Never Trust Facebook
wellpreparedmind.wordpress.com
wellpreparedmind.wordpress.com
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.
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.
Without your consent, they made private photos public. You didn't do that. You used their privacy settings which they created to prevent this type of situation. To have FB disregard their own privacy settings is 100% on them.
But, instead of blaming FB, you blame yourself. In light of the total collapse of privacy we've experienced recently, it's really sad that that seems perfectly rational.
But I agree with you about Facebook. I closed my account three years ago. (Heh -- three weeks later they tried to recruit me. I turned them down.)
How do you apply that seemingly unassailable stance to something like iPhone/iCloud, where photos you take with the only camera you have on you during once-in-a-lifetime-moments are immediately and automatically uploaded to a third party for safekeeping?
The solution to all of this data retention/spying stuff is not "start being meticulously paranoid with all of your data", not the least of which is because that won't scale to the majority of the population (and it must, if we are to retain a free society). Furthermore, communications metadata (such as email envelopes with your residential IP and timestamp, cell tower logs that reveal your location, or call logs that reveal your social graph) can't be kept secret unless you _stop communicating with people_. It's a non-starter.
The solution is to alter the legal environment such that these large troves of centralized data are much harder to exploit for evil, both by service providers and military intelligence organizations.
I apply it equally. The same goes for VPS, EC2, etc., and (especially given recent revelations) it's clear it should apply even to unencrypted communications over the Internet even between nodes you control.
At what point can you actually have a basis for legal recourse?
Once again the problem is that we don't have decentralized technology that would store our data encrypted and serve it only to those who we have granted access. But we will. Actually the new MegaUpload is encrypted.
A: if you want to keep it secret. How often do people find themselves in once in a lifetime moments that they want to keep secret, and want to take photos of, but only have an iphone with them?
B: iphones are not the only phones with built in cameras. If you care about privacy to that extent, you wouldn't own one.
That said, I agree with you. One example is when Service providers unilaterally change their tos by asserting that continued usage implies consent. This puts too much power in the hands of companies like Facebook, where many users are too embedded not to continue.
FB is happy to "destroy privacy" like a child unable to consider the real implications.
They agreed to keep your stuff private under their settings, and then they just unilaterally decide that it should be public? Screw that. This could be a winnable class action lawsuit.
Or actually, it does, but in the sense that your argument is pretty much analogous to the "if you have nothing to hide" argument.
There's really nothing you can do about this state of affairs except quit FB. They know you won't so they'll just keep fucking you. FB doesn't respect you like they don't respect their own ToS. Their job is to fuck you, over and over. That's their business plan and purpose of existence. Your job is to get fucked. Recognize your place in this relationship.
If you're uncomfortable about this relationship then leave. Otherwise STFU. Stop telling me that FB did something terrible with your precious personal information again. It's like someone complaining that their car got stolen after they left the keys sitting on top of it in a bad neighborhood. WTF did you expect?
For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.
I think this violates the grant that the user is giving Facebook. If they deleted the content, it's supposed to be gone - Facebook no longer has a license to display it on their site. Facebook has, in public communications, stated that the qualification there is about their messages where you could send effectively an email to another person and both sides have to delete the message - just like with email.
As human beings, we should do a lot of things for pragmatic purposes. That doesn't make it good. In a certain way, it's like knowing that you live in a neighborhood with a criminal and "well, I guess it's my fault that I didn't lock my door or even bothered to go out of the house."
I'm all for Facebook changing to try and do new things, but sometimes there's a lack of consent that's disturbing given that Facebook has been telling users to expect control over their sharing. We've seen articles about the ability for third parties to add you to a group and for that adding to be advertized to your friends. I understand that we should consider anything we post to Facebook public. However, Facebook has strongly encouraged us to put things we don't want public on Facebook with an assurance of privacy. As such, I don't think it's unreasonable to rake Facebook over the coals over this (if it's true). It's the type of bad behavior that should be admonished.
