
Ask HN: Know a good tool to purge all posts/likes/photos from Facebook? - galaktor
Hi HN! I want to reduce my footprint on FB, i.e. delete all posts and photos, unlike all likes, etc. I&#x27;d like to keep the account active, so simply deactivating isn&#x27;t the way to go (yet?)<p>I did some digging and there seems to be some Chrome extensions that - according to reviews - can give mixed results.<p>Most of what I could find - including past posts to HN - were 4 or 5 years old. So my question: is there a recent, go-to tool that you know of which can help me achieve the above? Or should I try my luck with the random years-old tutorials you can find online?<p>Thanks!
======
bsbechtel
This is tangentially related to this, but apparently their mobile app now
automatically downloads all the photos on your phone if you give permissions
to access photos? My wife and I recently had a child, and when I opened up the
app to post one single photo of our child, Facebook was showing in my newsfeed
a video they made with all of my photos I had taken. This seems like a gross
violation of my privacy. Is there any way to prevent this aside from deleting
the app and no longer sharing photos with family and friends via FB?

~~~
brightball
I use the mobile web now instead of the phone app now. I realize it's probably
paranoia but there have been far too many times when I've talked about
something and a related ad magically appears in my news feed.

Hasn't been a problem since I deleted the app.

~~~
leovander
Reminds of these ads.

[http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-
pranking-...](http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-
roommate-with-targeted-facebook-ads)

------
mgberlin
It's impossible. A few years ago I manually went through and "deleted" all
content. It probably took me five or six hours all told. A year or so later
someone was showing me something on their profile, and I noticed a picture
that I thought was gone. Digging around, everything I marked for deletion had
re-appeared publicly. I've since "deactivated" my account (there's no apparent
way to actually delete it) and refuse to use the service, much to my family's
chagrin.

tl;dr: Even if you delete things, they will eventually reappear.

~~~
WmyEE0UsWAwC2i
What I did was to feed them noise. I clicked the like buttom on popular
things, followed popular people. It is kind of a chore, and it can prompt
their anti-bot measures (like asking me if I'm interested in pig (the
animal?)).

This, of course, has its drawbacks.

------
palerdot
A related personal experience. I deleted my facebook account few years ago.
Much Later (actually around 2 years later), when I wanted to check something
related to facebook sdk, I created a fake account but gave my original mobile
number.

Surprise! Surprise! Facebook was recommending all the people from my deleted
account magically to my newly created account which has nothing in common with
my old account except for the mobile number.

For all those sharing content in FB, worrying about your privacy is pointless
and a total waste of time.

My personal opinion is that, Google somehow values people privacy more than
Facebook, that why its social networking attempts are failing. On the other
hand, Facebook is just ruthless when it comes to handling people's data and
that is why it is having much success as a social networking platform.

~~~
kaoD
> that why its social networking attempts are failing

IMHO the real names policy killed their projects even before release. I
would've loved to use Google+ as a less invasive alternative to FB but the
policy killed the deal for me (and generally everyone around me, both tech-
savvy and not... who wants another Facebook?)

AFAICT they relaxed on the policy but it was way too late.

~~~
nilved
Facebook exists with that policy, though.

~~~
T2_t2
Which is why you can't beat it. You need to offer something in better to win,
you can't just offer the same service.

------
webwanderings
Just deactivate first and forget about it. Your life does not cease to exist
because you are not on Facebook anymore. If there are people out there who
genuinely care for you, they'll know how to get a hold of you. You can then
share your life with them, if you care for them. The world has existed like
this for thousands of years.

------
pedro2
Facebook detects automated activity or scraping and tries to stop it. That
being said, only this one seemed to partially work for me:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/timeline-
cleaner-f...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/timeline-cleaner-
facebook/ooimeknpoejjpkmgeibojeklnklcjchf?hl=en)

~~~
gtk40
Thanks! I've tried similar tools without success, but this one is sort of
successful. It has completely cleared things a few times, but I've had to keep
re-running it since yesterday as they re-appear. This morning I was down to
only things from 4 years ago or more showing up so I'm running it for a fourth
time.

------
danwinters
They introduced the ability to restrict those who can view your past posts
quite recently, which might be useful. A link to news article is here:

[http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2016/07/28/facebook-remove-
ol...](http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2016/07/28/facebook-remove-old-
posts/#gref)

That news article also mentioned:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/facebook-post-
mana...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/facebook-post-
manager/ljfidlkcmdmmibngdfikhffffdmphjae)

------
nibnib
If you are outside of the US or Canada you are entitled to request all data
Facebook holds about your account. This may be useful in determining what is
actually deleted.

[http://www.europe-v-
facebook.org/EN/Get_your_Data_/get_your_...](http://www.europe-v-
facebook.org/EN/Get_your_Data_/get_your_data_.html)

------
syphilis2
I've found that there are old messages of mine that Facebook will not let me
delete. I took the manual approach of scrolling through my history and
deleting every post I no longer wanted, and I found that some of my early
posts produce an error when I try to delete them. I believe it has something
to do with them being on a friend's wall, but I really am not sure. It's
frustrating to not be able to remove my own content.

