
I Decided to Delete All My Facebook Activity - jamesbritt
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/01/facebook_cleansing_how_to_delete_all_of_your_account_activity.single.html
======
isomorphic
I "deactivated" my Facebook account long ago. I'd like to _delete_ it, but
that apparently involves sacrificing some small animal and studying the
entrails for clues.

I deleted by Google+ account(s) recently, as well. I have several Twitter
accounts with no tweets. I'm thinking of sanitizing my LinkedIn account soon.

It's not that I'm anti-social (well, maybe); I am just one of those elder
geeks who once dreamt of truly federated services under one's own control.

~~~
diminoten
Deleting your Facebook is difficult? I believe mine is hard deleted (not
deactivated), and it was the same workflow as deactivating it, if I remember
correctly. I just clicked "delete" instead of "deactivate" or whatever.

Facebook leaves the account deactivated for a week so you can ponder on your
choice, but if you don't do anything, it was my understanding that the account
gets deleted.

~~~
jrs235
I believe doing the delete account via Facebook will only delete [your own]
posts and things on "your timeline/wall". Any comments you made on other
peoples posts do not get deleted. I believe, using the "automation" method or
similar methods actually goes through and finds all your posts and comments on
other people's walls/timelines and also deletes them.

~~~
ubercow13
I deleted my account and I am pretty sure all your comments on others' things
do get deleted..

~~~
ta_delallthings
Nothing gets deleted ever, your account and related data still lives in
facebook servers but only accessible to facebook and their commercial partners
(also NSA, US government, spy agencies and crackers).

~~~
ubercow13
Unless I am misunderstanding, that is all but totally unrelated to what we are
talking about, however true it is.

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chippy
What most people seem to be missing and which the article does not properly
explain is why some people think it is necessary to delete each item
individually.

Yes you can both deactivate (soft delete) an account and you can actually say
to facebook to actually delete it. Deleting an account does not allegedly
remove your data from the Facebook servers. Deleting items however will remove
your data from the servers. The idea is that you should delete each little
thing first, and _then_ delete the actual account.

From the FAQ at [http://suicidemachine.org/](http://suicidemachine.org/) :

"Facebook and Co. are going to hold all your informations and pictures on
their servers forever! We still hope that by removing your contact details and
friend connections one-by-one, your data is being cached out from their backup
servers. This can happen after days, weeks, months or even years. So merely
deactivating the account is just not enough!"

~~~
salvadors
He wants to keep using the account, just remove the historic activity.

~~~
dredmorbius
NB: She, presumably, based on "Jennifer Golbeck".

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Casseres
Expiration dates for posts is a brilliant idea. Who ever is working on the
"next Facebook", I hope you implement something like this.

~~~
thirdsight
Actually I'd rather prefer someone to not invent the next Facebook. It reveals
the human trait that despite best intentions, when shareholders get involved,
cash is king regardless of the ethical stance the company supposedly takes.

~~~
Casseres
Good point.

In my mind, ideally the next big social media platform will be P2P and open
source. I have some ideas on how this might work and the features this would
include, but I've never hashed them out since my programming ability doesn't
approach the level required for such an undertaking. Maybe I will as a thought
experiment and publish my ideas so that anyone can use them.

~~~
achamayou
Are you aware of Diaspora ? It's both distributed and open source.

~~~
ta_delallthings
Diaspora is a poor attempt at copying facebook, it's nothing like the
distributed I have in mind, which would be easy to use encrypted self-hosting
and not tied to a specific network/website/technology.

~~~
captainbenises
So basically implemented with no technology? Maybe just an idea in your mind?

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avolcano
Ooh, cool. I was just idly wondering today whether I could easily delete all
my posts from high school (full of angst about calculus and bus rides).

If Facebook actually wants people to be using their service in twenty years,
they should really build timeline cleansing in.

~~~
k-mcgrady
>> "I was just idly wondering today whether I could easily delete all my posts
from high school (full of angst about calculus and bus rides)."

Although I agree with your feature request why does it matter to you that that
stuff is there? I enjoy going back through my timeline (maybe once a year or
so) and seeing old things. There may be a few things that make me cringe but
there's nothing so embarrassing that it would have any effect on me currently
should anyone else see it.

