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

https://gizmodo.com/facebooks-clear-history-tool-doesnt-clear-shit-1841305764

by decrypt • 5 years ago

287 88 5 years ago

Jaygles• 5 years ago

If someone decided to meticulously track everything I do. Follow me wherever I went. Put a GPS tracker on my car to see everywhere I visit. Peep inside my windows to see what websites I browse. Look over my shoulder at the grocery store to see what items I buy. I would consider that stalking and attempt to file a restraining order against that person.

Can I file a restraining order against Facebook? Or Google?

gundisclosed3• 5 years ago

I guess no, because you agreed to terms and conditions that they can.

bicepjai• 5 years ago

How about if one deleted the account with them 5 years before and they still follow you. I hope that is stalking.

01343402• 5 years ago

Terms and conditions which would have a hard time holding up in court without a signature and witness. Maybe things will change in the future since my own bank does this for online agreements as well as a few government agencies but those do have more stringent KYC rules for online verification.

croes• 5 years ago

They track you even without an account, so no not everyone agreed to their terms and conditions.

dspillett3• 5 years ago

For those who have signed up. What about "shadow profiles"?

Rygian• 5 years ago

If you're a European citizen, then you can invoke your legal right to erasure.

still_grokking• 5 years ago

How does the EU enforce the deletion of said data from Facebook servers standing on US ground?

How do I enforce deletion if I have unwittingly only a "shadow account" in Facebook?

c7DJTLrn2• 5 years ago

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.

nr2x• 5 years ago

Not if the Irish have any say in the matter.

fsflover2• 5 years ago

Not really: https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/.

rcoveson3• 5 years ago

You can't, because all the websites they're tracking you on are actually helping Facebook by choice. They didn't plant a GPS tracker on your car, they paid a bunch of amoral civilians to monitor your movements through the city.

Our legal system isn't equipped to handle the majority of free people deciding to act like broad-spectrum stalkers within the span of a few years. Society only works if most people aren't evil or utterly susceptible to evil influence.

adamdusty• 5 years ago

They didn't plant a GPS tracker, you bought it and use it for navigation, messaging, and social media.

r00fus• 5 years ago

No, because of a 1996 US Federal law, information collected about you is no longer your property, even if there is no business relationship.

devenblake• 5 years ago

What law specifically?

skybrian• 5 years ago

When was it ever? Anyone could write an article about you. Articles about specific people are discussed all the time on Hacker News. Usually the person being written about doesn’t get a say about their reputation.

marketingtech• 5 years ago

That's an interesting question, but it doesn't accurately describe the collection/transfer of data as far as FB or Google are concerned.

Millions of websites/apps/stores willingly deliver this information to Facebook/Google for free, and it's your relationship with each of those websites/apps/stores that governs the collection and sharing of that data.

GDPR, for instance, makes a distinction between "data controllers" and "data processors." The businesses are the controllers, and FB/Google are processors. Both have responsibilities regarding the handling of your data, but most of the requirements fall on the controller. The processors are able to assume that the controller had the right to share the data with them.

yosito2• 5 years ago

Can I file a restraining order against Facebook? Or Google?

Not as long as you're maintaining an active relationship with them. First step is to break up and stop using their services entirely.

fsflover2• 5 years ago

You do not need any relationship in order to have a shadow profile on Facebook.

marto1• 5 years ago

Wouldn't be surprised if they haven't even written the code to actually delete stuff.

titzer2• 5 years ago

They will mouth some words about "our high availability data replication and backups are not designed to delete information instantly". Meanwhile, their metric ton of machine learning has already been loaded up with your behavioral traces and cannot be unlearned. It'll still predict your behavior well enough to target ads, even if the raw trace of what you did is gone.

programmarchy• 5 years ago

Wouldn't you say the "right to be forgotten" includes deleting the weights and biases that have been accumulated for a person?

bobthechef2• 5 years ago

Given how they and companies like them behave, how they drag their feet and stall all the time, I am not surprised.

