Hi HN! I want to reduce my footprint on FB, i.e. delete all posts and photos, unlike all likes, etc. I'd like to keep the account active, so simply deactivating isn't the way to go (yet?)<p>I did some digging and there seems to be some Chrome extensions that - according to reviews - can give mixed results.<p>Most of what I could find - including past posts to HN - were 4 or 5 years old. So my question: is there a recent, go-to tool that you know of which can help me achieve the above? Or should I try my luck with the random years-old tutorials you can find online?<p>Thanks!
This is tangentially related to this, but apparently their mobile app now automatically downloads all the photos on your phone if you give permissions to access photos? My wife and I recently had a child, and when I opened up the app to post one single photo of our child, Facebook was showing in my newsfeed a video they made with all of my photos I had taken. This seems like a gross violation of my privacy. Is there any way to prevent this aside from deleting the app and no longer sharing photos with family and friends via FB?
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.<p>tl;dr: Even if you delete things, they will eventually reappear.
A related personal experience. I deleted my facebook account few years ago. Much Later (actually around 2 years later), when I wanted to check something related to facebook sdk, I created a fake account but gave my original mobile number.<p>Surprise! Surprise! Facebook was recommending all the people from my deleted account magically to my newly created account which has nothing in common with my old account except for the mobile number.<p>For all those sharing content in FB, worrying about your privacy is pointless and a total waste of time.<p>My personal opinion is that, Google somehow values people privacy more than Facebook, that why its social networking attempts are failing. On the other hand, Facebook is just ruthless when it comes to handling people's data and that is why it is having much success as a social networking platform.
Just deactivate first and forget about it. Your life does not cease to exist because you are not on Facebook anymore. If there are people out there who genuinely care for you, they'll know how to get a hold of you. You can then share your life with them, if you care for them. The world has existed like this for thousands of years.
Facebook detects automated activity or scraping and tries to stop it.
That being said, only this one seemed to partially work for me: <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/timeline-cleaner-facebook/ooimeknpoejjpkmgeibojeklnklcjchf?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/timeline-cleaner-f...</a>
They introduced the ability to restrict those who can view your past posts quite recently, which might be useful. A link to news article is here:<p><a href="http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2016/07/28/facebook-remove-old-posts/#gref" rel="nofollow">http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2016/07/28/facebook-remove-ol...</a><p>That news article also mentioned: <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/facebook-post-manager/ljfidlkcmdmmibngdfikhffffdmphjae" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/facebook-post-mana...</a>
If you are outside of the US or Canada you are entitled to request all data Facebook holds about your account. This may be useful in determining what is actually deleted.<p><a href="http://www.europe-v-facebook.org/EN/Get_your_Data_/get_your_data_.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.europe-v-facebook.org/EN/Get_your_Data_/get_your_...</a>
I've found that there are old messages of mine that Facebook will not let me delete. I took the manual approach of scrolling through my history and deleting every post I no longer wanted, and I found that some of my early posts produce an error when I try to delete them. I believe it has something to do with them being on a friend's wall, but I really am not sure. It's frustrating to not be able to remove my own content.
My plan is to corrupt my data. I'll warn my friends that if they see stupid stuff going on with my profile, it's just me.<p>If they won't delete it, might as well make it useless.
Another idea would be to flood your page with a lot of stuff: like everything that FB suggests (unless it's controversial or possibly illegal), create posts with random content (you can make it visible to "Just Me", reshare everything that pops in your timeline, etc
There is the "Limit Past Posts" feature under the privacy settings. It doesn't delete your stuff, but it does make it less visible. Not ideal, just a start.<p>Go to "see more privacy settings"... then look for 'Limit the audience for posts you've shared with friends of friends or Public?'. It will present a "Limit Old Posts" button.
Did you know it's impossible to disallow comments on your facebook posts? You have to allow them and then remove them manually.<p>FB is like a poorly-featured blog.
Funnily tonight I've spent about 3hrs going through and marking everything "only me" which leaves everyone that was tagged or has commented on it with access. So it is completely doable through a chrome extension, would just take time to do. Plus now the site is all react based it should be fairly simple.
My goal was to reduce my public footprint and each month I'll go through and close out the previous 2nd month of content.
There was an app that did something related to this called facewash (renamed to simplewash) <a href="https://www.facebook.com/simplewash/" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/simplewash/</a>, but it seems to since have been shut down. May be worth it to shoot them a message
Reading all the comments on how little control users have over their data on fb. Isn't this kind of messed up? How is FB still able to get away with this? Especially when Apple and Google are pushing for more privacy and user control over data, I'd think FB would get called out more.
Slightly unrelated to OP's question... but something I just thought of, how would trying to reduce one's footprint impact the algorithm? i.e. would a lot of removals of likes invoke Facebook to suggest radically new content different than the thing which was removed? Or would it continue to suggest similar content?<p>For example, if someone unliked and removed every post and/or action that had to do with goats. Would they still get suggested content about goats or animals in the same family; would they get more animal-based suggestions than someone who'd never liked goat content? Or would those kinds of suggestions drop off entirely and change to common trends?<p>I have not used Facebook in a long time, so I'm curious if anyone has insight into the behavior.
Not sure how possible it is, but i've used Javascript from the web console to do some interaction with Facebook, perhaps they have restricted this though?<p>But if that is allowed that could be one route, getting all the elements by Xpath that are posts.<p>Otherwise automation with Selenium or similar could work?
There's <a href="https://github.com/chander/social-network-cleaner" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/chander/social-network-cleaner</a> which more or less worked for me when I deleted my account. (Over a year ago now.)
To my knowledge fb doesn't allow apps to delete data. Or, better, an app can only delete data it created in the first place. This is the reason, I guess, there are no such "server-side" services.<p>I don't know the status of client side, sorry.
Not a tool and Maybe not for photos. But I'd recommend doing potential edits instead. Where possible (comments and text posts). As this will screw with a lot of the undelete aspects and archiving. I do this in a variety of places and is far better than "delete" in most scenarios.<p>Tl;dr; better footprint reduction method than delete: Replace all text posts with a single letter or word.
I'm trying this right now and it appears to be working. Although it looks like it will break once the timeline scroll gets too large. Maybe a page refresh will fix it.<p><a href="https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/9106-facebook-timeline-cleaner" rel="nofollow">https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/9106-facebook-timeline-cle...</a>
You could take a look at testing with spock & groovy. With those you can instantiate browsers and control their behavior with just some lines of groovy code. Haven't heard of any tools that still work and do the job right, so though it might seem a bit of an overkill, it may just be worth the effort and you learn something cool ;-)
I did this once for fun. At the time I used Sikuli (it just controls your mouse / keyboard and find things on screen). easy to code it, takes quite a while to run and makes your computer useless to do other things.
I wonder if you could breathe life into this and perhaps mold it to do what you want ?<p><a href="http://fbcmd.dtompkins.com/" rel="nofollow">http://fbcmd.dtompkins.com/</a>
I had good luck with a greasemonkey script but it was 5 years ago and it no longer works. I did have to run it several times. Maybe see if there's an updated one.