- Facebook publicly claims it does [1]
- Mark Zuckerberg testified in-front of congress and stated they do [2]
- Multiple government regulators have specifically checked that it does in their privacy audits. [3]
They might be lying and actively conspiring to not delete it, but they'd have to have a very good reason to take on that much legal risk.
Now, consider:
- A infinitesimal fraction of facebook users try to delete anything.
- Facebook makes money from your data by showing you ads. If you stop using facebook, you stop generating any revenue and your data becomes a liability, not an asset.
What reason would there be to lie about it?
[1] https://facebook.com/help/250563911970368
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/10...
I just want to point out that "testified in-front of Congress" seems to have no relation to the truth of any statement. I don't recall the last time (if ever) there have been legal ramifications for lying in front of Congress.
Zuckerberg also testified that shadow profiles don't exist and that users can always remove their personal information from Facebook (they do exist, and you can't). James Clapper testified that the NSA doesn't "wittingly" surveil hundreds of millions of Americans (they do, very "wittingly").
https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/11/is-zuckerberg-under-oath-c...
John M Poindexter was one who was convicted of lying to Congress: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Poindexter#U.S._executive...
[1] https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/12/13/michael-c...
It's one of the reasons Cohen is in prison, isn't it?
It is illegal to lie to Congress (unrelated to whether you're under oath or not), but I can think of very few examples where there were real ramifications for it.
Sure you're not thinking of Manafort? I don't think Cohen had a plea deal, and I don't think he was charged with lying to the FBI. Manafort and Flynn did, and Manafort I think was the one that then broke the deal. There's a lot of crimes to keep track of.
I guess it depends on what you mean by real ramifications as it's being served concurrently but Cohen is serving two months for lying to Congress, a charge he plead guilty to.
They technically wouldn't be lying if they only deleted the record from application systems, but retained it in historical data by simply setting a bit flag (eg "IsDeleted") to 1.
The question about what motive they have comes down to whether or not the types of posts a person deletes indicate something meaningful about their personality. Ad analytics are ultimately seeking to understand the kind of person you are, after all.
"In determining appropriate retention periods for personal information, data controllers can have due regard to any statutory obligations to retain data. However, if the purpose for which the information was obtained has ceased and the personal information is no longer required for that purpose, the data must be deleted or disposed of in a secure manner. Full and irrevocable anonymisation would achieve the same objective." (Page 69, under 3.4 Retention)
So basically, as long as it's anonymised, the data can be retained.
Under this reading, is there even an obligation to anonymize? And how anonymous does anonymous need to be? Does a simple base64 encoding count as “anonymized”?
And the matter of anonymisation is a great question - "irrevocable" anonymisation certainly has a different meaning back in 2011, when swapping a name for a guid would do the job. Nowadays, it would require at least deleting all relationships as well, since social network analysis is much more advanced these days (especially at FB, of all places.) It wouldn't be impossible to derive the identity of an anonymous account/record based on the undeleted data associated with it. And since FB's "ghost profiles" are something we know exist, I think it's safe to assume those relationships are being maintained somehow.
Also, I'm now looking forward to Zuck's next apology for "a breach of trust" and his explanation of how they "failed to live up to their own standards" when it becomes publicly undeniable that their "Full and irrevocable anonymisation" of data they've claimed is deleted is as flawed as all the other attempts we've seen of doing that.
FTFY
#1 You can train the model continously
#2 the model stops learning
#3 it has a submodel which detects you are feeding it false data.
Given that people change over time, #2 seems unlikely. The question to me is "how advanced is #3?". Another thing I wonder about is how relative are these to eaxh other. At odds?
#2 makes no sense from a business perspective.
#3 is also well-established. This is how Google's Captchas work, for example.
If my friends or acquaintances continue to use facebook, then information about me continues to be useful to facebook as that information can be used to complete their model of what sort of people my friends are, that they would associate with somebody like me.
I wouldn't trust Zuckerberg to pour a glass of water on a burning orphan, let alone delete data for real. Nor would I trust any politician to know anything about the subject.
It wouldn't be the first time Facebook (nor any other business that profits from people's data) have been deceptive while treading a careful line between honesty and lies.
edit: I should add that if they were keeping archived records in a separate business unit, there is the possibility that they keep the original or even all edits. So scrambling your data might not do much aside confusing those who have you in their feed.
