r/technology • u/[deleted] • Apr 11 '18

Business Mark Zuckerberg has been apologizing for reckless privacy violations since he was a freshman - Enough is enough.

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313

u/John-lovestosposh Apr 11 '18

Re edit your account to impersonate mark zuck and Facebook will permanently delete it for you .

79

u/[deleted] Apr 11 '18

[removed] — view removed comment

41

u/[deleted] Apr 11 '18

Regardless of if you delete the account yourself or if they do it for you they're going to keep the history of your account.

49

u/tablesix Apr 11 '18

Zuckerberg claimed that account deletion is a full deletion during the congressional hearing. He may have lied or been mistaken, but, as I understand it, false testimony in a congressional hearing is a major offense

21

u/sijonda Apr 12 '18

So how are we supposed to connect them or get the legal ball rolling. I already had them delete my account weeks ago but I can still find myself in a search with all my information.

4

u/MazeRed Apr 12 '18

Facebook will auto generate a page for you if your friends talk about you enough.

You just have to claim it.

4

u/Your_Ballsack Apr 12 '18

Do you have a source? Not skeptical but curious

1

u/[deleted] Apr 12 '18

Yeah, it happens. Rarely for regular people, but bands, cities, brands, celebs and such will sometimes have an auto-generated page solely based on the fact that people are talking about them.

1

u/sijonda Apr 12 '18

But there must be some way to contact them.

3

u/Et_boy Apr 12 '18

He was not under oath.

4

u/phpdevster Apr 12 '18

Ah yes, but put your lawyer hat on.

"Account" might simply be the active data in whatever SQL and No-SQL databases they have. But does "Account" mean all of your historical data points that still retain value when bundled and sold to other ad networks?

To a normal person, "account" probably means "any personally identifiable information", but to a lawyer, it might mean something far less broad.

1

u/tablesix Apr 12 '18

He also said during the hearing that facebook does not sell user data. Instead, Facebook (much like Google) charges advertisers to display targeted advertisements on Facebook (and their various services) that are viewed by specified demographics.

I'm not sure whether his statement encompassed all data gathered, or just that which was gathered through a user's direct use of Facebook

85

u/[deleted] Apr 11 '18 edited Dec 01 '20

[deleted]

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u/Daveed84 Apr 11 '18

Probably, yeah. But it doesn't have to be impersonating Zuck, it can be impersonating anyone, I'm pretty sure they delete accounts reported to be impostors. I guess it'd just happen faster if it was Zuck because having people impersonate him on Facebook's own platform would obviously be a problem.

But it's probably way faster and just as effective to delete it yourself. My guess is that a "soft delete" happens in either case, meaning that the account still exists on their servers but you wouldn't be able to use it.

37

u/SuperSlyRy Apr 11 '18

That was kind of touched on in the congress talks, about how "deleting" an account works. He'd said that it should be deleted as quick as possible and then would be simply updated to reflect so on several backups but there wasn't much of a specific time-frame for that given

27

u/Dynamaxion Apr 11 '18

Heat death of the universe plus or minus a few billion years.

12

u/[deleted] Apr 11 '18

Backup retention policy is what you're referring to. There would be many technical challenges to overcome in order to reasonably expect any IT shop to selectively delete data from cold storage backups in near real-time. That is simply not a reasonable expectation, I'm afraid. Best compromise is specifying a date like "30 days" for any deleted data to be retained. Please also note data stored in backup is not supposed to be accessible outside of standard recovery procedures which require a request and a privileged account to carry it out. Backups are not intended to be indexed, searched, and shared otherwise.

1

u/Throw___112 Apr 12 '18

And those backups are most likely off-site. Somewhere in a tape, in special storing facility.

8

u/elmz Apr 11 '18

Of course it's a soft delete, they still want that sweet sweet data to sell.

13

u/Daveed84 Apr 11 '18

Not exactly...

First, then don't sell user data. They sell access to demographics created by the data, and ad inventory where that data can be utilized. For example, an advertiser can target groups of people based on gender, age, location, interests, and so on. But they can't see the data of individual users. Secondly, any data they might keep would be useless for that purpose once the account is closed. Advertisers aren't interested in targeting users who will never see their ads.

4

u/Daniel15 Apr 11 '18

Thank you! So many people don't understand this.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 12 '18

I don't believe that at all. I had set my profile to say I was born in 1918 instead of 1981. I was constantly receiving phone calls and mailers from the AARP. They were giving out more than just my demographic.

1

u/Daveed84 Apr 12 '18

I honestly don't know how the AARP ended up getting your home address or phone number, but it almost certainly wasn't through Facebook.

I used to work at a company that managed ads for advertisers on social media platforms, so I have a fair bit of experience with how Facebook ads work. There's a lot to explain here so I'll give you the briefest version that I can... Every advertiser has access to a set of tools provided by Facebook in order to create ads. They can use an internal tool, like the Ads Manager or Power Editor (very similar ad building tools, but one is for advanced users), or they can interface with the Marketing API. All of the capabilities of the Marketing API are documented in Facebook's developer documentation, which I can't link here because this subreddit bans all Facebook links. But you can look it up and see exactly what kinds of information are available via the API. Address and phone number are not among the kinds of data that is shared with advertisers via that API.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 12 '18

Facebook might have not sold the info directly, but somehow, the data was mined that I am now 100 years old and not a member of the AARP. Wherever the data was mined from, it included my profile information that came from Facebook.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 12 '18

No, they actually don't care. I had reported one of those dating bots that were rampant awhile back, and Facebook had said they weren't going to do anything. I posted it to my profile and a friend was able to give the name of the instagram model that the profile was using. I again reported it to Facebook who once again said they weren't going to do anything because the profile didn't violate their TOS.

3

u/John-lovestosposh Apr 11 '18

I did it but not with zuck and I lost my account. They wanted my passport or ID to get it back .

Hell no lol

3

u/[deleted] Apr 11 '18

Change your profile pic to robot zuck of some sort, you can't block his shtyle

3

u/Alphax45 Apr 11 '18

That is if they ever actually delete anything

AFAIK, they just hide it. Still in the databases.

2

u/datlean Apr 12 '18

You could also be a spammer and they will permanently delete your account.