I have a very old Facebook account i haven’t touched for no less than 10+ years. I had decided to just let it decay under the reasoning that old data is worse than useless to them, but now in light of Facebook announcing they’ll take it all to train for LLMs if you don’t opt out, i am unsure if to continue leaving that account to rot, or if to recover it, opt out, then doing the delete procedure. What would you say is the best choice?
Leave it to rot - if you have left, then don’t go back to that cesspool…
I don’t trust Meta to actually delete all copies of my data if I “delete” my accounts, but I will lose access to any privacy controls if I do it.
So, I have been deleting my posts, comments, photos, etc… stripping the account down to a mostly empty shell. Sometimes you can find browser scripts to help automate this.
I might add some junk data to the account later.
There’s no disadvantage to deleting your account…?
Last time I tried to login to Facebook they wanted a picture of me to verify. Said fuck that and left it to rot
edit: you never logged in in 10+ years? Unless you know there’s sensitive stuff in there, leave it. You probably won’t even be able to log in without going through major hoops.
I decided to actively delete my account a couple of years back. I did NOT want to scan my ID, as they demanded, but there were always other options. None of which appealed to me since they were clearly designed to get one last bit of valuable info for my shadow profile, but I went with the option to have 3 friends vouch for me.
After that I was told that it would take 30 days or so and trying to log in during that time would be interpreted as canceling my deletion. I never did.
I’ve deleted my account like 4 times and if I try it now, untouched for 2 years since the last ‘deletion’ I bet it’ll just log in.
So yeah if there’s nothing sensitive just ignore it.
I haven’t tried it myself but I’ve seen other people say that when they go back to an old Facebook account, Facebook will require a scan of their ID in order to log in. They can be a real removed about letting people log in to accounts that have been inactive for a long time.
I can confirm. But a couple years back, there were alternatives to that (none of which privacy-friendly) - if you can find the tiny, easy to overlook link “try something else”.
It doesn’t even have to be a long time. Just changing IPs in a way they find suspicious is enough.
Same for Google btw and probably all large US American platforms.
scary.
Hey thanks for asking I had the same question !!
A solution I would like is an automated way to poison my old data and edit all my old post, change image and edit all my comments with something non related and totally false.
After some digging, their api is very limited and doesn’t allow such thing very easily. My programming skills beeing very limited I gave it a try with AI (yeah I know this is kinda “hypocrite” but we have to fight their empire with their own weapons…) and found out about a very cool tool you can selfhost and give instruction to execute this kind of operation in an automated way with AI !
It’s called browser use and it’s the open source alternative to ChatGPT operator. I haven’t tried it yet so I can’t give you any feedback but If that’s something you have the horse power for you can give it a try to slowely poison and edit all your facebook data without hitting their limit or their alert !