I'm certainly not arguing that companies need to do what their users want or anything like that. However, we call out bad companies as bad. In this case, it looks like they're even violating their own ToS (if the story is true). If Facebook had started out like Tumblr or Twitter or Geocities where you're really trying to post public content, it would be one thing. Facebook didn't start out that way and, in fact, encouraged us to think of them as protecting private content. Let's say Google decided to sell or publicly display your email tomorrow. We'd admonish that. It's a violation without your permission. Is the reason we should consider things posted to Facebook as public that we've seen Facebook be scummy for years now and should have learned that their promises are nonsense?
I don't think you're wrong or anything. I just think that "buyer beware" or "well, you shouldn't have rented an apartment in that neighborhood" are great ways to look at it.
* P.S. Nothing in this comment is meant to cast judgement on whether or not Facebook is doing the things the article accuses them of. I haven't researched it. It's simply to note that Facebook portrays itself as both 1. not sharing your content further than you allow and 2. allowing you to remove content other than things like messages which might be in someone else's inbox. If they're violating that, they're violating what they're telling users.
It would be interesting to try to send Facebook a DMCA take-down notice if they undelete your content.
But wait. What if another person's privacy settings preclude one's ability to know if people have shared my content or not, and/or whether those people deleted it?
Doesn't that place Facebook in a realm of ultimate deniability with respect to whether or not they are still in lawful possession of this implicit IP License?
Case in point:
1. I upload a scandalous and controversial image, accidentally.
2. I have a friend, who can see the album that contains the
image. [thus it is "shared"]
3. This "friend" immediately shares it. [satisfying the
requisite logical AND whereby it is simultaneously both
shared and not yet deleted by them]
4. The friend UNFRIENDS me (OH NOES!), and locks me out of
viewing anything related to their account.
5. I delete the image, believing that I am revoking the
implicit IP License.
6. Unbeknownst to me, Facebook retains an IP License by virtue
of the fact that someone else has not deleted the image.
7. Due to Facebook's policy, they are bound by their own
privacy obligations to the other user, to withhold from me
information regarding WHO still possesses the image, and
will not tell me HOW they are able to claim lawful
possession of an IP License for the image I am trying to
revoke.
8. I am stuck in the very limbo that OP is complaining about,
whereby Facebook claims to have an implicit License to
publish content, but will refuse to disclose the evidence
of who has yet to delete the image, as prove that their own
license is derived by the actions of another.
9. In theory, this other user might very well "forget" their
Facebook password (whoopsie! but innocently, and certainly
not as revenge...) and lock themselves out of their own
account. In this manner Facebook now entitles themselves to
the IP rights of this image in perpetuity, without the
potential for revocation, because thei refuse to unlock the
sharer's account without adequate proof.
Like, simply by virtue of sharing, any person who then accesses the content and then re-shares it and refuses to delete it, is then acting as the de-facto rights holder from which all of Facebook's privileges are derived.
But by letting another Facebook user access your shared content, as a peer, it's not immediately clear where that peer truly derives their eternal permission to forever re-share everything they ever had access to as your friend. Why does that person possess eternal rights to share YOUR content on Facebook, simply by being listed as your friend? Where does that part come from? Isn't that behavior enabled by Facebook? And doesn't Facebook reserve the right to redefine how things are "shared" at will? So then, doesn't that mean that Facebook is enabling itself?
Doesn't it seem like there is strong potential for a conflict of interest between Facebook and the other two parties involved?
It says that their license to display the image is subject to your privacy settings. Simply setting the image to Only You doesn't remove the image, but would ensure no one can see it. It effectively revokes Facebook's license to show the image to all your friends. If none of your friends can view it, they cannot share it, and it should remove any of their previous shares. Then you can delete it.
EDIT: Come to think of it, I have a feeling that "unless your content has been shared with others" behaves more narrowly in practice than it could by reading the text. Probably, it would apply to edges cases beyond Facebook's reasonable control - like a notification of a picture to a phone. The app only checks for updates every so often, and it may be out of service for a while, but a thumbnail is sent. You could delete the image, but until they check Facebook's servers, the person has effective control over the thumbnail, which is a derivative work of your copyrighted image, legally. Facebook is just covering their bases there.
