now SIGNIFICANTLY harder to follow. What are those thousands of replies in relation to? Who knows? Those conversations are permanently lost to the sands of time. Putting something out in public should not place any binds on the people who display that information. I believe everyone else's right to learn supersedes the individual's supposed "right to be forgotten". It's easy enough to fix - don't comment in public if you don't want someone else having those words later. That said, this isn't to condone Facebook's behavior of "soft-deleting" things that they say are gone. This is downright fraudulent, IMHO.

mililani 13y ago

Just create a fake FB account for things like authentication, or getting coupons, etc... I don't trust FB, but I do need it for certain things. Keeping in touch with friends/family is definitely not one of them

benbeltran 13y ago
In a very creepy aspect of this. I closed my account a while ago, and I opened a dummy one with another email, because I still needed to mod a few communities. The recommendations were the usual: friends of people in the communities and such. About a month ago it started recommending family members, classmates, and friends. Really accurate. It's creepy: I don't have a smartphone from which it could syphon the contacts, I'm not using my real name and I was using an email that I only use for facebook. I have no idea what data it's using. But I was not surprised, I just thought. "Damn it, they found a way"

pyvek 13y ago

Another thing to note is that they don't want their users to delete stuff or do any action that may suggest abandoning the platform. I thought that I deleted my profile 1.5 years ago but I tried logging in last week (after seeing a similar HN thread) and was surprised to find that it was all there. It occured to me that I must have deactivated my profile. Then I tried looking for delete option but couldn't find it anywhere. All I could find was a _deactivate_ button. I had to use a third party (Google) to find out about how to delete my profile. Facebook has made it unnecessarily hard to delete accounts and instead pushes the _deactivate_ option in a very psychologically manipulative way. Even after using the delete option, I'm sure that they're going to retain my data for as long as they like. I still did it for my own sake, prevent myself from using it at all.

talhof8 13y ago

Do you think facebook is going down?

Helpful_Bunny 13y ago
Looking at the trends, I suspect Facebook will be the goat in the tech group cull that's being contemplated.[1] The reasons for thinking this are three-fold: a) Extremely poor share performance post-IPO (which has irked a lot of heavy-weights) and demise of Zynga's revenue sources. Although ad revenue is there, there's a lot of industry research showing that $/click return is minimal at best (out of all of these models, FB appears to have the lowest, and easiest to Bot). FB ad revenue has more to do with the current glut in Corporate $cash holdings than real returns, fyi. b) Lack of utility outside data mining / advertising (all others, even dead ducks like Yahoo! have secondary and tertiary utility, not to mention the shining lights like Google who are still willing to push the envelope). By this, I'm not referencing Social Utility, but Business Utility. c) Their ties to NSA / current security concerns go so far beyond the base level of acceptance that it's a given they'll suffer hard blow-back. Those Bilderberg meetings weren't about unicorns and skittles and any serious business should be concerned about having their employees mined so easily (and in certain fields, more open to Social Engineering hacks directly due to this intel). Even as an American company, you'd want this be considering this; for the rest of the world, it's a major concern. You can argue about these, but I suspect as they hit their 10 year mark, there will be a hotter, faster, hungrier and probably more honest model to replace them (i.e. "We will do X with this data - agree, and get Y benefit, or even better - we'll pay you Z for it, and not in Farmville Tokens, or even "pay Z+1 to go dark"). Anyhow, since this is free commentary, YMMV. But, realistically - the age of the "Dumb Fucks" is closing. Wild Wild West is ending, and the Buffalo ain't roaming no more. If you need that explained: a large amount of the cash generated by web 2.0 (e.g. Huffington Post sale) was created by parasitical leveraging of user's ignorance & goodwill. I suspect that's about to change with a newer generation; although, hey, Pop Idol still makes money, so perhaps not - but it will only be farming the ignorant, which is hardly "cutting edge". Face Book as the online Walmart - there's an image to take to heart as you look @ it's stock price over the next 6 months. Full disclosure: Never had a Face Book account, because Privacy / Anonymity is the coolest thing in a connected world, nor do I hold any FB stock, nor am I shorting FB stock in any manner. [1]FT - Real progressives believe in breaking up Google (no link, as it is pay walled). I don't agree with the opinion piece, I'm merely using it to denote a recent trend.