~~~
roninb
It's definitely on purpose. They've done the same with "Likes". I've been
trying to unlike all the dumb pages I liked when in high school ("When you
flip your pillow to get to the cold side ;]", "Brock Obama", "texting late at
night", "peeling plastic off of new electronics", etc...) and once I got my 2k
likes down to about 300ish, they stopped showing me my likes when I look at my
profile. It literally says "326 likes" on the tab itself but it's just not
populated with anything. Every once in a while, a defunct page will post again
and I'll have the opportunity to unlike "Tiger Blood", but the infrequency
kills me.

Just wish I could firewall <22 year old roninb from >22 year old roninb.

~~~
syphilis2
I remember the "likes" counts always being incorrect. Specifically for
categories of things such as how many movies, bands, TV series, etc I had
liked. Back around 2010 I cleaned up my list of liked movies and experienced
the same thing: the count displayed was not synchronized with the number of
movies appearing on my page.

I wonder if this isn't something akin to the YouTube "subscribers" bug. Users
could repeatedly subscribe then unsubscribe to a channel. Only the unsubscribe
actions were counted, and the channel's subscription count could be driven
down to 0. That bug was around for over a year before being addressed.

~~~
spike021
Wouldn't surprise me if there are bugs.

There are some weird issues with facebook.

------
bungie4
My plan is to corrupt my data. I'll warn my friends that if they see stupid
stuff going on with my profile, it's just me.

If they won't delete it, might as well make it useless.

~~~
JTon
I'm curious about this. How do you plan to corrupt your _existing_ data? (i.e.
stuff you've done/uploaded in the past)

~~~
bungie4
FB does allow you to edit >:)

~~~
kpcyrd
I doubt this is actually overwriting anything, it just adds more data to
facebook's database.

~~~
bungie4
That's fine. It just means I've become a bi-coastal, transgendered, red
headed, left handed bag pipe player with a speech impediment.

Regardless, the data is corrupt at that point, and that, is the point.

~~~
paraxisi
I feel like this is a very naive way to look at this. As kpcyrd said, you're
simply adding to their data, not 'corrupting' anything you've previously
shared. If anything, you're sending up a big red flag from suddenly changing
your gender, location, etc all at once.

~~~
javajosh
It may not hide anything from FB, but it will hide from anyone using FB to
observe you, which seems like what the OP wants.

------
raverbashing
Another idea would be to flood your page with a lot of stuff: like everything
that FB suggests (unless it's controversial or possibly illegal), create posts
with random content (you can make it visible to "Just Me", reshare everything
that pops in your timeline, etc

~~~
VLM
That's just going to insult people given that about 10% of FB users do that
while thinking its the correct way, and mistakenly believing that behavior is
"socializing". I don't want the fallout from Bill and his friends thinking I'm
parodying or imitating Bill, ditto jackie and angela and richard and becky and
denise and

------
greyfox
Anyone know a tool to stop people from being able to tag you (in their posts)?
this shit is getting out of hand..

~~~
shogun21
You can change your privacy settings so you have to approve everything before
going on your wall/feed.

~~~
sotojuan
This has been around for years. It's interesting how many people complain
about Facebook allowing oversharing and tagging when at this point, they give
you more options to handle and restrict your interactions than ever.

~~~
pc86
While I agree that the knee-jerk reaction is overblown and 90% of the time
people can do exactly the thing they complain about not being able to do on
FB, it's not as easy a process to find the page and manage the settings as it
could be. Most of the non-tech people I've talked to about this don't even
realize FB has an "account settings" screen.

~~~
sotojuan
Facebook does have a habit of switching things up often (not in the best way)
but right now it's not _too_ bad, here are some examples:

[https://i.imgur.com/vxtiePM.png](https://i.imgur.com/vxtiePM.png)

[https://i.imgur.com/1epcmNA.png](https://i.imgur.com/1epcmNA.png)

------
pwenzel
There is the "Limit Past Posts" feature under the privacy settings. It doesn't
delete your stuff, but it does make it less visible. Not ideal, just a start.

Go to "see more privacy settings"... then look for 'Limit the audience for
posts you've shared with friends of friends or Public?'. It will present a
"Limit Old Posts" button.

------
triangleman
Did you know it's impossible to disallow comments on your facebook posts? You
have to allow them and then remove them manually.

FB is like a poorly-featured blog.

~~~
Shish2k
If you think FB is bad as a blog, just try using it as a source code
management system, it's _really_ bad at that. And don't even get me started
about the lack of ray-tracing support! Worst. 3D modelling app. EVER.

