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That is why I do not think they delete much, especially when it comes to what personal information they sell to other companies.
The minute lenders start considering your FB friends credit scores, someone will start selling a service whereby you will gain a lot of FB friends with stellar credit scores.
You can’t really game your own credit history, but you can certainly game the average credit score of a group of people linked to you by some piece of software.
They’re required by law in many European countries to do so via stronger data privacy laws. They absolutely delete content provided by you, but as said, you don’t own your meta data.
Yeah and in the US they don’t have to do what they do in Europe. And if you think they do what they are legally required to do in Europe you should think again – just consider how much they pay to be represented against what they are required to do, whether in Europe or the US.
It’s one thing to be skeptical, but the law has teeth and it has been enforced. They are deleting that information inside the EU. And I truly believe they are deleting the info inside the US as they say they are - your photos and posts are really being deleted because they are of no use to Facebook. As said in the thread, the meta data is what is valuable to them, and you don’t own that.
Dragging your family over to the next big thing might be rather difficult.
Anyway: from their deletion page:
How do I permanently delete my account?
If you don’t think you’ll use Facebook again, you can request to have your account permanently deleted. Please keep in mind that you won’t be able to reactivate your account or retrieve anything you’ve added. Before you do this, you may want to download a copy of your info from Facebook. Then, if you’d like your account permanently deleted with no option for recovery, log into your account and let us know.
When you delete your account, people won’t be able to see it on Facebook. It may take up to 90 days to delete all of the things you’ve posted, like your photos, status updates or other data stored in backup systems. While we are deleting this information, it is inaccessible to other people using Facebook.
Some of the things you do on Facebook aren’t stored in your account. For example, a friend may still have messages from you even after you delete your account. That information remains after you delete your account.
There’s certainly a lot there about deleting the account: this says nothing as to whether they will delete the data, merely that it would take 90 days for them to do so. There is a difference.
Besides, they have kept data they had allegedly deleted for 30 months: Sydney Morning Herald 2010.
I actively shun people who use Facebook. And similar; not merely because they are the same kind of people who watch So You Think You Can Dance.
I read it differently. This quote says they actually delete the date from the online systems and their backups. How do you read it otherwise?
You can check out, but you can never leave.
Why would it take 90 days? Do they use a pencil eraser tied to the back of a gnat and drop it through the air vents on the Dell?
The wording there does not declare intention, but observes that it would take a certain time to do a certain thing. No court could fault them if they did not delete anything merely on that statement.
It’s the difference between saying this car model is guaranteed to get 75mpg, and that this car is capable of getting 75mpg.
However I doubt they would bother to keep everything on every member for years: it wouldn’t be worth their while.
I understand what you are saying, but disagree that a reasonable person or any court would agree with you. “While we are deleting your data…” The statement clearly says that they will permanently delete your posts, photos, and data. It’s different from deactivating your account which clearly states that they retain all your data and will restore it if you log back in. Deleting your account = deleting your data.
Again, I think it’s good to be skeptical but IMO you’re taking it too far in this case.
I imagine the FB backup scheme is extremely complex based on how their servers are distributed worldwide with redundant data sets and failover. I’ve worked on server setups that would take a full cycle of backups (a week in our case) to ensure that any particular piece of data was removed. And we were small potatoes compared to the data in FB.
It’s not like a particular user’s data is all in one place, all on one server, or all in one server farm.
Isn’t that what Ashley Madison also promised?
If they were to actually start doing this, I suspect that it would quickly become a useless metric as people would start gaming the system by friending and unfriending (yes, I know those aren’t actual words) people based on their known or perceived credit rating.
It would chill speech on FB. I’ve seen people announce that they’re out of work and asking if anyone knows who’s hiring. I imagine that some of them have gotten new jobs this way. They would no longer do this if they feared that it would make people (especially people with good ratings) drop them.
People might even start requesting a credit check before they agree to friend you.
Imagine the family disputes and hard feelings over being dropped from a relative’s FB friends.
I think that FB would quickly realize what a disaster it is.
That was my point (maybe not very well put). Facebook has you over a barrel if you object to something they do. You can’t leave if you want to stay connected to everyone. It’s like being unable to buy another car if you don’t want to drive a Ford any more. I don’t know if Facebook fits the legal definition of a monopoly, but the effect is the same.
I would not assume that Facebook doesn’t delete things when you tell them to. As a content host, they are subject to increasing liability for what is posted as they take greater control of it. Beyond that, the only evidence that they keep non-metadata is people like Vaevictis who seems to have decided a priori that Facebook = Evil.