I suspect Facebook is too useful as an intelligence and surveillance tool to lead to some kind of meaningful legislation, penalties, whatever. If you can delete your data, then you can hide your tracks. Also, even if we assume that the US at least has in its favor a cultural apprehension toward surveillance, China doesn't, so you'll have a situation where a country is monitoring everything to death while you don't know what's going on. At least that might be the thinking. If that is so, I cannot imagine any realistic solutions. A race toward the bottom. You would need to ween people off Facebook, to cause them to leave the platform in droves. The only way to do that is to offer something better and that something would need to have privacy "built-in" in some way and either remain profitable or decentralized.

stevehawk2• 5 years ago

actually, that was the situation at one point. Facebook never wrote the code to delete things from their CDN.. so if you deleted your photo from your profile or album or whatever but someone else still had a link then that photo was still available.

I assume that's changed since 2010 - https://www.zdnet.com/article/facebook-does-not-erase-user-d...

TedShiller• 5 years ago

The most surprising thing may be that people are surprised.

zhuber• 5 years ago

I once worked with a guy who said "I don't know how Facebook can even be making money, like they don't charge for anything." Seriously.

Granted, this was a decade ago but even then all of us tried not to laugh and I just said something along the lines of "Do you know how they have ads for wedding venues right after you were engaged? That's how."

user764743• 5 years ago

There is also a reason websites have stopped using the term 'delete' and are using 'clear' instead. Because clearing something does not imply that it's gone unlike with delete, just out of view.

cgriswald• 5 years ago

I'm not sure what distinction I'm supposed to be making. What are these websites doing differently?

To me, 'delete' means 'remove this entry' and 'clear' means 'remove the data in this entry.'

atat70243• 5 years ago

What you want it to mean is "remove this entry from my view in the frontend, delete the related record in the backend, and delete all previously cached copies of it in the backend."

lprd• 5 years ago

Color me surprised. I kept hoping that with one of these privacy leaks, or any of the other atrocities that FB has committed, it would've triggered the beginning of their demise...but nope. Their stock prices just keep rising, and people continue to use the platform.

captainclam• 5 years ago

... and people continue to use the platform

I imagine that the number of people who even hear or read about these privacy leaks represent a minuscule fraction of the user base.

And of those that are aware of these leaks, a small fraction are concerned about internet privacy.

patorjk• 5 years ago

People are addicted and enjoy it too much. I have family members who spend all day posting memes, pictures, comments, etc. The only way I see FB failing is if something better comes along that can replace it.

passivate2• 5 years ago

Can Facebook legitimately pivot into any other service/product and still make money? It seems like they're always going to be at odds with privacy/public trust.

One one hand, it is extremely sad to see talented engineers at Google/FB work hard on products designed to spy on people, but OTOH, I suppose it could be far worse if these were companies who simply sold our data.

awestley• 5 years ago

Would it be worse? A big part of what companies like FB and Google do is get people "hooked" (A good book on this very topic) on sharing that data. In effect willingly revealing more and more data about themselves. If it were simply being sold I don't think people would divulge as much information.

rcoveson3• 5 years ago

Agreed. If entity A makes billions of dollars by selling everything they know about you, and entity B makes billions of dollars by merely knowing everything they know about you, I much prefer entity A. Entity B and its investors terrify me with the confidence they have in the future returns on that knowledge.

stevehawk2• 5 years ago

as a ~40yr old it feels like the greatest disappointment of my generation is that most of our brain power went towards making better spyware, click tracking, etc, all in the name of maximizing ad revenue and click through.

Gibbon1• 5 years ago

Went from designing stupid stuff like cheap audio IC's which meant any teenager with a part time job could afford a bitchin stereo. To designing cool stuff like a wiget that disables a single mother's car when she's a day late on her car payment!!!

passivate2• 5 years ago

I think there are several parallels in other industries - financial, pharma, etc. Very smart people, working on products that are (on some axis) detrimental to our society (or at-least one vision of what a society should look like).

theropost• 5 years ago

Quite true, it is their business model. There are so many talented engineers using their great talent on ways to gather advertising data. I wonder what will happen when their business model is no longer viable? Do they then begin the pivot of selling our data to anyone?

cglong• 5 years ago

The Facebook Portal seemed like an attempt to make a product less dependent on ad revenue; unfortunately, the fundamental nature of it made people really distrustful of it. This is also why I'm closely watching what they do with Oculus.

oriettaxx• 5 years ago

Any EU authorities out there reading this?

