Re: [libreplanet-discuss] helping friends kill their facebook accounts

[Daniel Pocock]

On 28/04/16 09:47, Fabio Pesari wrote:
> On 04/28/2016 09:30 AM, Daniel Pocock wrote:
>> Is it better for people to go through their profile more vigorously
>> though, messing up all the data?  For example, changing their date of
>> birth to something random (if they actually used their real DoB to begin
>> with), deleting the groups used to classify friends, deleting photos,
>> deleting things like their relationship status, maybe even deleting all
>> their posts and comments one by one?
> 
> That's useless: any decent algorithm can guess what's the right birth
> date by looking at past "happy birthday" messages, personal chats or
> classmates even without AI.
> 

That applies to day and month, but not year

Some people have their date of birth completely private too, so they may
not have a lot of happy birthday messages, if any.

Also, while an algorithm may be able to sniff that out, a casual
intruder who finds a way to get a megaleak of facebook's user list won't
necessarily have all that other data to play with.

> Also I'm not sure it's possible to delete stuff from their servers
> permanently.
> 

It wouldn't surprise me if they keep everything archived, but even so,
"deleting" things may reduce the possibility they are exposed by gaps in
the front-end security and privacy mechanisms.

For example, there have been various hacks that allowed people to see
photos that were "private".  If the same photos were completely
"deleted", facebook may still have them archived but they may not be
accessible with that hack.

> The best thing to do is to close ("deactivate", really) the account and
> forget about it.
>