
How I Erased Facebook Comments and Likes - Jaruzel
http://www.jaruzel.com/blog/How-I-Erased-5000-Facebook-Comments-and-Likes
======
deckard1
You can't "delete" anything from the Internet. Despite Snapchat saying you
can. Or a big button that says "Delete". Furthermore, Facebook doesn't need
you to have an active, visible profile for it to collect data on you. They
still have tracking pixels. "Erasing" comments and likes doesn't do anything
or get to the heart of the issue.

The best way I know of to combat Facebook is to poison their data. Which means
taking the effort to "friend" strangers across the world, "like" random
things, visit websites you don't care about and basically blur your profile to
the point that Facebook can't tell who you are or what your actual interests
are. It's quite an effort over years.

But no. Everyone wants a button. Which is how we ended up in this situation to
begin with.

~~~
cup-of-tea
I don't understand why more people don't understand this. Each "post" is a
record with a field called "deleted". You can make that field True. You can't
remove that record.

"Deleting" only gives the database owner one more piece of information about
you: that you wanted to delete that record.

~~~
asfdsfggtfd
If you are in the EU and press delete and the database owner (data controller)
does not delete the post then the database owner is now breaking the law. As
of ?may? this will carry significant fines.

~~~
plopilop
I don't think it's the case yet. GDPR will enforce the right to be forgotten
and as such truly delete data about you, but other than that, I don't think
there are other regulations forcing you to delete data.

~~~
asfdsfggtfd
This is why I said as of ?may?. The GDPR comes into force this year.

~~~
jjeaff
I'm not familiar with the specifics of the law, but my guess would be that it
does not require that something be deleted upon _any_ delete button click. I
would assume it requires full deletion when requested through proper channels.

There are plenty of cases where a system would not function correctly if you
are actually erasing DB entries when a user clicks the delete button. In many
cases, even the users themselves might expect to be able to undo or go to a
delete list and see entries that were deleted.

~~~
some_account
At my company, I heard them discussing deleting the data the user requested
within 1 month.

------
woudsma
Does someone have a script for this? #interested

I'm on the verge of deleting my Facebook account, but for the same reasons as
given by OP i'm hesitant. Facebook is the only platform with i use to connect
to some of my closest friends on the other side of the planet. Also staying up
to date with events/parties. If there was an alternative for these, i would've
ditched Facebook yesterday. I've wasted too many hours of my life scrolling
through the feed, being subjected to all kinds of psychological manipulation.
Not to mention that Facebook probably knows more about me subjectively than
any other person. I'm done.

~~~
antsar
I "deleted" 11 years of history using this[0] Chrome extension. Took a few
days to get through everything, and I had to re-run it a few times because it
missed things.

[0] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social-book-
post-m...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social-book-post-
manager/ljfidlkcmdmmibngdfikhffffdmphjae?hl=en-US)

~~~
allanbreyes
It doesn't cover untagging, from I gather. Also, you can run it at 16x speed.
It "deleted" ~15 years of history for me in less than an hour. And yes, it
does miss a few things.

~~~
olyjohn
Do you really believe that it's completely deleted? My theory is that you can
delete all you want, they still have it.

~~~
allanbreyes
No, and I'm pretty sure the parent commenter doesn't either. It's why I put
"deleted" in double quotes, as the above comment did.

------
laythea
Should be titled: "How I Erased A Copy of 5000 Facebook Comments and Likes"

~~~
vikascoder
Or "How I have additional data to Facebook about my erasures on top of the
copy of data I planned to erase".

~~~
avoidit
Up next: "How I wrote an article that explains how to do something, which
actually doesn't do anything, and helps in absolutely no way other than make
people feel better they did something rather than nothing"

~~~
coldtea
Up next: how I wrote a comment hating and contributing nothing to the
discussion.

Well, it does something: it erases your public comments on FB, and even more
so, shows in a few steps how a programmer can go about doing so. Not
everything has to be about what FB knows.

~~~
cornholio
Agree. Facebook might still have them in some log or neural thinggy about you,
but it will protect you from direct profiling like the Cambridge Analitica
debacle. If it would turn out that deleting the activity still allows Facebook
to keep them and sell them to 3rd parties, it would be a company-ending event,
so there is at least self-preservation.

~~~
laythea
Why do you presume that once you come off facebook, your data is not used?
That is not true, the data gets used and pimped around to the highest bidder.
What is true, is that as time passes that data has less value (assuming you
actually stopped pumping in the data in fb).

------
nemacol
Some friends and I have been talking and we think the better choice would be
to write something that would flood your profile with data.

Your stuff may still be there but with that much noise it would make the data
useless.