Hyrum_Graff 13y ago

Fuck it. Delete everything. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5846496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5846496

donniezazen 13y ago

Not having facebook makes you look like an anti-social element irrespective of what it does to your mental health and well being. At the end of the day, I feel like make a small circle of friends that engage with you on deep level and not just superficially. What kind of friend it would who couldn't or forgets to text or call you?

koralatov 13y ago
That's exactly my feeling on it. Since I left Facebook at the start of 2011, I've seen my friends just as much --- perhaps more --- than when I was on there, and I hear from them at least as frequently. The only difference is that I don't get the occasional, insincere message from people I went to school with who are bored and looking for something to do.
- donniezazen 13y ago
  Also it is more fun to hear about them face to face and not read a generic message on facebook and they tend to have more things to say to you.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

speeder 13y ago

I just remembered a very interesting tale. There is a social networks for some stuff that you don't want known (for example, sexual fetishes, or gay stuff, or anti-government stuff, and so on). I know a case where someone (that was never found out who, although there are some suspects) in one of those social networks started to attack some other people there. Until things started to get out of hand, with the person finding the Facebook profiles of those involved (even if they had completely fake profiles) and posting on that network, and then getting their profile in that network and posting back on Facebook... Then the attacker posted on the niche social network the Facebook profiles of children of the victims, stuff escalated to the point of people hiring private investigators and professional assassins (some of the victims were soldiers and/or military police shock troops, and were not amused at all at threats toward their family... and happily supported plans for a assassination). Happily the attacker suddenly gave up, and things de-escalated... But it made me much more aware that social networks can be VERY dangerous... Of course (considering the tone of social networks here, professions of those involved, and that people wanted to do illegal stuff) I cannot explain better or give more information.

PavlovsCat 13y ago
"To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem." ― Douglas Adams

hamoid 13y ago

I wonder if I could get my account really deleted and my data put offline by breaking the terms [1] (posting ads and logos or sharing my password for example). I'm afraid it would not work, though. Probably they delete the recent content, leave the rest online, and refuse me to log in... Did anyone try? [1] https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms

ultimoo 13y ago

I wonder what facebookers who are HNers have to say about this. Do you guys have any opinions about this -- it is by design? Are there ways around it? Will there be ways around this?

shmerl 13y ago

Just use better alternatives like Diaspora.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

marknutter 13y ago

I've had similar issues with Facebook. After it became clear they were using my "likes" and profile information (favorite movies, books, tv shows, etC) to serve me ads I removed every single "like" I had ever done and all information from my profile. Yet I still get targeted adds based on that information.

pjbrunet 13y ago
That info has been resold 100 times already ;-)

kailuowang 13y ago

Thank you. I didn't know that you can actually delete your facebook account until I saw you post. The only option I knew was to deactivate the account. From the UI, I couldn't find any other option, but a single Google point me to the delete account form. Thanks!

kimlelly 13y ago

Is this real life? Do you really think it's still necessary to state that you should not trust a company that works with the NSA? Does anybody do any thinking after reading the news? What exactly do you need to wake up? EDIT: :-D just keep downvoting and burry your heads deep in the sand...

h2ohno 13y ago

I did the very same thing with my account, and also noticed everything that I deleted still showing up in the timeline. Pissed me off. Need I remind everyone that Zuckerberg himself said people were "dumb fucks" for trusting him with their data?

grandalf 13y ago

I think this is far more likely due to incompetence on the part of Facebook than malice.

