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Ask HN: Know a good tool to purge all posts/likes/photos from Facebook?

110 points by galaktor ↗ HN
Hi HN! I want to reduce my footprint on FB, i.e. delete all posts and photos, unlike all likes, etc. I'd like to keep the account active, so simply deactivating isn't the way to go (yet?)

I did some digging and there seems to be some Chrome extensions that - according to reviews - can give mixed results.

Most of what I could find - including past posts to HN - were 4 or 5 years old. So my question: is there a recent, go-to tool that you know of which can help me achieve the above? Or should I try my luck with the random years-old tutorials you can find online?

Thanks!

97 comments

[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] thread
pedro2
Facebook detects automated activity or scraping and tries to stop it. That being said, only this one seemed to partially work for me: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/timeline-cleaner-f...
gtk40
Thanks! I've tried similar tools without success, but this one is sort of successful. It has completely cleared things a few times, but I've had to keep re-running it since yesterday as they re-appear. This morning I was down to only things from 4 years ago or more showing up so I'm running it for a fourth time.
ecesena
To my knowledge fb doesn't allow apps to delete data. Or, better, an app can only delete data it created in the first place. This is the reason, I guess, there are no such "server-side" services.

I don't know the status of client side, sorry.

greyfox
Anyone know a tool to stop people from being able to tag you (in their posts)? this shit is getting out of hand..
shogun21
You can change your privacy settings so you have to approve everything before going on your wall/feed.
pasbesoin
That's what I've done. Just to be clear to the grand-parent, you are still tagged. It just doesn't appear under... I've lost track of the FB terminology: On your "wall", profile, whatever.

It will still show up in your "newsfeed" of other posts -- the thing you typically browse.

It's an example of a dark or semi-dark pattern from FB. You can't really stop it, nor others' actions with respect to it. You can only limit some of its propagation and perception.

You on FB? You get tagged.

sotojuan
> That's what I've done. Just to be clear to the grand-parent, you are still tagged.

That hasn't happened to me... I don't approve some photo tags my friends added and they're not on my profile at all.

The photo/post does appears in my newsfeed because well, my friend posted it. Unless I unfollow them it'll show up, right?

djloche
And worse, their auto-tagging algo is not good enough to differentiate between similar siblings. I am routinely tagged as me, in photos of my brother, on my brother's timeline.
sotojuan
This has been around for years. It's interesting how many people complain about Facebook allowing oversharing and tagging when at this point, they give you more options to handle and restrict your interactions than ever.
pc86
While I agree that the knee-jerk reaction is overblown and 90% of the time people can do exactly the thing they complain about not being able to do on FB, it's not as easy a process to find the page and manage the settings as it could be. Most of the non-tech people I've talked to about this don't even realize FB has an "account settings" screen.
Ntrails
I can stop people tagging me in such a way as it shows on my profile, but I can't stop my friends from "linking" my name as a comment on some inane clickbait with a "lol"

grrr

angry_octet
Nuke them from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
angry_octet
Aliens references aside, you can't actually 'purge' anything, deletes don't actually delete.

Apart from marking stuff as private you can increase the noise. Like lots of stuff you don't like, add photos of people you don't know. Randomly unlike stuff. Eventually you will have washed your profile.

SoreGums
Funnily tonight I've spent about 3hrs going through and marking everything "only me" which leaves everyone that was tagged or has commented on it with access. So it is completely doable through a chrome extension, would just take time to do. Plus now the site is all react based it should be fairly simple. My goal was to reduce my public footprint and each month I'll go through and close out the previous 2nd month of content.
doc_holliday
Not sure how possible it is, but i've used Javascript from the web console to do some interaction with Facebook, perhaps they have restricted this though?

But if that is allowed that could be one route, getting all the elements by Xpath that are posts.