Given FB's size and the small amount of people deleting data, I doubt Facebook would take the risk to keep a few more datasets.
Granted GDPR is supposed to catch businesses that pull those kind of stunts, you have to remember that Facebook do already break GDPR in number of public ways too. So it's pretty clear they have a relatively open interpretation of the regulations (and an army of lawyers who are confident they can proceed in such a way). Or it might just be the case that even the worst fine issued by the GDPR is worth the risk given the financial benefits awarded to Facebook for retaining data.
This part at least is incorrect. Your data will always be an asset, and FB makes money not just by showing you ads but by selling your data.
And they obviously give away some data for free, especially pertaining to users who click through OAuth consent screens as in the Cambridge Analytica case: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api
What are some examples of transactions where they exchanged data for money?
That's not a great analogy because I would be violating other people's IP, whereas FB generally has rights to the data they collect.
I am not a fan of Facebook but this entire thread is just filled with misinformation.
It would’ve surprising if they didn’t capitalize on them.
I work at a company you've heard of, and you've probably (P > .5) used at least one of our products. We're international (including EU). I personally wrote our user data deletion logic for GDPR compliance.
We delete all of your PII. It doesn't matter if you're from the EU or not, because it's too expensive to figure it out and too risky because you're going to miss some weird edge case - Legal doesn't have much of a sense of humor when it comes to wiggle room.
My experience has been that larger organizations consistently spend more effort (relative to size) to genuinely comply with privacy regulations than smaller ones. The risk:reward ratio for deliberately ignoring or subverting privacy regulations is insanely bad. There are too many surfaces along which that would leak out, and the gains would be pretty marginal. Pretty much anyone who works at a large tech company can and will confirm that this is the case (see Jeff Kaufman's posts on this thread). There is no conspiracy between the six-digit number of engineers who work at these companies to keep quiet about it.
I wouldn't say "conspiracy" but they've been mums-the-word about things like shadow-profiles. Perhaps, it comes down to too much kool-aid but to say that engineers would initially speak-up in such cases has been proven wrong, time and again.
Take the Snowden revelations, as an example: How many years were the programs in service before Snowden went public? How long have we known about shadow profiles and no one from Facebook has come forward to say, "yes, this is what they're doing and it's wrong"?
Relying on people to do the good that should be done by the organisations doesn't take into consideration that those engineers face severe penalties for "going pubic" about such things - namely because whistle-blower laws do not supercede such thing as NDAs.
And then, what about all the data copied into Hive? Copied to 3rd parties? Does Facebook go and delete data that 3rd parties took?
>>> They "trust me"
>>> Dumb fucks
He's the same old dirt bag he ever was. Here are some fresh stories to back that up:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/21/facebook-...
https://www.vox.com/2018/11/14/18096008/facebook-zuckerberg-...
All of Zuckerberg's and Facebook's actions, however, continue to suggest that his approach hasn't changed.
Honestly the vibe's still there if you pay him/fb enough attention. I'm working on extracting myself completely from them (Still got a few group messages on upcoming events to clear)
This is the most profound insight we have into the mind of Mark Zuckerberg and what he thinks of his user base.
Stop listening to the PR and examine his actions since then. You can see how that comment was not merely a youthful indiscretion, but his entire business.
Zuckerberg continues to display this exact same mentality, only now he has billions of dollars in resources.
I doubt this
> Mark Zuckerberg testified in-front of congress and stated they do He would tell us everything that helps him as he is an opportunist
> Multiple government regulators have specifically checked that it does in their privacy audits You're talking about the governments secretly spying on us and lying about that since decades? Ouch.
There is no legal risk for those who observe if you abide the laws.
> A infinitesimal fraction of facebook users try to delete anything What does that tell you about the majority of ppl?
> Facebook makes money from your data by showing you ads. If you stop using facebook, you stop generating any revenue and your data becomes a liability, not an asset. That's just what you think you know. What about psychological profiling, law enforcement etc.?
Also did you hear about the "shadow profiles" about users who don't have an account? The moment you're surfing into their net (as we know even through embedded like buttons etc.) you'll be milked like a dairy cow.
> What reason would there be to lie about it? What reason is there not to be honest about it? The recent events have shown very clearly that they don't have to fear much.
Or they can just claim, again, that they accidentally forgot to delete copies of these posts from their backups. It just completely slipped their mind.
