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If you realy want to delete your data, try a client like redact.dev that batch overwrites all your posts and pictures.
I went without Facebook for about 7 years. I went through the account deletion process. After meeting my now wife, she wanted to be able to send me stuff she sees on there. W/E I’ll just use my old email address and spin up a new account… Low and behold, my account was still there… I went through and manually deleted all of my posts, chats, liked pages, everything. My account is now just a place for my wife to share reels.
I don’t like Facebook but I have found it convenient to be able to use the marketplace again.
Thats cute, but no. Its a company with profitmargins
I’m going with … never.
Yup, them “shadow profiles” will become sentient one day
Fuck! Thanks. Anyway my…ummm…friend can have his meta footprint deleted?
Don’t they ressurect dead accounts, and use the ai to post randomly
Unless someone feels like breaking into a datacenter (and likely several cold backup facilities) and mechanically wiping data, that shit is there forever. Facebook deletes nothing.
“Never Delete Anything” is Standard at every place I’ve worked. What happens is that anything that is requested to be deleted is simply marked as “Deleted” in the database.
Not to discredit or counterpoint what you’re saying… But in some jurisdictions, that’s illegal. As an example, California RTA/RTF laws make it a requirement that some data should be deleted unless there’s a different legal standard requiring the data be kept. Enforcement? Who knows?
Even Reddit doesn’t delete your post(data) when you delete your account. You will have to do it. Yourself first, of you have hundreds of posts or comments
The Nuke Reddit History Chrome extension is great for this.
Reddit has a change log of your comments. This does nothing to their underlying data
To add, not deleted stuff is what my favorite lawyers call “discoverable”. Not sure how many lawyers Meta has but I’m betting at least one of them is reminding them deleting stuff is a good thing.
mechanically wiping data
You mean thermite the drives while the employees are gone for a holiday/lunch?
If your friend is an EU citizen, they might have some luck with a GDPR request to delete all their data.
They also might not. Meta technically would have to comply, but there is no real way to know if they did.
Same response as the EU but for California.
That’s illegal in Europe.
It’s legal if they irreversibly anonymise it.
So the content you created will still be used to train AI with no consent from or payment to you.
And?
And what? The EU has a trackrecord of pretty hefty fines. They won’t risk it for this many users.
Think about it in terms of risk / reward or if you like, shareholder value.
If the value of the data exceeds the fine combined with the risk of it being discovered, the data will continue to exist.
Factor in the cost of actually guaranteeing that deleting something across all online, nearline, offline and archived data stores and the chances of anything being purposely deleted are not high.
Accidental data loss, sure, purposeful data loss, I can’t see it happening.
GDPR fines can reach up to $20 million dollars. That’s not a business expense. That’s quiet a dent in their quarterly balance sheet. And the EU has issued hefty fines in the past. This is not the USA we’re talking about.
Actually GDPR fines can reach 3% of revenue if i recall my compulsory training correctly. That’s a lot more than $20m for farcebook I would expect
It’s up to $20 million or 3%.
Again, you vastly underestimate the size of Meta.
In the last quarter of 2024 it shows a net income of $20,838 million. A $20 million fine would change that 3 into a 1 and again, that’s net income for just for three months.
How about a $1.2 Billion fine ? Would that perhaps be consequential ?
They got hit with that 2 years ago
https://dataprivacymanager.net/5-biggest-gdpr-fines-so-far-2020/
They need the data to train theur AI. They will not delete. They may glag that the account is now deleted and add this to the data fed to the AI.
They don’t need the data perpetually to train their AI. Just dump it once into the black box and be done with it - no need to save it for even a second. Of course, if they want to train and re-train, and perhaps build ad profiles, that’s a different matter.
Even for European users? That seems illegal.
It is illegal if you send a delete request.
The question is here, if ‘delete account’ is the same as asking Meta to delete all data in the regard of GDPR. My guess is, its not.
There’s also no way they will retrain their AI without your data, just because you told them to.
Are you from the EU? We have an entirely different UI than the US. We get additional options. When you request to delete your account and all the data it gets deleted. I’m confident of that. The EU has given very expensive fines for much less than that.
GDPR permits anonymizing data instead of deleting it, provided anonymization is irreversible. They’re keeping it one way or another. They don’t need to know who the data belongs to to feed it to an AI.
It’s going to be really difficult to anonymize personal posts. FB and Instagram posts often include personal information. Feeding it to AI isn’t going to help as someone might find a way to reproduce it with queries and they get in trouble.
I find it hard to believe any given post would have enough information to link it back to a specific person when viewed in isolation. Even “I’m Mary and going to visit my friend Sarah in New York City.” isn’t going to tell you who that belongs to if the profile and history itself is gone. It would have to be ridiculously detailed and all contained within a single post to actually reliably point to a specific person.
Containing personal information in general and even having an AI spit it out (which good luck, that’s not really how LLM work unless there’s something SUPER niche that essentially only you have spoken about) isn’t enough to say it isn’t anonymized. You also have to show it could specifically be linked to you by other people, in other words, that it can be de-anonymized.
“Your” content? I seem to remember that everything you post is their (meta’s) content.
Why would they delete their own content?
Where did you get that information from? Their ToS say nothing like that. Stop spreading fake news.
When you delete your account as a European they are legally required to delete everything associated with you or that you created.
Please don’t spread fake news without providing a source.
Bad source. This is not even the European ToS (it’s VERY different) and the information listed on it isn’t referenced like at all. It’s like asking ChatGPT for an answer.
It’s European law that your personal content gets deleted or completely deanonymized. The latter is in most cases obviously not possible with Facebook or Instagram posts.
It should be 30 days
And if you attempt to sign back in, or open anything that auto signs you in, it will cancel the 30 day countdown to delete and restore your account.