~~~
matte_black
You'd be wasting your time. Your data is versioned. People smarter than you
have long thought about this.

~~~
gaius
It doesn’t matter. This information has a half-life. What I “liked” diminishes
in value over time. What advertisers care what I clicked on 1, 5, 10 years
ago?

~~~
matte_black
Imagine that at different points in time, the confidence in your persona can
be quantified. Say at some point in time last year they were 89% confident of
the type of person you were, but today after months of using a ton of random
fake likes and clicks they are only 16% sure.

They could choose to ignore low confidence measurements and still assume you
are the same person from that point in time last year. Given that they can
measure the standard rate of change in people’s interests (per interest even),
and how quickly interests fall out of style, they can then extrapolate how
relevant certain ads might be for you today based on your old data.

Imagine that. They don’t just own your data today, they own all the forecasts
of your data for years to come. Go home and sleep on it.

~~~
FLUX-YOU
The best solution is to just not use Facebook.

Better if you can get your account suspended for something that doesn't
provoke a law enforcement response.

~~~
matte_black
Agreed, if you don’t want them to have data on you the best case is to never
use anything FB owned, including Instagram and WhatsApp.

If you already use FB services, stop using them and don’t give anymore data.
They will still know about you, but at least you won’t give them any new
information.

------
mixmastamyk
Are the objects actually deleted or just set deleted=true in the db?

~~~
mtgx
It still means Facebook can no longer legally use that data, at least in the
EU.

~~~
reaperducer
If companies let laws get in the way of making money, there would be no need
for enforcement bureaus.

------
riebschlager
FWIW for anyone trying to permanently ditch Facebook, adding these entries to
your hosts file is also a good step.

[https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporatio...](https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporations/facebook/all)

At the very least, it helps break the habit of visiting Facebook.

~~~
411mrc
Wow, thanks for this.

------
merb
well I'm pretty sure all these ways to delete your facebook stuff will only
soft delete it. I mean it's way more sane to do:

    
    
        UPDATE picture SET date_deleted = now() WHERE picture_id = ?
    

instead of actually deleting it, because so you can recreate something if
people deleted their stuff by accident. Means facebook probably still has your
data.

~~~
MSM
Yep, this is how pretty much every large data warehouse works as well. It's
very useful to be able to say "What was the state of everything at time X",
even if it's been deleted you want to be able to see the state at certain
times.

I also imagine with all the data that FB has, they probably have a _legal_
obligation to keep data as it can be useful in solving crimes or gathering
evidence. In fact their TOS explicitly states that they will preserve data:
"We may access, preserve and share your information in response to a legal
request"

~~~
gruez
i think that's only after they received a request.

------
thrwaway0564564
We need to solve the problem of companies gobbling up consumer data by means
of "connectors". Remember back in the day when social was just a place to
write on walls. Now people use it as their identity/email on the internet.
It's like Walmart in that regard, the giant mega corp is just all too
convenient to resist. We need more innovating ma' and pop shops on the
internet if anyone other than ourselves will be stewards of our data in the
future.

------
davewasthere
Ha... I did exactly the same. Automated mbasic to delete/hide from
timeline/remove reaction to everything older than the last 30 days.

Also deleted all albums and photos that I could. (leaving a few cover photos
and a single profile picture)

I know there'll be backups and it's probably just a soft delete. But it was
still an enjoyable process.

By default, facebook should allow you to keep a tailing delete of everything
older than XX days if wanted.

------
jedanbik
Hey Jaruzel,

Do you think you will share the code on github or something similar? Great
writeup.

~~~
Jaruzel
It's just some C# loops, and scanning the DOM for 'a' tags, and then analysing
the 'href' attribute on them, and if there's a match, put it in the array.
What I wanted to share was the methodology I used to solve the problem.

------
giarc
Jaruzel - in using Facebook since this purge, what have you noticed? Less
relevant ads? Bad friend suggestions? Other?

~~~
Jaruzel
I've literally just done it (yesterday), so I've not seen anything different
yet.

------
downandout
Ironically, this kind of automated activity is a violation of the TOS and may
get your account suspended.

------
kevin_b_er
It is unlikely facebook deleted anything. Just all the stuff you did is marked
as unavailable to the public. It would be kept because it is still profitable
to sell the information about your private actions to other corporations.

------
hw
I asked this a while ago, but when you delete something on FB, the data's
probably not completely deleted.

There's likely data retained in backups (unless they have some way of pruning
your data from backups), and it's likely that your data already sits on an
external platform OUTSIDE of Facebook.

Unless Facebook requires apps that you connect to to delete your information
gathered from Facebook when you delete your FB account or when you disconnect
an app, you're likely to have your personal data and likes and comments
already somewhere else.