The problem here is that I do consider everything I do on the Internet to be public, but most average people don't. This is why I don't have a Facebook, which admittedly is probably a big killer for my social life in my age group being a late teenager. People in their late teens/early twenties are reckless when it comes to the Internet and I simply can't risk being associated with any of that.
Don't blame facebook, blame Canada. Facebookers just do their job :-)
Even if Facebook hadn't exposed the photo -- would it have hurt in any way? Her parents surely would have noticed at the wedding that you weren't Muslim.
Facebook seems to have been a force for expediting a break through the impasse, in this case.
I'm getting tired of people finding excuses for Facebook like "hey, you should've known it's bad, just don't do that, and then it's fine". How about you stop using it?
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).
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).
I have deleted by FB account twice and then I was spending lots of time explaining why, getting weird looks from people and being left out of comments (e.g. people would post something to FB and be laughing about it later but never explain about what.. really impolite of them but what can I do? engage in more arguments).
So yeah, be honest to your beliefs, just don't expect that will translate to happiness (unless you really work on telling yourself none of that unpleasant situations are really bad). We are human beings, how we interact with others matter (even if I didn't want any of that).
No matter how strange your beliefs are, you will always find people that think similar. The world is very diverse.
It seems that FB even changes the fundamental meaning of a friend. Which is a shame and a lack of social culture.
Trusting facebook to prevent Eve from accessing to your data is not the same thing as controlling Eve's access to your data.
Also, birthdays? Aren't those the sorts of things you find out about once per friend and then add to your own contacts? I've never had a Facebook account, but that's not a problem I've ever experienced.
Granted, I don't automatically know the birthday of every single person I meet or even get a number/email from. But I would go so far as to call that a feature, and because of that, the birthday notifications I do get are worth getting.
My flatmate's boyfriend is fond of throwing large house parties with hundreds of invitees, then hiring a doorman to check names off against the FB RSVP list. If you're not on it, you're not admitted.
My closest friends remember me and send me invites via email, but I can't fault them for forgetting now and then.
I'm very close to my wife and can't imagine getting a divorce, but I think it's healthy that we manage our own social calendars.
It's definitely naive to think "oh, if you're really friends with them you'll remember their name without the help of a computer." This is especially the case with larger more inclusive weddings where now-disconnected friends are invited.
In short: pointing to the line between friends and "friends" and (likely my personality coloring the value judgment) thus questioning whether you're actually missing out by not being so closely connected to those "friends".
(Frankly the very concept of a house party with so many attendees that don't actually know one another, that a door man and a guest list is required, sounds like a caricature of a straw man I might have cooked up to have a laugh at "things you might need FB to get invited to". But maybe that's just saying more about me and why I don't grok or value things like FB.)
That said, I find it challenging to remember my immediate families birthdays (not to mention, anniversaries etc) and while my crutch has always been a calendar, FB can provide that crutch for folks who don't have a calendar habit.
Bottom line is that the core premise of FB is actually quite sound, its just not easily monetizable. Its possible that after a while folks would pay to subscribe to a FB like service but long before that Google or someone else who isn't being held against the wall with a share certificate pointed at their head may find a more workable solution.
And of course FB could, their are a lot of smart folks over there.
Yes, its against FB user agreement but fuck that.
Luckily there's no online record of relationship history or it'd be an open and close case.
I'm the same, I do it too and think it's very neccessary, but it can interfere with FB procedures in funny ways.
But then again, all this isn't new information. I have never really trusted a webpage with relevant stuff. ECHELON is old news, and servers can be hacked. The level of trust some people put into the net amazes me.
Probably. Using a fake/altered name is incredibly common on Facebook, especially among younger people. I think any 3rd party assigned with that task would realize that and avoid it.
On the Saprano's they said something like 'nostalgia is every mans weakness'. In my eyes facebook breads nostalgia, thus I keep away.
It is really hard to go off the grid. Does anyone know if I job change, city change plus a name change would help? :)
1) No one can post on my wall
2) No one can tag me in pictures, post or places.
