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Comment by eumenides1 | Hacker News Reader

I was thinking of a way to destroy my facebook account because you can't actually delete it, this is pretty much it, like everything. Also I guess you could check-in every where at once all the time.

I didn't think about the collateral damage it could cause to others, which is to bombard your "friend's feeds". This is also interesting because, well you can destory facebook in this manner. If enough people are peeing in the pool, people are going to get out.

Maybe I should write a greasemonkey script to accomplish just that. Not that I want to destroy facebook, but that if i wanted to destroy my data this would be the way because facebook doesn't give me that option.

Also does everyone else think it's creepy when your friends stop using facebook and old "likes" pop up on your feed to make it look like that user hasn't left?

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> I was thinking of a way to destroy my facebook account because you can't actually delete it, this is pretty much it, like everything.

This kind of bloody-minded civil obedience is something that I very much like.

Many years ago the supermarket (20? 25?) Safeway (UK) started a customer loyalty card. My flatmates and I applied for one in the name of "Ivor Trotts". That card was only ever used to buy loo paper.

So a browser-plugin to allow me to auto-click all the social buttons might be fun; especially if I can do that on a throwaway social media account. Or maybe it's better if I do it on my main accounts?

this is very simple and should like all the loaded like buttons http://pastebin.com/CUhS9vq4, it also unlikes whatever was already liked though, since fb doesn't seem to change the class.

That's not going to work. Facebook will block you from liking on account of "going way too fast". Calling a sleep() function after every like might help...

So i guess the script would need to include some kind of gradually escalating random "like" increase.

I made this and it seems to work pretty well. http://pastebin.com/bfhw3R7H

You can actually use this method on LinkedIn to endorse all of your friends, and because it offers more results, you can set an interval to endorse infinitely. My LinkedIn friends all hate me now because they've been endorsed for random things.

Another thing to do with store loyalty cards is to always look up by phone number - many people in my extended family live nearby and use the same phone number, so the card has so many purchases on it it becomes useless to target.

I like Facebook. It helps me keep up with friends in distant places. If you find it to be pernicious and intrusive, don't use it (or use it differently). Don't impose your dislike on others. "Peeing in the pool" is a great metaphor in that regard.

I agree that it can help people keep in touch with other, and i never considered the network effects of doing what I was thinking, which is actually why I'm glad I didn't get around to doing it.

Also another commenter mentioned that facebook does actual get around to deleting things, albeit slowly.

As for imposing my dislike on others, that is a fair arguement, but there is also the other side of the coin to consider. To impose your like of facebook on others. People who want to remain off facebook get pulled into it via tags. While i'm not saying you are doing the tagging, but opting out isn't really an option in a network as vast and pervasive as facebook is.

>I was thinking of a way to destroy my facebook account because you can't actually delete it

"Maybe that was true in the past, but today when you delete your data it is gone. Trust me, I wrote it myself. The law enforcement guidelines that have been circulating recently corroborate this."[0]

"If you don't think you'll use Facebook again, you can request to have your account permanently deleted. Please keep in mind that you won't be able to reactivate your account or retrieve anything you've added. Before you do this, you may want to download a copy of your info from Facebook. Then, if you'd like your account permanently deleted with no option for recovery, log into your account and let us know."[1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3320240

[1] https://www.facebook.com/help/224562897555674

https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account

I guess not being able to erasing data on FB servers is now just an urban myth.

I've erased my facebook account this way, and created a new one from scratch with the same name.

Somehow it still suggests me friends from the old account. I can't figure out the way it could fetch this data without actually restoring it from the previous account.

If the people that you are no longer friends with have your contact information (email, phone, etc.) and sync their contacts to Facebook, and you have the same details associated with your new account, then a relationship can be inferred and Facebook could show these people as suggested friends.

you deleted only your account, not of your friends, they have uploaded phonebooks, email directory ... of there own which refers back to you.

> Also does everyone else think it's creepy when your friends stop using facebook and old "likes" pop up on your feed to make it look like that user hasn't left?

A friend of mine died last year. Her FB account is still active. From time to time I get old "likes" of hers. It is a bit creepy.