I'd be much less confident, considering that they explicitly save and make public post's edit history.
That sounds hilarious. You don't happen to remember or have a source for that, do you? Would love to read more.
However at Facebook's size, and given they're known for 0 privacy, they likely track all changes anyway.
I don't think editing a Facebook post first would have the desired effect.
The README states the intent is to clean up publicly facing content. It's meant to tidy up internet presence to the general viewing public, not escape the grip of FB's data vacume.
I'm a big fan a Selenium, and this is great usage of it! Scripting a boring, repetitive browser task, that would take a large amount of time & effort to do manually.
All the big companies are doing immutable, append-only event logging and probably have no mechanism to expunge this data. All because storage is cheap and they need to hold on to everything for testing or whatever future need that might arise.
What a pitiful dystopia we're living in.
This is not true at all. Here's a recent HN discussion that talks about how Google handles this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19809259
(Disclosure: I work for Google, but I'm speaking for myself)
(I would love to see someone subpoena something deleted, say, 1y ago and write up whether it was produced.)
Not sure how many actually did that, but to be compliant append only does not fly. I was on a product that did exactly that for data lakes.
[1] http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/meetings/documents/storag...
Don't be confident. They have [1], or used to, post edit history. Even if the feature isn't there in the UI, I bet they didn't remove it internally.
[1]: DDG: facebook post edit history.
https://datacenterfrontier.com/inside-facebooks-blu-ray-cold...
It's text you wrote, why would there be any problem "covering up" your own text?
Note that, I'm not arguing you should have a right to use Selenium to scrape their site and replace the text, but if you went through every post in a non-automated fashion and changed the text, from a perspective of "covering up" the text, the purpose would be the same. Facebook almost certainly has an interest in keeping 100M users from scraping with Selenium, that's a separate thing entirely.
It’s true that editing could serve to hide it from other users, but privacy settings could do that also.
This is information that you originally put out, wrote down on Facebook, so it's not that you're hiding something you didn't want anyone to know originally. If it was libelous or something so you wanted to delete it after the fact, it's still likely possible to get it back -- even if Facebook deleted the actual message in the database, there's likely a number of methods -- server logs, db logs, cached resources, db backups, or even a simple screenshot -- that would likely be sufficient proof.
http://www.wassom.com/delete-at-your-own-risk-spoliation-of-...
As far as the rest of your post, i believe that is exactly what I was asserting originally.
If FB has this data squirrelled away somewhere in cold storage then in order for anyone to harm you with it, FB has to admit to keeping it (which would be a scandal) and it has to get out into the wild. That is a reduction in risk compared to someone just looking at your profile.
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Delete what you can, then shut down your account.
UPDATE users SET is_deleted = true WHERE user_id = ?The eerie part? It used to show faded thumbnails of my photos that I had deleted more than a year ago in Photos section when prompting me to add my pics.
[0] https://github.com/x89/Shreddit
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/1dhw2j/reddits_privac...
FWIW, I believe this is still true of reddit. Deleting a post doesn't actually delete it. It just no longer shows on the webpage. To really remove it from the database, you need to edit the post/comment, replace the contents with something simple (e.g., the character "a"), save it, then delete it.
It’s really good.
Seed with: "Why does my dog speak poor English?"
> It's possible your dog has a rare genetic condition called dyslexia, which puts him or her at risk for learning difficulties. If the problem has progressed beyond a certain point—say, if your dog has been in the hospital for over a year—and when you go to bring him out of the hospital—not for exercise or exercise training—he may not speak English in the proper way. Your veterinarian will work on the problem while you are in the hospital.
What should I do with a dog with dyslexia?
It's important to be vigilant and familiar with what is going on with your dog in hospital. If you find that your dog may be learning, take him home and have him trained as soon as possible. It may take a while for your dog to learn to associate the letters of English with words.
There are times when we need to ask ourselves, are our interests really served by having this ability, when so many of us are now doing so much online anyway?
Facebook has many years of pretty smart work, and probably safe to say tens of millions of dollars just in meetings about specifically this (re costs associated with effort of user data retention).
... similar to the outcome of a ransomware attack (gets backed up, archived, overwrites old legit data): brilliant!
I'd be slightly more confident (slightly) that editing the post might cause the core data in the db to be updated, however. In which case, I think the more effective script would be one that goes through all of your FB posts and scrambles them, or replaces the text with gibberish.