3) My profile picture excludes my face.
4) I post little to nothing.
5) I only friend a narrow group of people. Being an offline friend of mine for years is not enough.
6) People who make weird comments are unfriended quickly.
7) The list goes on, but it can be summarized as do as little on FB as possible.
My best friends, most of my girlfriends, my family -- I am not friends with on FB!
You can have a FB account and maintain some basic degree of privacy. It probably is not the way Mark Zuckerberg intends it. The more he does to interfere with my usage patterns, the less I use FB (and I hold him ultimately responsible for the UX.) I expect to continue to lose control over my account in the future. The more this occurs, the less I'll use it.
Strangely, over the past year I have begun to really enjoy and understand using Twitter.
You just have to learn to ignore some posts - gloss over them.
If you swapped Facebook out for say a private email list - would you be more inclined to participate? And if that is the case - why don't people just use mailing lists?
If there are more people like me, then I truly fear for Facebook's long term success. (Disclaimer: I still own Facebook stock).
Try to focus on getting a core group of friends that you maintain regular contact with. Call them, email them, sms them. Use communication forms other than FB to get at them and eventually you'll train them to include you. If not then get some new friends.
Join a table top gaming club. There seems to be a resurgence of table op gaming going on that's really exciting. And it's a great way to meet people.
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 and you can find your Activity Log at 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.
It shouldn't be necessary to put a lot of work. Just delete the content, clobber it with blank fields, or randomized content. It really is very easy.
The problem is that your company's policy is to never truly delete content despite calling it "delete", there are many ways to weasel-word it ("many software subsystems don't truly delete" blah blah) but when someone asks a third party to delete something (s)he doesn't ask for it to have it marked deleted. Just delete it.
Surely not your fault though.
PS: there's no money in this world so that I'd work for a company with the morals and values of Facebook.
But for a large social site, it starts to become a more interesting distributed systems problem.
Even for a simple story with 4 likes, 12 comments, and likes on several of the comments, the data is sharded across several databases. Simple transactions no longer work. One option is looking for scalable distributed transactions. A more likely option is making sure deletions can be interrupted and restarted without losing state.
Now imagine a public figure whose post has tens of thousands of comments and hundreds of thousands likes. You may not be able to load all of those rows in a single request let alone delete them synchronously. Instead, you have to be able to process the deletion incrementally, reading and deleting some of the data then later picking up where you left off the last time you were interrupted.
Interestingly, the order of these operations can also be important. If you're interrupted between deleting a comment and deleting the likes on that comment, will you still be able to find the likes when you restart?
We've put a lot of work into a deletion framework that deals with these and many other issues. We're hoping to share more details about it in the future.
Each of the steps in building up the tree of comments, likes, etc. is a a couple writes at most. If that fails, you're left in a safe state. You tell the user it failed and carry on.
Deleting a post and the comments on it is harder. First, you have a potentially unbounded amount of DB rows to delete across an unknown number of shards. Second, you now have to worry about the order in which you delete things, else you risk being unable to retry in case one of these deletes fails. Third, unlike the inserts and updates, you can't just give up partway, as that's not a safe state to end in.
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.
Because no where in Facebook does it allow you to do this. Only deactivate your account.
> 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.
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.
That alone says something about the longevity of the business.
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.
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!
A Kindred spirit!
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.
Then what about replacing it with junk? THen doing it again? Then again? Then again?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
This is just another case of user misunderstanding/error which gets blamed on facebook.
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...
Need I remind everyone that Zuckerberg himself said people were "dumb fucks" for trusting him with their data?
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
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.
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.
This should be illegal and I bet there are some countries that don't tolerate it. Germany?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
We should also do something that you're not even certain you're going to do yourself?
``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.
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.
[2]: https://wellpreparedmind.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/facebook-t...
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.
I hope mark zuckerberg ends up broke doing LAMP consulting.
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.
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.
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?
Now the extension does not work anymore (the button it adds to the setting pages is not showing).
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...
(This may be a good thing.)
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.
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.
They own you.
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.
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...
Had to LOL at this comment