------
juskrey
Selenium driver and manual clicking through history.

------
SoreGums
Funnily tonight I've spent about 3hrs going through and marking everything
"only me" which leaves everyone that was tagged or has commented on it with
access. So it is completely doable through a chrome extension, would just take
time to do. Plus now the site is all react based it should be fairly simple.
My goal was to reduce my public footprint and each month I'll go through and
close out the previous 2nd month of content.

------
mattstrayer
There was an app that did something related to this called facewash (renamed
to simplewash)
[https://www.facebook.com/simplewash/](https://www.facebook.com/simplewash/),
but it seems to since have been shut down. May be worth it to shoot them a
message

------
erdevs
Reading all the comments on how little control users have over their data on
fb. Isn't this kind of messed up? How is FB still able to get away with this?
Especially when Apple and Google are pushing for more privacy and user control
over data, I'd think FB would get called out more.

------
keyboardhitter
Slightly unrelated to OP's question... but something I just thought of, how
would trying to reduce one's footprint impact the algorithm? i.e. would a lot
of removals of likes invoke Facebook to suggest radically new content
different than the thing which was removed? Or would it continue to suggest
similar content?

For example, if someone unliked and removed every post and/or action that had
to do with goats. Would they still get suggested content about goats or
animals in the same family; would they get more animal-based suggestions than
someone who'd never liked goat content? Or would those kinds of suggestions
drop off entirely and change to common trends?

I have not used Facebook in a long time, so I'm curious if anyone has insight
into the behavior.

------
doc_holliday
Not sure how possible it is, but i've used Javascript from the web console to
do some interaction with Facebook, perhaps they have restricted this though?

But if that is allowed that could be one route, getting all the elements by
Xpath that are posts.

Otherwise automation with Selenium or similar could work?

------
kzar
There's [https://github.com/chander/social-network-
cleaner](https://github.com/chander/social-network-cleaner) which more or less
worked for me when I deleted my account. (Over a year ago now.)

------
ecesena
To my knowledge fb doesn't allow apps to delete data. Or, better, an app can
only delete data it created in the first place. This is the reason, I guess,
there are no such "server-side" services.

I don't know the status of client side, sorry.

------
beachstartup
delete it. that uncomfortable feeling in your gut is telling you something
important.

------
Namrog84
Not a tool and Maybe not for photos. But I'd recommend doing potential edits
instead. Where possible (comments and text posts). As this will screw with a
lot of the undelete aspects and archiving. I do this in a variety of places
and is far better than "delete" in most scenarios.

Tl;dr; better footprint reduction method than delete: Replace all text posts
with a single letter or word.

------
merpnderp
I'm trying this right now and it appears to be working. Although it looks like
it will break once the timeline scroll gets too large. Maybe a page refresh
will fix it.

[https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/9106-facebook-timeline-
cle...](https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/9106-facebook-timeline-cleaner)

~~~
merpnderp
Looks like Facebook undeleted all the stuff from the last time I ran this.

Last time I made it to 2014 before my browser locked up. But now I'm seeing
stuff from early 2016.

------
mr_O
You could take a look at testing with spock & groovy. With those you can
instantiate browsers and control their behavior with just some lines of groovy
code. Haven't heard of any tools that still work and do the job right, so
though it might seem a bit of an overkill, it may just be worth the effort and
you learn something cool ;-)

------
libeclipse
As far as I can tell, the only surefire way is to delete your Facebook account
permanently.

------
fimdomeio
I did this once for fun. At the time I used Sikuli (it just controls your
mouse / keyboard and find things on screen). easy to code it, takes quite a
while to run and makes your computer useless to do other things.

------
geggam
I wonder if you could breathe life into this and perhaps mold it to do what
you want ?

[http://fbcmd.dtompkins.com/](http://fbcmd.dtompkins.com/)

------
fred_is_fred
I had good luck with a greasemonkey script but it was 5 years ago and it no
longer works. I did have to run it several times. Maybe see if there's an
updated one.

------
xenosapien
Change your name to another language (another alphabet). All of your history
will appear that way and will be rather useless.

------
hnrodey
There is an app Xpire that should do what you're looking for. I have it for
iOS.

------
Kinnard
People would pay for this!

------
awinter-py
the court system

~~~
javajosh
It's not clear that FB is required to delete your content if you ask them to,
especially if it says in your terms that you explicitly give up this right
(and I haven't actually read it, but I'd not be surprised if this was the
case). I suspect you could claim someone stole your account and posted things
that libeled you, and FB would be a party to the harm. But that's not quite
the situation for the OP.

------
angry_octet
Nuke them from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

~~~
angry_octet
Aliens references aside, you can't actually 'purge' anything, deletes don't
actually delete.

Apart from marking stuff as private you can increase the noise. Like lots of
stuff you don't like, add photos of people you don't know. Randomly unlike
stuff. Eventually you will have washed your profile.

