Privacy

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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Asking for advice: Very old abandoned Facebook account - revive and delete, or leave to rot? (beehaw.org)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I would recommend resurrecting it.

Once you do so; Lock it down, make everything private that you can.

Secondly change all the privacy settings and opt out of any AI training.

Then slowly go back through your history and scrub out your posts; replacing them with gibberish and junk. Do not use AI text IMHO; use something like 'lorem ipsum' or some kind of 'Markov chain babbler'.

I would just suggest scrubbing back through your history slowly once a day; editing a few posts here or there. Look into what exactly the rate-limits might be; so that you can avoid triggering whatever automated suspensions that exist and edit one or two posts less than that a day.

Avoid using automation, as this too can be detected possibly...but do remember you can use other tools that run on your PC only to help streamline your editing.

In general, it's better if you can manually review and scrub over your old posts slowly. That way you can best decide how each posting and image will be scrambled. Maybe one post gets lorem ipsum in strategic places and the other gets 1000xTranslated into a barely plausible word salad.

Perhaps other times you feed the post into a markov babbler and let it babble on for a few minutes. Perhaps you leave a few otherwise innocuous posts alone so that the poison doesn't look so suspicious while you sanitize anything that you might consider sensitive.

Once a few months have passed and you've deleted all the sensitive information from the account that you can possibly edit or change; then you can proceed to deleting the account and waiting out that process.