codezero 13y ago
Yep. My guess is that when you deactivate, FB marks your posts as deleted to remove them from view, then when you reactivate, it unmarks them, but doesn't make a distinction between whether the user manually deleted them, or whether it was automatically done as part of the deactivation process.
claudius 13y ago
I tend to be more lenient of malice than incompetence. If your goals don’t align with mine, fine, maybe we can still work something out. But if you are in the data-handling business (Facebook, Google etc. are) and you fail to handle data properly, you should rather die today than tomorrow.
gohrt 13y ago
To users, there is no distinction.

yid 13y ago

I find rants like this quite interesting, especially when they end with lines like this: > That is why I may delete my Facebook account. And that is why you should too. "May". In spite of this pretty egregious behavior/bug, it's still a "may delete my Facebook account". That alone says something about the longevity of the business.

Tyrannosaurs 13y ago
I suspect they have a pretty good idea of exactly how far they can push it without losing significant numbers. For every outcry they'll know the impact on usage, account deletions and so on and I suspect sadly for the most part it's negligible.
baddox 13y ago
It says something about the immense social utility that Facebook provides.
- a3_nm 13y ago
  ... because everyone is using it. It says nothing about the difference in social utility between the current state of the world and an alternate state of the world in which everyone would be using a federated social network. Facebook is a local optimum from which it will be hard to move away.
  - baddox 13y ago
    I completely agree. However, when my mother wants to locate an old friend from her childhood, my description of a currently non-existent widely-used federated social network is of little use to her, but Facebook seems to serve her quite well.
threeseed 13y ago
That alone says something about the longevity of the business. That and the fact that the people that are leaving are the geeks of the world. Which typically have a lower friend count, lower engagement and fewer connections to the popular 'tastemakers' in society. Facebook will start to see problems when the popular people leave and drag their social networks with them. But these people are the ones that don't care so much about privacy, security or whether Facebook deletes data now, in the future or not at all.

nadahalli 13y ago

The only reason I am on Facebook and also not use AdBlock on Google Search is, I am in the internet business. And if you are in the internet-business, you do have to be a part of the system: all in. I do not want to mull over a social media monetizing idea and wonder if Facebook has already figured it out. I just need to be there and know it myself. Sad reason, but that's the way it is.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

3327 13y ago

wow after reading this I went and closed account.

Arnor 13y ago

Regarding: >> Or is it? If Facebook doesn’t understand what should happen when I delete my wall posts, who’s to say that if I delete my account, it won’t come back too? I thought I had deleted my account in 2009, but I was curious when I saw this. It turns out I can still log in. Curious...

jmandzik 13y ago

Facebook lost me a while back when the Android app first came out. Logging into the site and finding contacts that had no account in my facebook "phonebook" felt like a breach of trust. I figured they'd act in good faith and enrich Android contacts with facebook data. I did NOT think they'd yank my contacts the other way, doing who-knows-what with it. Shame on me for not reading the app permissions with more scrutiny. Leaving facebook removed a distraction I did not realize I was weary of. At risk of sounding dramatic, it felt like I got a few minutes a day of my life back.

eyeareque 13y ago

So if you break their T.O.S. bad enough, will they delete you for real?

baddox 13y ago
Why would they do that when they could just lock you out of your account?

boi_v2 13y ago

I bet when you "delete" something facebook (and many others) just marks it as "hidden" so you will think it is gone. The same happen to me but with yahoo, I had an old account that was long unused, because I didn't want to lose any contact that could happen I redirected it to another email, then, after a couple of years, I decided to delete the account because only spams were being redirected. A year later I notice that emails started to come from this "deleted" account again and so I tried to login and for my surprise it was active. So don't expect to "delete" anything, and I think we shouldn't expect to have our rights respected, these companies provide a service that is not really for us.

pjbrunet 13y ago
Supposedly I don't have a Yahoo account, deleted it several years ago. It was very difficult to delete. They make you talk to the fraud/abuse dept, ask you personal questions to prove who you are, ask you over and over again are you absolutely sure, it's a long process. Same with Amazon, it's a long, frustrating process. Then I get an Amazon gift card. To claim the money I signed up for an account (used a different email address) and surprise, surprise, they had all my data saved, old purchases, etc. This should be illegal and I bet there are some countries that don't tolerate it. Germany?