Otherwise automation with Selenium or similar could work?

mgberlin
It's impossible. A few years ago I manually went through and "deleted" all content. It probably took me five or six hours all told. A year or so later someone was showing me something on their profile, and I noticed a picture that I thought was gone. Digging around, everything I marked for deletion had re-appeared publicly. I've since "deactivated" my account (there's no apparent way to actually delete it) and refuse to use the service, much to my family's chagrin.

tl;dr: Even if you delete things, they will eventually reappear.

logfromblammo
I log on around my birthday anniversary and 6 months before and after, to reassure people that I'm still alive and to conceal (nothing on Facebook is "deleted") the previous 6 months of activity.

You can't reduce your Facebook profile to zero, because a large part of it is composed from friend activity, and some of your friends will be on Facebook without privacy concerns as severe as yours. And you can't control the things that other people do.

merpnderp
I ran a greasemonkey script that tried to delete everything. What ended up happening was everything was switched to hidden from timeline. I don't know if something was wrong with the script (looked good to me) or if facebook just doesn't want to delete anything.

But I was truly bummed to see that it is impossible to delete anything.

WmyEE0UsWAwC2i
What I did was to feed them noise. I clicked the like buttom on popular things, followed popular people. It is kind of a chore, and it can prompt their anti-bot measures (like asking me if I'm interested in pig (the animal?)).

This, of course, has its drawbacks.

aw3c2
That might be a great opportunity for a lawyer (maybe in Europe).
juskrey
Selenium driver and manual clicking through history.
beachstartup
delete it. that uncomfortable feeling in your gut is telling you something important.
raverbashing
Another idea would be to flood your page with a lot of stuff: like everything that FB suggests (unless it's controversial or possibly illegal), create posts with random content (you can make it visible to "Just Me", reshare everything that pops in your timeline, etc
VLM
That's just going to insult people given that about 10% of FB users do that while thinking its the correct way, and mistakenly believing that behavior is "socializing". I don't want the fallout from Bill and his friends thinking I'm parodying or imitating Bill, ditto jackie and angela and richard and becky and denise and
bsbechtel
This is tangentially related to this, but apparently their mobile app now automatically downloads all the photos on your phone if you give permissions to access photos? My wife and I recently had a child, and when I opened up the app to post one single photo of our child, Facebook was showing in my newsfeed a video they made with all of my photos I had taken. This seems like a gross violation of my privacy. Is there any way to prevent this aside from deleting the app and no longer sharing photos with family and friends via FB?
Tharkun
You're using FB. Talking about a 'gross violation of privacy' is almost laughable.
danfromberlin
If you care at all about maintaining control over this kind of data, consider abstaining from facebook and running your own service e.g. owncloud or nextcloud.
philh
On android, there are unofficial apps which act as shells on the mobile web interface (the ones I have are "Tinfoil for Facebook" and "Swype"). IIRC these are capable of uploading photos, but they won't upload any that you don't explicitly choose to upload.
nickcw
Delete the app and just use the mobile website.

That is what I did, and it works pretty well in general.

It also has the advantage (for me) that you don't get any notifications.

bsbechtel
That's probably what I'm going to have to do. Thanks for mentioning this!
hollander
Plus this works without uploading your contacts to FB.
roninb
You're not redirected to use the Messenger app when trying to check messages on mobile. For a bit, while on the B side, I could request a desktop site on Chrome for Android and then still use the m.facebook.com subdomain. Now that I'm on the A side, I can't use that workaround.

I've been told other m.facebook.com wrappers like Tinfoil were affected by this as well.

srathi
Use mbasic.facebook.com. Works like a charm! (so far)
hollander
That's even an option on the laptop!
Spivak
FaceSlim currently works great as a Tinfoil replacement until they work around redirect.
mattzito
So - what you saw was automatically generated on your phone, and not uploaded to facebook. It's just displayed on your phone in the newsfeed view, and you can opt-in to having it posted.