> because you can't actually delete it

You can. At least, this seemed to work effectively for me:

http://deletefacebook.com/

It's hidden from public view. They hold on to all of your data, which the page you linked says.

So the steps would be:

1) Obfuscate the private view by liking everything. This raises the signal-to-noise ratio exponentially and surely makes it hard(er) for "them" to characterize you. The longer you do this for, the more effective this strategy will be I would think.

2) Delete from public view.

Step 0: Do not join Facebook.

Notice how Facebook noticed what she was doing and got a PR person to talk to her. They have algorithms to detect abnormal behavior like that and flag it.

If you want to have any real effect, you'd need to provide a fake but plausible signal, not noise.

I'm sure they have a history of all your actions. They could easily revert your profile to a time before you went to town liking irrelevant stuff.

Hey, append-only databases are awesome, but hard to delete from!

> They hold on to all of your data, which the page you linked says.

Be interesting to see if any of the Facebook privacy lawsuits help Facebook to delete that data when they're asked to.

That's not what the page or the Facebook Data Usage Policy says. Quoting from the page:

> In theory, deleting your account immediately removes all Facebook data related to you. In reality it's more complicated, taking about a month.

> Even data tagged for deletion can still take 90 days to be deleted.

> "‘It typically takes about one month to delete an account, but some information may remain in backup copies and logs for up to 90 days.’" — Facebook Data Use Policy.

> Allegations of complicity with US National Security Agency surveillance suggest that your data may never truly be deleted.

the last of which links to the Glenn Greenwald PRISM article:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-...

The article says the NSA has "direct access" to Facebook systems, but doesn't mention Facebook deletion policy. If the NSA has a copy of your data, we can't really expect Facebook to be responsible for deleting it.

By my reading of the page, deleting your Facebook account functionally deletes your account immediately (that is, you no longer appear on Facebook) and after the two-week deactivation period, if you don't reactive your account, your data will be deleted within 90 days.

Of course, if any of this is true, I have no idea.

When I deleted my account I first unfriended everyone, unliked everything I had liked, deleted all my pictures and posts and changed my name and personal details to fake information. Then I waited a couple of days and went through the official Facebook deletion process. I don't know if any of this worked but it made me feel better and like I did more than just stop logging in or rely on Facebook to stop using my account information once I "deleted" my account.

And to cap it all off:

- create a new email address with a long random password

- change your FB account to use this new email

- destroy your copy of the email password

- change your FB account to have a long random password and don't keep a copy of it

Or you could simply request a permanent deletion: http://deletefacebook.com

That's what worries me about Facebook too, about being able to destroy someone else's experience in this way. Of course you can hide posts from users but Facebook's algorithm should be able to intervene when things get "out of control".

A few months ago Facebook shared it would rank news higher, maybe this is the result about why Huffington posts were ranked so high.

Interesting experiment. Tweaking Facebooks algorithm is an ongoing process.

Isn't it trivial to block a user's stuff from your feed, though?

Yeah that sounds like creepy facebook. Blowing content tumbleweeds through its digital ghost town. This explains recent likes I've had on stuff I posted 3-4 years ago.

of course, it wouldn't be hard for a facebook engineer to write graph queries that would ignore such obvious noise, thereby preserving the original information they had on you.

You'd have to slowly blend it in to your normal activities so that the abnormal behavior would be harder to classify.

I'm guessing there are legal requirements that prevent them from truly deleting your content.

Abusive ex-husband posts pictures of himself making threatening remarks to his wife. Other potentially incriminating documents. If he was able to delete it, then that evidence is lost. My only thought of how to preserve privacy rights is to have the "deleted"-not-deleted user files sent to a legal-compliance department and out of facebook's user database (where I have no doubt they're using the "deleted"-not-deleted user's files in analysis.

In the US, at least, I believe there is no such legal requirement unless the party doing the deleting is aware of pending legal action relevant to the documents being deleted. I'm not a lawyer though and may be wrong.

Agreed, it's not Facebook's job to retain evidence for all their users' lawsuits.

Accurate. Many corporations exploit this with "document retention" policies, which are more often about document destruction.

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