dysinger 13y ago

I just went and looked too and all my content going back to 2007 which a painstaking hand deleted is back(!) I hope mark zuckerberg ends up broke doing LAMP consulting.

jorgecastillo 13y ago

Every time this sort of articles come up, I feel glad I don't have a Facebook account. As I see it if you care enough about somebody, you have their phone number and their address.

diminoten 13y ago

For the 100th time, the only reason any of us are on Facebook and not Google+ or MySpace or Friendster or whatever is because all of our friends are on there with us. Facebook can and will do whatever it wants to abuse this fact, and as long as they provide the most convenient way to communicate with other people, there is nothing we can do about it, period. So rant away, my Internet friends, it's all we can do anyway.

pjbrunet 13y ago
-1

PavlovsCat 13y ago

I am not going to waste time deleting all of my content a third time. I did that once, there's a Firefox extension (the name escapes me at the moment sorry) you can use to create macros. Sure it's useless in a way, but it's also fun in a way :D If it pops back, it's macro time again -- better than nothing, right?

gtirloni 13y ago
I used one of the userscripts.org extensions for that and it caused my FB account to get locked for 24h. When I came back all my content had been restored (I know that because while the script was working, I had another window opened checking the progress). Now the extension does not work anymore (the button it adds to the setting pages is not showing).

D9u 13y ago

I stopped using FB over a year ago, and I deleted my account there last December. Once you delete your FB account your profile remains visible for another two weeks, provided you don't login during the interim. Today I can happily say that I am no longer on the publicly-available Facebook site, but who knows if FB maintains an LEO version of the site for use by the fascists (spies) and other government entities...

marcelocamanho 13y ago

It is probably issues with cache and/or data replication.

alariccole 13y ago

"That is why I may delete my Facebook account. And that is why you should too." We should also do something that you're not even certain you're going to do yourself?

koralatov 13y ago
Previously on the same blog (and linked to at the bottom of the post no less!): ``Don't Be Fooled Facebook Is Forever''[1]: I stopped using Facebook because I distrusted them, and what I discovered yesterday only confirms that I was right. and ``Facebook --- The Last Straw''[2]: All this may take a while, but I’m going to remove myself from Facebook and I’m going to do it on my terms, not theirs. [1]: http://wellpreparedmind.wordpress.com/2012/10/24/dont-be-fooled-facebook-is-forever/ http://wellpreparedmind.wordpress.com/2012/10/24/dont-be-foo... [2]: https://wellpreparedmind.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/facebook-the-last-straw/ https://wellpreparedmind.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/facebook-t...

sgrenfro 13y ago

My name is Scott Renfro, and I’m a software engineer at Facebook working on security and privacy. I thought I'd post the comment I submitted on the original blog post here as well. We’ve put a lot of work into making deletions permanent, so I can imagine how frustrated you must be. I’m pretty sure those story deletions are permanent, and I can’t think of any place where we can or do automatically restore user-deleted content months later. If you happen to have any more details about specific stories that reappeared, I’d love to try and figure out exactly what happened. Admittedly, that may be difficult now that several months have passed. As one of the other commenters mentioned, your Activity Log is a better place to get a full list of your activity and delete it item-by-item. It also shows posts that Timeline omits and includes other types of content such as likes and comments. This help page may be useful https://www.facebook.com/help/activitylog https://www.facebook.com/help/activitylog and you can find your Activity Log at https://www.facebook.com/me/allactivity?privacy_source=activity_log&log_filter=all&filter_onlyme=on https://www.facebook.com/me/allactivity?privacy_source=activ... I couldn’t tell from your description, but one possibility is that you only saw and deleted the stories rendered on your Timeline, which is just a summary of your activity.