This happened to a friend of mine who is an ex-FBer, and he posted on FB about it, and a number of people from the FB team who worked on the mobile app piece of it confirmed that indeed no data had left his phone without him requesting that it be posted, but that they were going to make that behavior more clear in an upcoming release.

colinbartlett
That's crazy, does that rendering happen in the background while the phone is in your pocket?
cbhl
It's all just slides and pans -- stuff that can be previewed in real-time locally on your phone. Stuff that would run on a computer with 1/10th the compute/graphics/memory in 1998.
bsbechtel
Yeah, it's happened in the past where they show you little thumbnails of your photos album to encourage you to share/post, but the fact that they created a video (during an eventful, emotional, and exciting but very private time) was a bit much. Your comment is a little reassuring, but the fact that FB doesn't have the greatest track record, and this is hearsay on HN, I'm still concerned/annoyed.
_RPM
Should you be using the mobile application if _you_ care about privacy?
brightball
I use the mobile web now instead of the phone app now. I realize it's probably paranoia but there have been far too many times when I've talked about something and a related ad magically appears in my news feed.

Hasn't been a problem since I deleted the app.

enobrev
Doing so has also saved me a considerable amount of battery. I delete the app before any travel to ensure battery drain isn't as much of an issue.
linkregister
I'm not sure if the option is there on iOS, but on Android N, you can revoke the Microphone permission. I use the web app on Chrome but relented on installing the Messenger application ever since they crammed using that on mobile users. Yes, I admit defeat.
spriggan3
You're using Facebook and linked Facebook to your phone. You shouldn't do that unless you want all your private data to go to Facebook servers.
bungie4
My plan is to corrupt my data. I'll warn my friends that if they see stupid stuff going on with my profile, it's just me.

If they won't delete it, might as well make it useless.

JTon
I'm curious about this. How do you plan to corrupt your _existing_ data? (i.e. stuff you've done/uploaded in the past)
bungie4
FB does allow you to edit >:)
kpcyrd
I doubt this is actually overwriting anything, it just adds more data to facebook's database.
bungie4
That's fine. It just means I've become a bi-coastal, transgendered, red headed, left handed bag pipe player with a speech impediment.

Regardless, the data is corrupt at that point, and that, is the point.

paraxisi
I feel like this is a very naive way to look at this. As kpcyrd said, you're simply adding to their data, not 'corrupting' anything you've previously shared. If anything, you're sending up a big red flag from suddenly changing your gender, location, etc all at once.
javajosh
It may not hide anything from FB, but it will hide from anyone using FB to observe you, which seems like what the OP wants.
libeclipse
As far as I can tell, the only surefire way is to delete your Facebook account permanently.
fred_is_fred
I had good luck with a greasemonkey script but it was 5 years ago and it no longer works. I did have to run it several times. Maybe see if there's an updated one.
pwenzel
There is the "Limit Past Posts" feature under the privacy settings. It doesn't delete your stuff, but it does make it less visible. Not ideal, just a start.

Go to "see more privacy settings"... then look for 'Limit the audience for posts you've shared with friends of friends or Public?'. It will present a "Limit Old Posts" button.

awinter-py
the court system
javajosh
It's not clear that FB is required to delete your content if you ask them to, especially if it says in your terms that you explicitly give up this right (and I haven't actually read it, but I'd not be surprised if this was the case). I suspect you could claim someone stole your account and posted things that libeled you, and FB would be a party to the harm. But that's not quite the situation for the OP.
erdevs
Reading all the comments on how little control users have over their data on fb. Isn't this kind of messed up? How is FB still able to get away with this? Especially when Apple and Google are pushing for more privacy and user control over data, I'd think FB would get called out more.
hnrodey
There is an app Xpire that should do what you're looking for. I have it for iOS.
[dead] hnrodey
There is an app Xpire that should do what you're looking for. I have it for iOS.
syphilis2
I've found that there are old messages of mine that Facebook will not let me delete. I took the manual approach of scrolling through my history and deleting every post I no longer wanted, and I found that some of my early posts produce an error when I try to delete them. I believe it has something to do with them being on a friend's wall, but I really am not sure. It's frustrating to not be able to remove my own content.
roninb
It's definitely on purpose. They've done the same with "Likes". I've been trying to unlike all the dumb pages I liked when in high school ("When you flip your pillow to get to the cold side ;]", "Brock Obama", "texting late at night", "peeling plastic off of new electronics", etc...) and once I got my 2k likes down to about 300ish, they stopped showing me my likes when I look at my profile. It literally says "326 likes" on the tab itself but it's just not populated with anything. Every once in a while, a defunct page will post again and I'll have the opportunity to unlike "Tiger Blood", but the infrequency kills me.