ThisWasTaken• 5 years ago

it's funny how when you open an article criticizing how Facebook tracks you the first thing you have to do is go through 70 pages to tell the site you're reading the article on to not track you.

nicbou3• 5 years ago

uBlock has a blocklist for cookie notices and other annoyances. Turning it off feels like watching cable TV after a decade of Netflix.

It's crazy that we need to go through so much crap (tracking, cookie notices, ads, newsletter prompts, SEO keyword soup) to get the simplest answers.

The website I run is deliberately annoyance-free. I see it as a competitive advantage.

EastSmith• 5 years ago

Which blacklist is this?

yosito2• 5 years ago

There's also a Firefox extension called "I don't care about cookies"

olyjohn• 5 years ago

The fucking article even mentions how many trackers are on Gizmodo, and then says "BUT THATS NORMAL ITS ON EVERY SITE YOU GO TO!" The author writes a piece and shits all over Facebook, and then goes on to minimize it when it comes to them doing it.

52-6F-62• 5 years ago

The author has absolutely 0 control over that.

Directions on analytics come from the "serious, business-minded" end of the company. That is true for every [major] journalism outlet. It's always been true.

Don't put that on the writers to resolve. Unless they have the resources to found their own competitor, they're as much at the mercy of the whims of the company heads as the readers are.

Even the development staff have little to no say about it. Inclusions of those kinds of things are at the behest of sales/marketing and management/executive. There is less crossover between those groups and the editorial staff than many people have decided to believe, no matter how often they're reminded.

If you ask me, the writer is doing plenty and they're doing exactly what is in their power to do: write about it.

Frankly, it seems like a modern miracle that a publication will produce editorial pieces that are so self-critical. I think it speaks to a healthy journalistic environment in general, even if the business practices need an overhaul.

ldbooth• 5 years ago

Similarly if you try to delete your Facebook account, the only option is "Deactivate Account". Or at least it was for me. They don't give a whoot- until their bottom line losses reflects the damage they cause.

mtnGoat• 5 years ago

well this is not a surprise at all. I am pretty sure facebook engineers have outright said the system does not have the capability to delete anything. Their claim was that deleting things "is hard"... id bet that scaling to keep everything forever is much harder.

somid3• 5 years ago

I tried to see my data... all i gotta say is "WWWWTTTFFF!!!!" <--- who knew all of this existed!

throwawaysea• 5 years ago

This is the main point the article is making:

The only thing you’re clearing is a connection Facebook made between its data and the data it gets from third parties, not the data itself.

However this is not the main privacy issue with Facebook in my opinion. Even if Facebook users could legitimately clear their third party data entirely, they still can't easily clear their own first party data (posts, photos, searches, likes, Instagram activity, etc). Right now, you have to go click "delete" in your activity log one-by-one on individual posts. This is so time consuming and manual that most users will never do it - which is of course by design.

There is a plugin that helped users delete their Facebook content (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social-book-post-m...), by letting you select the time period and type of content you want to delete. However, Facebook repeatedly breaks it by changing the page design for seemingly no real reason. The cat and mouse updates worked for a while but this extension has not been updated since 2019. Some creative people then built a second extension that switches Facebook to an older layout (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/switch-to-classic-...) and this allowed the above history clearing extension to work. But then Facebook made an even more drastic redesign of the Activity Log, which broke this approach of using a second extension in conjunction with the first.

Can any enterprising HN code ninja help solve this problem? I think we need a suite of tools to help users easily clear their history from all social media platform, whether it is Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or whatever. Ideally we'd have a law requiring such controls be provided to users but I'm not holding my breath.

seattle_spring• 5 years ago

Is there a browser plugin or something that filters Facebook-related posts from HN? We get it, they don't respect your privacy, but seeing the same content voted to the frontpage multiple times a day is getting exceptionally tiring.

mleonhard• 5 years ago

Even if you clear it, they continue to link future third-party site activity to your FB profile.

https://www.facebook.com/off_facebook_activity/activity_list

To actually opt out, you have to click the "More Options" button, then "Manage Future Activity" at the bottom, then "Manage Future Activity" button, then toggle off the "Future Off-Facebook Activity" toggle.

Dark patterns. So disrespectful. Shameful. :(

encryptluks2• 5 years ago

I've noticed when deleting reactions from my activity history, that after they appear to be all gone if I wait a few days more pops up. It is like impossible to remove them all.

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

Related Stories