My understanding from the Cambridge Analytica stuff is that even if you completely wiped every bit of data from Facebook's servers, it doesn't matter any more. Your personal data, attached to your name, is out in the wild. For a price, someone can buy a detailed psychological profile of you.

All of our genies are out of all our bottles. They aren't going back in.

This is somewhat true. However, if you stop adding data to your profile it becomes stale. Since I deleted my facebook profile I moved cities, bought a house, a different car, and have new friends in real life. My old FB profile is probably still a good indicator of which way I'd vote in an election, but it's useless now for targeted advertising. The only way to make that break is to delete your profile now; slowly over time your real life will start to change and eventually won't resemble the digital you at all.

> but it's useless now for targeted advertising

What makes you think this? According to another recent article about Facebook's data collection[0] says:

> And it showed these odd patterns; that, for example, people who liked ‘I hate Israel’ on Facebook also tended to like Nike shoes and KitKats.

This gives me the impression that even mundane bits of information can be used to extrapolate other connections through intelligent guessing.

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistl...

Data gathered from browsing websites that share data with FB (by third-party tracking or by direct acquisition of data from other companies, I'm not sure if FB does the latter) and from apps that include FB libraries (a surprisingly high number of apps) can still be associated with your ostensibly deleted profile.

Yeah but I get the feeling that current data is worth way more to facebook and data brokers in general than old data. Having data to make projections is nice but being able to experiment in real time with active data is probably the dream facebook is built on.

This times a million. Delete the FB account now, install uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger, and the data about you that's out there will become increasingly stale.

I thought it was only if you had used Cambridge Analytica's Facebook app. Is it bigger than even that?

If you, or any of your friends (even a single one, since defriended).

Facebook App security started out extremely lax, letting you pull all info including pictures about anyone visible to the user of said app.

The app also pulled data about friends of people who used the app, so if someone in your graph used it, you may have been scraped.

Pretty sure Facebook's "delete" is just a Boolean toggle called isDeleted with everything else unchanged.

But I guess this is the best we have.

Well think of it this way: all of that data facebook put time, effort and money into collecting from you will become less and less relevant as soon as you delete your account.

I wouldn't be surprised if from facebook's point of view they'd rather collect 1/100th of your data as long as it's current data vs just a bunch of irrelevant old data. Pull the plug.

> I wouldn't be surprised if from facebook's point of view they'd rather collect 1/100th of your data as long as it's current data vs just a bunch of irrelevant old data. Pull the plug.

I would be surprised. Most data and preferences change very slowly or never (race, political affiliation, religion, sexual preferences, musical preferences, food preferences). And much of the data that does change frequently, like location and employer, can be sourced from other sources (linkedin, voter registration, donations, your bank and phone company who gladly divulge a lot of info -- did you read the fine print?).

Your old flame, your old classmates, your parents, brothers and sisters, the name of your first pet (used for password challenges) -- these things do not change.

Will GDPR change this?

It will absolutely change how Facebook treats EU citizens; otherwise, they risk extremely large financial penalties.

May 25th is GDPR Day. The day when you can withdraw consent to be tracked, stored, or processed by businesses with dealings in Europe.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/nightmare-letter-subject-acce...

EDIT: To clarify, GDPR applies to citizens of EU member states globally.

So this doesn't really work. You think you deleted it, but when you "re-activate" your account, there are backups that bring back most of the data from the starting date of your account to just before you deleted it - plus or minus a day.

Also, a) they never really, truly delete your profile (mine, which I deleted in 2013, is still present in some form) and b) one or more shadow profiles will probably pop up, at least giving the impression that you are still on FB.

Heheh, his last FB post was ~4hrs ago. I guess the cancer has progressed further than he first thought.