[socratesone]

Does anyone have a script or app that can go in and delete every post I've ever made? Google turns up a few Chrome plugins that all look dubious. Be great to have an authoritative guide to deleting everything without fully deactivating Facebook (since there is still a lot of utility in it w/r/t rolodex, event planning)

[StavrosK]

I saw the one in the post, but it's a Chrome extension. I think this will be very useful for me, so I'm going to write a very simple one (basically you just log in with FB/Twitter/whatever) and it deletes every post older than what you specify.

It's going to live at https://forgetme.stavros.io/, if you want to take a look later on to see how far I've gotten. Hopefully, deleting posts will be doable from the APIs, and the app will be feasible.

I expect I'll have a useful app up in a day or two.

[latexr]

From the website:

> an application that will delete all your old posts from social media every so often, to help your privacy.

I’m not sure this will help with privacy. If you keep posting, you keep giving Facebook data and helping them build their profile of you. There’s no guarantee deleting old data from your timeline will delete the data Facebook has on you. To help your privacy, you need to stop giving them data (i.e. stop posting).

[StavrosK]

That's true, but privacy is more than against Twitter/FB. You can also have privacy against a new boss, a new friend, etc. You aren't the person you were ten years ago, there's no reason your opinions should remain somewhere, immutable.

Unfortunately, this is looking very hard to do as a service, as most platforms don't let you delete posts at all (e.g. Facebook) or only give you access to a very limited amount of your own data (e.g. Twitter, where there's no way to access more than your 3200 latest Tweets).

Especially with Twitter, corporations literally have more access to your data than you, as accessing old Tweets is only done via an Enterprise API, and not via the standard API or even the website. You cannot access your own old Tweets unless you pay good money for the Enterprise API.

[socratesone]

Excellent - would love to test out when you are done

[StavrosK]

Bah, it looks like most platforms won't let you delete stuff through the API (of course). I'm going to look for some alternative method.

[steindavidb]

I did this by running a sikuliX script. Took about 5 minutes a day for a week to iron out all corner cases it got stuck on.

[hellofunk]

If you read the article, the actual tools to do what you say are linked from within it.