~~~
parliament32
Probably not, but how much does that really matter? The main point of these
erasures, IMO, is so 'analytics' providers can't sift through it... and I
doubt FB makes their backups available to such providers.

------
GnarfGnarf
I'm not a big fan of Facebook. It's a huge black hole sucking up your time.
However, I recently had great success crowd-sourcing a new software feature
from a closed FB group. The people were great: informed, smart and helpful.
Over a couple of weeks, I was able to release a cutting-edge chart that
innovates genetic genealogy.

Just never publish anything you wouldn't be comfortable sharing with the
World.

------
dandare
Is this even necessary in the age of GDPR? I mean, with GDPR Facebook can not
just thumbstone your profile, it has to delete every copy of every data that
can uniquely identify you, which includes "your" likes and of course comments.

~~~
llao
Jaruzel wanted to keep their account, but remove their visible activity.

------
ktpsns
So much people here mention it would be pointless to poison the profile data
with noise. This is giving up before trying. In the end it's a fight of our
algorithms against Facebooks. I'm quite confident who wins.

------
EB-Barrington
Emphasis should be on the cessation of commenting, clicking like, or
performing any other Facebook activity, or this process would seem to be in
vain.

(for sure, the process is only a "soft-delete")

~~~
Jaruzel
If it is a 'soft-delete' as you and others point out, then at least I know
I've done as much as I can without resorting to deleting my account.

And yes, I intend to use FB in 'read-only' mode from now on.

~~~
monocasa
Even if you delete your account, that information is still probably kept
(assuming that you're in the US).

~~~
Jaruzel
EU/UK here. Hoping that GDPR will force FB to actually delete every copy of
what I've tried to delete/hide.

~~~
monocasa
Good luck that they don't bork the GDPR replacement bill they're writing for
post-Brexit.

------
katebrooks
I found some websites that do the detective work to find your online traces
but don't know if they are that useful. I believe, once the information gone
online it's backed up somewhere even if the website deletes your data. For me,
that's big data, lol. I learned a new tip today. Thanks.

------
bitL
"How I set the hide flag on all my comments and likes while doing nothing
about actually deleting them."

------
gerardnll
Do you really need to crawl an html? There's APIs to do that already, right?

------
eterm
Does the "right to be forgotten" extend to Facebook?

If I can write to google to not appear in google search results, would it be
possible to write to google and ask not to appear in their results when people
search my name?

------
kristianc
The data is already gone. It's on a developer's server, a developers laptop,
or has been laundered and is back in Facebook. Even Facebook has no way of
tracking what has been done with the data.

------
hokus
Most harmful is to delete the most recent material. Say everything after 2016.
Nothing makes a "social" site look more dead than abandoned accounts.

------
hycaria
I wondered how you got that number and you don't explain how to (I don't want
to get rid of that piece of memorabilia)

~~~
Jaruzel
I just had a counter that tracked the DeleteList().Length

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t1o5
That's very clever. I tried to do something along those lines. On a second
thought, why bother, its just a flag for them.

------
gizmodo59
When you delete something, I think its not even setting true to the deleted
column but just a display:none /s

------
nstj
You could just not give any 3rd party app permissions to see your stuff and
achieve the same thing?

------
narven
I'm pretty sure you also erased all the 2000000 backups that fb makes every
minute

------
jumpinalake
Hate to break it to you but you essentially just hid all that shit from the
UI.

------
tammer
This is excellent and far more efficient than other tools I've tried.

------
hprotagonist
Where's the code?

~~~
davidpelayo
It didn't get published

------
drc37
Funny. I just did the same thing last week.

------
dudul
"How I flipped a couple booleans to `is_deleted=true` in Facebook's DB"

------
horsecaptin
"Never delete data. Storage is cheap. Just mark it as deleted."

------
nikolay
Deleting anything given the limitations of Facebook, is very irresponsible.
I've invested hours of commenting on stuff. The way Facebook is designed if
people delete their comment or posts on which I commented, my content gets
wiped out, too.

Other systems have handled this gracefully in the past. I hate when somebody
decided to wipe all evidence out and put hours of life into the trashcan.

If you want Facebook to be responsible, set an example, and be responsible and
respectful of other people's time and effort!

~~~
anon1979
Is this a joke? Comments on Facebook are not "effort". They are a waste of
life.

~~~
nikolay
Yours - sure, mine - mostly not.

~~~
raarts
I think you are taking Facebook far too seriously.

~~~
nikolay
Seriously, but not too seriously, sorry. And, yeah, that's what we grownups
do.

~~~
raarts
Oh sorry, let me rephrase: you kids are taking Facebook far too seriously