Just wish I could firewall <22 year old roninb from >22 year old roninb.

syphilis2
I remember the "likes" counts always being incorrect. Specifically for categories of things such as how many movies, bands, TV series, etc I had liked. Back around 2010 I cleaned up my list of liked movies and experienced the same thing: the count displayed was not synchronized with the number of movies appearing on my page.

I wonder if this isn't something akin to the YouTube "subscribers" bug. Users could repeatedly subscribe then unsubscribe to a channel. Only the unsubscribe actions were counted, and the channel's subscription count could be driven down to 0. That bug was around for over a year before being addressed.

spike021
Wouldn't surprise me if there are bugs.

There are some weird issues with facebook.

palerdot
A related personal experience. I deleted my facebook account few years ago. Much Later (actually around 2 years later), when I wanted to check something related to facebook sdk, I created a fake account but gave my original mobile number.

Surprise! Surprise! Facebook was recommending all the people from my deleted account magically to my newly created account which has nothing in common with my old account except for the mobile number.

For all those sharing content in FB, worrying about your privacy is pointless and a total waste of time.

My personal opinion is that, Google somehow values people privacy more than Facebook, that why its social networking attempts are failing. On the other hand, Facebook is just ruthless when it comes to handling people's data and that is why it is having much success as a social networking platform.

matthewmacleod
Surprise! Surprise! Facebook was recommending all the people from my deleted account magically to my newly created account which has nothing in common with my old account except for the mobile number.

Do bear in mind that many of those people likely have your phone number, and will have integrated Facebook with their smartphone's contacts list; they could easily find loads of people just from that.

I'm not saying that they have deleted your old account, but it is possible that there are other explanations.

palerdot
It is possible. So, if we want to completely get out of FB, we need to ditch our other online persona like email, phone number? In any case, recommending the people from old account does not make sense. What if that mobile number was now owned by different person?
evgen
In any case, recommending the people from old account does not make sense. What if that mobile number was now owned by different person?

Yes, it makes sense. FB wants you to connect to your network of friends and they already have a graph with a you-sized hole in it from all of the data your friends have provided. When your phone number shows up again it is far more likely that you have changed your mind and want to re-join than to assume that someone else has received the number of someone who deleted their account, so they optimize for that expected outcome. If it was a new person with your number then that person would simply ignore all of the friend suggestions.

palerdot
In that case, tracking a re-joining user with email makes more sense than mobile phone, since emails cannot be transferred. As far as my thinking goes, as soon as I delete my account, Facebook's ability to track me with that mobile number should go. There is no point in digging my phone number from the networked people's data and try to connect with me again. For me, it reconfirms my point that to quit facebook, we need to sacrifice all online persona related to it.
randomgyatwork
Its bazar to me that the ruthless company usually wins, why does this happen so consistently?
unclenoriega
In my opinion, the most likely answer is that the ruthless company will be more profitable, and most customers either don't care or don't understand (don't care to understand?) the implications of the ruthless policies.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
kaoD
> that why its social networking attempts are failing

IMHO the real names policy killed their projects even before release. I would've loved to use Google+ as a less invasive alternative to FB but the policy killed the deal for me (and generally everyone around me, both tech-savvy and not... who wants another Facebook?)

AFAICT they relaxed on the policy but it was way too late.

nilved
Facebook exists with that policy, though.
T2_t2
Which is why you can't beat it. You need to offer something in better to win, you can't just offer the same service.
reitanqild
Just add that last time I checked adding multiple personas (in the form of pages) to your single account was even streamlined it seemed to me.
webwanderings
Just deactivate first and forget about it. Your life does not cease to exist because you are not on Facebook anymore. If there are people out there who genuinely care for you, they'll know how to get a hold of you. You can then share your life with them, if you care for them. The world has existed like this for thousands of years.
Kinnard
People would pay for this!