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Re:Ask HN: Know a good tool to purge all posts/likes/photos ... by mgberlin on Tuesday August 09, 2016 @11:05AM (#12255001)
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.

Re:Ask HN: Know a good tool to purge all posts/likes/photos ... by WmyEE0UsWAwC2i on Tuesday August 09, 2016 @03:37PM (#12257192)
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.

Re:Ask HN: Know a good tool to purge all posts/likes/photos ... by logfromblammo on Tuesday August 09, 2016 @11:14AM (#12255104)
I log on around my birthday anniversary and 6 months before and after, to reassure people that I'm still alive and to conceal (nothing on Facebook is "deleted") the previous 6 months of activity.

You can't reduce your Facebook profile to zero, because a large part of it is composed from friend activity, and some of your friends will be on Facebook without privacy concerns as severe as yours. And you can't control the things that other people do.

Re:Ask HN: Know a good tool to purge all posts/likes/photos ... by merpnderp on Tuesday August 09, 2016 @02:56PM (#12256938)
I ran a greasemonkey script that tried to delete everything. What ended up happening was everything was switched to hidden from timeline. I don't know if something was wrong with the script (looked good to me) or if facebook just doesn't want to delete anything.

But I was truly bummed to see that it is impossible to delete anything.

Re:Ask HN: Know a good tool to purge all posts/likes/photos ... by vemy on Tuesday August 09, 2016 @04:56PM (#12257647)
Re:Ask HN: Know a good tool to purge all posts/likes/photos ... by aw3c2 on Tuesday August 09, 2016 @05:50PM (#12257953)
That might be a great opportunity for a lawyer (maybe in Europe).