

How to Disappear from Facebook and Twitter - geoka9
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1954631,00.html

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moe
Even more interesting than the suicide-site itself is the panic-response from
Facebook. A C&D with the most laughable justification ever, Quote:

 _Facebook demanded that they "cease this activity immediately," citing a
violation of users' privacy._

If Facebook is concerned about my privacy then why do they C&D a site that
helps me to _remove_ my personal data from the public web?

Major kudos to the suicidemachine makers for provoking Facebook and similar
sites to reveal their true face for a moment.

~~~
mhansen
That's not their justification.

You can see the actual Cease-and-Desist on their website
<http://suicidemachine.org/>

They are being told to cease-and-desist:

    
    
      - Soliciting users' Facebook login information
      - Accessing a Facebook account belonging to someone else
      - Collecting Facebook users' content or information using
        automated means such as scripts or scrapers without 
        Facebook's permission

~~~
iamdave
Can anyone find that link regarding Facebook using someone's profile picture
at a presentation without her permission?

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pak
It's probably most interesting to see how they implemented a service that does
this. From their FAQ:

"The machine consists of a tweaked Linux server running apache2 with python
modules installed. Selenium RC Control is used to automatically launch and
kill browser sessions. This all driven by a single python/cgi script with some
additional self-written python libraries. Each user can watch her suicide
action in real-time via a VNC remote desktop session, displayed on our website
via an flash applet rendered live into the client's webbrowser. We are also
running some customized bash scripts plus MySQL in the background for logging
and debugging, jquery/PHP for the website and a modified version of the great
FlashlightVNC application built in Flex. Web2.0 Suicide Machine consists of
roughly 2500 lines of self-written code."

Maybe somebody will build another website that lets you watch a video of the
server browsing another website. I heard you like websites...

~~~
cakeface
Thats brilliant to use Selenium RC for the scripted deletions. Selenium is
incredibly flexible and easy to script, though not very fast which is probably
why they have such a backlog. Also because it is all coming from a legitimate
browser it would be very difficult for the sites to block, though I suppose
they could just block the ip of the server.

~~~
pak
I've used Selenium for automated webapp testing. Some people don't like it,
but I've found it a good fit for the abilities and preferences of my testing
team. Having scripts runnable in a Firefox plugin as they are developed, and
then also from a command line server to do mass unit tests, makes for a pretty
flexible testing setup. You can test against multiple browsers including IE.

The major complaint people have is usually against the command arg1 arg2 grid
for the scripts, but here's the thing about programming in a table: you can
get your testers to do it _without_ freaking out like "I can't learn how to
program, I am bad with computer languages". The command table gives them
exactly what they need--a way to repeatedly run a series of actions in a web
browser--without making them learn anything more.

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zck
>When trying to close an online account, [users'] information and connections
aren't ... erased; they're just unpublished. By deleting all your data,
Suicide Machine says, your private information is snuffed out on website
servers.

Do any of these sites guarantee that data will actually be deleted from their
servers? I would bet that this "deletion" doesn't remove any data, but just
unpublishes or archives it, like closing an account does.

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techiferous
Reading this reminded me of _why the lucky stiff_ , who committed online
suicide last year, at least as far as the Ruby community is concerned. It was
fast an efficient: he was gone as well as all of his projects and websites.
The Ruby community had to scramble to try to piece back together his missing
work, like Try Ruby. [http://www.rubyinside.com/why-the-lucky-stiff-is-
missing-227...](http://www.rubyinside.com/why-the-lucky-stiff-is-
missing-2278.html)

~~~
chc
I was just thinking, "I wonder if this is _why's new project."