~~~
personlurking
Probably just me but that sounds crazy (very possible you use it normally
while I don't). I've deleted then returned to FB many times. Even when I'm not
deleting my account, I always clean out my past posts, sometimes a few days
later (after posting them) while other times I'll wait a few weeks. If I add a
new profile pic, I usually delete the old one. Also, I talk to people via PM.

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k-mcgrady
The author keeps referencing posting 'links and videos'. I guess the value you
get from Facebook depends on how you use it. I occasionally post a cool video
I've found (and I usually post that specifically on the wall of someone I
think would like it) but 80% of the stuff I post and my friends post is not
links to content on other sites. Most of the content posted are photos or
people messaging each other through wall posts rather than PM. Although it's
obviously not all useful to me it makes Facebook's Timeline feature more
interesting. Going back and seeing links posted would be quite boring. Seeing
messages people posts to me or photos or comments on an event we were at are
nice to look back on.

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rolandukor
Maybe I'm just cynical, but I am very doubtful that Facebook would hard-delete
anything.

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pulmo
I did this a year ago. I used the mobile site because it has less JS and
iMacros[1] to delete the posts. Took me about an hour to delete approximately
900 posts.

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/imacros-for-
fire...](https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/imacros-for-firefox/)

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joshmlewis
Cough..snapchat..this is the value it brings.

~~~
pwnna
Except that's not really secure, either.

~~~
joshmlewis
I never claimed it was secure, or private, or whatever. Just that the
functionality of Snapchat embodies what the author was saying.

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shortstuffsushi
>> On average, it took 20 to 30 minutes to purge a month’s worth of posts.
After about 12 hours of hand-deleting stories, I decided it was time to
automate.

12 hours of deleting by hand? I don't know if I could even do 20-30 minutes
worth without seeking a tool.

That's dedication, or something.

~~~
selmnoo
You'd be surprised how dedicated normal people are when they don't _know_ that
these simple things can be automated. I remember about 15 years ago when I was
a freshman in highschool, and found my sister replacing every space after
period on her 40-page thesis with two spaces. I told her of the find/replace
all feature, and she was pretty happy. Over the years I've gone through a
crazy number of incidents where normal people are spending tens of hours on
things that would _literally_ take me less than maybe 30 seconds to do.

~~~
shortstuffsushi
That's fair. I actually had a similar experience with our publications team
replacing a word across multiple pages on multiple spaces of our wiki. I can
hardly imagine not immediately seeking/knowing to try to seek a better
solution.

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ta_delallthings
I cringed when I read "(...) and since it's my data, I want to be in control
of its disposal.", OP obviously makes the confusion between providing the data
and owning the data. It's regrettable that she contributes to propagating the
idea that users own their data on facebook, when in reality once it is on
facebook server it's not their data anymore, it now belongs to facebook.

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beat
I think this is why Snapchat strikes fear into the heart of Facebook. It's not
the current business model of sending drunken cleavage shots and not charging
for them... it's the potential for a social network that really states the
present, not the forever. I think there's tremendous value there.

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chekhov
imho deleting social profile is not an option anymore. Other guy could make it
look like yours. It just too suspicious to not have online profile. Double
identity is the key. Just be one kind citizen for the system. Generate likes
and upload kittens.

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dclara
Have cleaned up the garbage? It's time to create some real stuff now: Visit us
on Kickstarter for the project "BingoBo: Build your Private Web"

[http://kck.st/JNqv8z](http://kck.st/JNqv8z)

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joeheyming
wait, wouldn't it be faster to write a small script to hit the facebook API
foreach activity? I thought this was hacker news, not clueless article writer
news

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mariuolo
You know they won't actually delete your data, right?

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jsilence
Remove the cause and not the symptoms.

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justinzollars
I'd be more impressed if you just deleted your facebook account

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arnley
And so I just did

