Facebook Silently Removes Ability To Download Your Posts 229
dcollins writes "Facebook has a 'Download Info' capability that I've used regularly since 2010 to archive, backup, and search all the information that I've written and shared there (called 'wall posts'). But I've discovered that sometime in the last few months, Facebook silently removed this largest component from the Downloaded Info, locking up all of your posted information internally where it can no longer be exported or digitally searched. Will they reverse course if this is publicized and they're pressured on the matter?"
It does appear that the archive of your wall posts is now only available through the not-very-useful Activity Log.
Get a court order. (Score:5, Interesting)
If retrieving your posts is that important to you, get a court order, so Facebook must give you access to download them.
or if (Score:5, Interesting)
Down the memory hole (Score:5, Interesting)
On Sunday or Monday, I shared a "What is happening in Turkey" post, in English, from a Turkish friend's wall to my own. It was shared to "Friends except acquaintances" and got a few likes and comments. This morning I noticed it was gone from my wall. It is not to be found in my activity log, and the notifications of that it had been commented on were also gone.
I was starting to doubt I had posted it at all, when I remembered to check Google Reader (Yep, still running), as I ages ago had set up a RSS feed with my notifications there. There it was, "[Friend's name] likes your link", with a clickable link to facebook.com/my name/posts/ followed by a numerical value. However clicking on it gave this message: "This content is currently unavailable. The page you requested cannot be displayed right now. It may be temporarily unavailable, the link you clicked on may have expired, or you may not have permission to view this page". Other posts in my RSS feed works fine, so it was just this particular one.
If it wasn't for the RSS feed, I probably would have shrugged it off and thought no more of it, so I guess the RSS feature will be gone soon too.
Re:Reasons (Score:5, Interesting)
3) All your data are belong to ... Zuckerberg.
An excellent reason to NOT post personal information on ANY site, your data becomes another's property. Sites like Facebook collect an astounding amount of information from your activity, more than you likely suspect.
I know of multiple births which where announced on Facebook. Birth announcements only gave the full name and date of the birth but one could deduce a lot more from Facebook. One parent posts the announcement of full name and date. You got the proud parent's name who has a spouse relationship so you now have both parents' names. You look at the mother who has her mother shown and volia, mother's maiden name. Births are recorded in the county records, so you look for what counties are close to their home address. You can usually weed that down to one or two. Now we have Father's name, Mother's name, Mother's maiden name, date of birth and county of birth which is more than enough information to take over somebodies identity. Poor kids...Don't even know how much trouble their parents may have caused them, even before they get out of the hospital for the first time.
Seriously, if you find the need to download all your posts from Facebook and filter though them, you have a problem...
Re:Reasons (Score:5, Interesting)
It applies equally much if the stranger's handing out free candy from a windowless van in a city park, or handing out free web services online. And remember that to you Sergei, Zuckerberg, and MySpace Tom are strangers no matter how much they claim to be "friends" who "don't be evil".
Even Fox News tells you to not give facebook honest information [foxbusiness.com] (perhaps encouraging you to violate Facebook's terms of use).
Personally I encourage everyone who needs to use Facebook to do it with entirely fictitious data. It's more fun. Your actual friends will know what your aliases are; and you probably don't want your non-actual-friends spying on you anyway.
Re:Down the memory hole (Score:5, Interesting)
Or your friend took down his post. When someone deletes their post, I think it cascade deletes the sharing of that post.
Re:has that ever worked? (Score:5, Interesting)
Specifically to this issue? No, it's abundantly clear that most facebookers don't care. But when it comes to trivial things like "where did the 'like' button go why did you move it all the way to the line below oh my god this is horrible" then maybe.
Re:Malicious? (Score:5, Interesting)
If the way you're speaking here is any indication, is not surprising that you do not get it. Expressing ignorance of other people's views and subsequently declaring that your simplistic response is the end of the discussion indicates that you're not interested in understanding the views of others. Yet in the ever optimistic hope that I've misunderstood you, and that you ask because you wish to understand, allow me to offer a few thoughts.
Those in favor of information freedom and privacy rights understand the problem differently from the way you do. Your proposed solution indicates an atomized view of human action and choice-making. An individual chooses this or that option and is responsible for the consequences of those choices. That is all well and good, as far as it goes. But that an individual can act thus in a vacuum, freely choosing from a free market of options, is a myth--perhaps even the founding myth of Western liberal capitalist civilization. The problem those for information freedom and privacy rights (IFPR, hereafter) have in mind is not individual, but structural.
An individual's choices are constrained by the structures of his environment. This is true online, but it can sometimes be easier to see in the physical world. When and where I grew up, there tended to be numerous small towns, each having small shops, grocers, banks, etc. The available items for consumption were fewer, but whom one chose to purchase from was more diverse. Over the years I've seen people gravitate ever closer to the cities, while retail in the smaller towns has increasingly been dominated by big-box stores like Walmart. In some ways people now have more choices--e.g. one can get at a Walmart today what he once would have had to special order. In some ways there are fewer choices--e.g. one can only get anything at the Walmart and even if he moves to another town he'll still find little more than a dead Main Street and a bypass dominated by another Walmart. It's a mixed blessing and curse, but regardless the choices one can make in the new environment verses the old one are different not because of the decisions an individual can make (i.e. not because of 'personal responsibility') but because of larger changes in the environment.
The concern for IFPR is not that a few people might choose to surrender their privacy or that someone might lose track of every post he's ever made on a social network. The concern is that the web might cease to be an open platform, that it might be changed structurally to the benefit of a few corporations and for easier exploitation by governments. If this latter happens, the web could become the antithesis of individual choice--or personal responsibility--as available options are restricted to a few approved items. IFPR advocates wish to encourage corporations like Facebook to be allies of a free and open internet, but this is only possible if people can migrate from platform to platform, retaining their own data. Sure, that may make it easier for users to leave but if they provide a superior product then they needn't worry about that, do they?
And lest you think IFPR is only a concern for Facebook users (which, as an aside, I am not and never have been), you should know that they track non-users all over the net as well. If we really want individual choice, we must do what we can to resist the balkanization that threatens to undermine the freedom and diversity of the web.