Steuard 13y ago
As long as you're here, any comment on the (current) top-rated comment by lukejduncan? How can we trust that our private information today won't be similarly exposed by a settings change tomorrow? (I hope that nothing I've posted would endanger my relationship with my family, but I know others aren't as safe.)
- sgrenfro 13y ago
  I'd like to think we wouldn't need to make such a fundamental change again in the future, but if we did decide it was necessary, I hope that we would give everyone plenty of time to make whatever change to their account was necessary to avoid painful outcomes like that.
  - snth 13y ago
    "I hope" isn't much comfort.

johnjlocke 13y ago

I always think back to that time when Zuck was on stage a couple of years ago, and he was talking about user-generated content, and he slipped, and referred to it as Facebook's. There you go. Anything you put on their site is their property, to do with as they like. I really think their days are numbered. Not anytime soon, but eventually, they are going to become as obsolete as Friendster, Bebo, and MySpace are now, but first a new social network that is built in that same style must emerge.

tedsanders 13y ago

I think the title is an overreaction. Just because something can and has violated your trust doesn't mean you should never trust it. Never is a very strong word.

randartie 13y ago

Timeline shows only popular posts you make. If you delete the posts on timeline then only a subset of your posts are deleted AND they will get replaced by other less popular posts you made in the past. You'd need to go into user settings and delete items directly from the activity log. This clearly isn't a huge usecase (1 by 1 item deletion). This is just another case of user misunderstanding/error which gets blamed on facebook.

readme 13y ago

And Google doesn't delete your emails, either. Even if you click delete. They own you.

sidcool 13y ago

I read other posts by this guy and he really seems pissed of at FB.

vog 13y ago

In this context, it's worth noting that as a Facebook user, you are not their custumer, but their product.

yaix 13y ago

In the EU, there was a law in the makeing around "the right to be forgotten". Looks like we really need it, probably for Google as well.

mtgx 13y ago

Facebook always does this. Everytime there's a privacy policy change in some way, they restore everything to default (public) again.

workbench 13y ago

"My name is Scott Renfro, and I’m a software engineer at Facebook working on security and privacy. We’ve put a lot of work into making deletions permanent" Had to LOL at this comment

faizanaziz 13y ago

Thats exactly the reason why we built http://pixter.in http://pixter.in . Facebook's incentive is to get as much data of you and retain it. Our incentive is to build the best product. If your incentive's are clear and aligned things like this won't happen.

davexunit 13y ago

Ditch Facebook and join Diaspora. It's a great project that Rails/Javascript devs can contribute to. http://diasporaproject.org/ http://diasporaproject.org/

smutticus 13y ago

"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." It's simple folks. If you still trust FB with anything at this point you're going to get hurt. If you do trust them with something and they burn you then it's your fault.

jgeerts 13y ago

There is one part of this that I agree with, that is the part where you say that if you delete all items one by one (why don't they have a delete all?) you want them never to be visible for anyone again. The part I don't agree with is that you expect that the data is physically deleted from the server. I think and expect that big companies don't wipe all your data on command, they simply set a flag for deleted records. Really deleting the data also has a technical impact for them, it probably depends on the company's policy. It would be great if they did wipe all data but I really think most of them don't and have some sort of an aging process or really never delete your data.

ssw1n 13y ago

Sequel to the article incoming: "OMG! I deleted my Facebook account two months ago, and my friends just told me that they wished me birthday on my timeline last night. OMG! Facebook, I trusted you! Why!? OMG!" Seriously, I love the last sentence of the article: "That is why I may delete my Facebook account. And that is why you should too." If Facebook will not delete the posts on the Timeline, why is the author still believing that deleting the account will genuinely delete the account? The data you disclosed to the social network is here to stay. The only way you can stop is to not give it more.

antitrust 13y ago

Should you enter your real information on any internet site? It's kind of like when stores ask for your phone number: there's no real obligation to them to not use it for spam or re-sell it. I always give a fake and ask them to email.

gtirloni 13y ago

Yesterday I started deleting all my FB content. My FB account got locked and released 24h later. When I logged in, all my content was restored. I'm still trying to understand why.