Facebook's 'Clear History' Tool Doesn't Clear Shit (2020)

Re:Facebook's 'Clear History' Tool Doesn't Clear Shit (2020) by c7DJTLrn on Monday April 12, 2021 @12:58PM (#26781859)

It's not a silver bullet of course. Discord, for instance, just 'anonymises' message history by renaming your account to Deleted User. But most people's message history is enough to deanonymise them, making that completely null and void. If you ask for your messages to actually be deleted they will refuse your request.

I published a tool on GitHub for deleting message history in the most efficient way I could find. Yet users of the tool sometimes get their accounts banned because Discord's TOS prohibits unauthorised use of their API. I speculate this is because they don't want custom clients which don't send back telemetry.

Discord is either tone-deaf to common privacy concerns or they're completely conscious of them and don't want people to clear their message history.

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Re:Facebook's 'Clear History' Tool Doesn't Clear Shit (2020) by gjsman-1000 on Monday April 12, 2021 @01:27PM (#26782306)

One tactic I've worked out with individual mods is I have them ban me, then unban me, which causes all of my posts to be erased from the public chat. Of course Discord probably still has them privately, but it's better than nothing.

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Re:Facebook's 'Clear History' Tool Doesn't Clear Shit (2020) by c7DJTLrn on Monday April 12, 2021 @01:34PM (#26782405)

That's interesting, thanks for the tip. I would hope they would have a sort of garbage collection that deletes orphaned messages, but this is Discord we're talking about.

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Re:Facebook's 'Clear History' Tool Doesn't Clear Shit (2020) by atat7024 on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @08:56AM (#26791524)

Are they owned by Microsoft yet?

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Re:Facebook's 'Clear History' Tool Doesn't Clear Shit (2020) by christkv on Monday April 12, 2021 @01:02PM (#26781925)

I don’t think this will be enough in case they get sued if the messages contain personably identifiable information they will have serious problems.

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