Don’t Just Delete Facebook, Poison Your Data First

Don’t Just Delete Facebook, Poison Your Data First

6 years ago
Anonymous $gIi3-PxxKB

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qvxv4x/how-to-delete-facebook-data

In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, there’s a widespread movement for people to #DeleteFacebook. But even when you go through all the steps to wipe your account, the odds are high that Facebook still has deep caches of all your user data, which is can still use. Better than simply deleting your account is to replace all that data with nonsense, and if you’re savvy with code, you can do just that.

Kevin Matthew, a former systems administrator who owns a small web development company, shared a script he created that replaces existing Facebook posts with randomly-generated nonsense. With a little coding know-how, you could use this script to repeatedly mangle all your Facebook posts over a period of several months, to make the bulk of Facebook’s data on you virtually unusable (though it doesn’t do anything for the data that’s already been scraped by third-parties, like the kind Cambridge Analytica allegedly gained access to).

Don’t Just Delete Facebook, Poison Your Data First

Mar 28, 2018, 6:47pm UTC
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qvxv4x/how-to-delete-facebook-data >In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, there’s a widespread movement for people to #DeleteFacebook. But even when you go through all the steps to wipe your account, the odds are high that Facebook still has deep caches of all your user data, which is can still use. Better than simply deleting your account is to replace all that data with nonsense, and if you’re savvy with code, you can do just that. >Kevin Matthew, a former systems administrator who owns a small web development company, shared a script he created that replaces existing Facebook posts with randomly-generated nonsense. With a little coding know-how, you could use this script to repeatedly mangle all your Facebook posts over a period of several months, to make the bulk of Facebook’s data on you virtually unusable (though it doesn’t do anything for the data that’s already been scraped by third-parties, like the kind Cambridge Analytica allegedly gained access to).