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24-Year-Old Asks Facebook For His Data, Gets 1,200 PDFs
chicksdaddy writes "Be careful of what you ask for. That's a lesson Max Schrems of Vienna, Austria learned the hard way when he sent a formal request to Facebook for a copy of every piece of personal information that the social network had collected on him, as required under European law. After a wait, the 24-year-old law student got what he was seeking: a CD with all his data stored on it — 1,222 files in all. The collection of PDFs was roughly the length of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, but told a more mundane story: a record of Schrems' years-long relationship with the world's largest social network, including reams of data he had deleted. Now Schrems is pushing Facebook to disclose even more of what it knows."
It should be illegal for these companies to keep user generated content once the user deletes it.
Sure, a flood of data looks mundane, but combing it with the right filters probably tells lots of interesting stuff, like the DNA of relationships and interests. I can only hope mine is utterly meaningless. I've tried very hard to ensure that eventuality.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
This article's summary is rather baited. I fail to see how see how this guy "learned the hard way". It's not like they rolled up with a truck and dumped reams of paper in the middle of his living room. He received a CD with files in an easily searchable format. I'm sure he knew going into it he wasn't going to read through it all in a night, and probably doesn't contain any surprises. If anything, Facebook "learned the hard way", now that they have to divulge the massive amount of data that they store, upon request, which means they must employ people to do this. Are the costs incurred outweighed by any profit produced by hoarding this particular information?
..and this is why I don't use my real name anywhere online that I can possibly get away with it, or use any personally-identifiable information about me on any social networking. Enjoy your false, worthless data, Facebook.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
"Facebook, it seems, doesn't think much of the Delete key and continued to hold copies of the data on its servers."
This really shouldn't come as a surprise for anyone here.
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
I've worked for a number of tech companies that dont actually delete anything, the simply mark the record "deleted" in the database. It's a pretty common practice that didn't really ever get talked about until it came to light that Facebook did it. Let's face it, once something is out there, it never ever really goes away, whether it be on Facebook or somewhere else,
...if it had talked about this story before to know that it did already:
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/11/16/0239232/facebook-holding-back-personal-data
And yes, it links TFAs that mention this story already.
If so many people are concerned with their privacy, yet still want a Social Network; why not create your own website. Using HTML5 or whatever other fad code of today, creating your own fully linked website with interactive media is almost as easy as creating a facebook profile. With the searching power of google finding all your friends is just as easy. Chatting, use irc. facebook as brought nothing new to the area of personal web presence, except it's almost idiot-proof, and, oh yeah. FREE! Now that the dust has settled on this fashionable form of web presence, it's not so amazing to those who don't want everyone in the world with a PC or smartphone to have a direct portal to their info. Kids are killing themselves over this info, crimes are being committed. People, it's time to take responsibility for your own actions and get a clue. If you don't know how the internet works, GET OFF-LINE! Anyone can do anything with a computer. Until there is some kind of world internet police, it's free game. This is what makes it so special. Stop whining and get informed. Don't tell others what to do with their companies, your not paying for anything. On the web, all you have to do and compete. Make something better. Then watch as the users tell you what to do.Best part is, you can ignore them too. You have the power to control your "on-line avatar", whatever, but you cant sit on your hands and let others do it. Get coding!
And if the "attention" he gets convinces some people to stop using facebook or not to start using it in the first place, then he has done something worthwhile.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Social networking sites and search engines are used for data collection and data mining. I've been telling people for years that their activity will be monitored, captured and tracked yet people sre still willing to tradeoff their privacy for convenience. Ignorance knows no bounds.
I'm more interested in seeing the CD contents of someone that has never intentionally used Facebook--someone like me.
Yeah, really. I'm yawning, and all the discussion I've seen in this thread so far are on the same single point - should Facebook keep data after you've pressed the Delete button?
Other than that...
Lot of hue and cry about, well, bugger all, really.
His point is perfectly valid. Wikipedia is, for example, all about version control. Somebody defaces a page? Revert.
There is a clear difference here. Wikipedia tells you that's the deal up front. You don't have to file a foia request to find out.
What format did he expect it in? Is he pissed off he had to download a PDF reader or something? I think it seems reasonable.
Also, who do you think gave Facebook this information in the first place? The same douchebag who wasted their time ordering the info. I hope they billed him for their time.
What steps or rather how difficult it was to get them to produce that information. I'd particularly be interested to know how they verified the person requesting the data was actually him.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
I agree, it should be your choice. However, I'm one who really, really likes the idea of keeping an edit history for posts if one so chooses.
And I can understand why Facebook doesn't actually delete the data, but just flags it as hidden/deleted -- it's a real bear to update and nullify all the object id references to a post in such a mammoth system. There are links all over the place from people whose "feed" pages may reference your post. There are forwards and reposts of your post which create a commented link to your post -- does your right to delete your post mean you have the right to delete the posts of people who've commented on it?
Given that some of the content links could be in archived databases instead of mainline storage or cache, updating them could be virtually impossible.
Canada is facing the same issue with it's Long Gun Registry being shut down by Harper's Conservative government -- the data is cross-linked throughout government and law enforcement system, with over a decade of archived databases referencing the LGR databases. Truly deleting the data requires restoring the archived external databases, updating their contents to remove the references, exporting the database for an updated backup, and archiving it for storage.
Now there's the cascade effect -- any references to the archive disks now have to be updated to reference the new archive database content instead of the original.
They're currently expecting it to take over FIVE YEARS to purge that one database, and it's pitifully small compared to Facebook or Google.
Never mind the potential legal issues of external and archive systems that are mandated to be write-only by government legislation, and which have to be retained for 7-10 years in many cases.
Realistically, a versioning system or flagging content as deleted instead of purging it is the only option available for large systems that maintain historical data of any significant size.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.