When you will try to actualy delete your fb account (at least when i did it some time ago). Its a minefield of dark patterns. First you need special link, because you can only deactivate from settings. Then you will have to go through pile of emotionaly draining photos of friends with claims that they will mis you and you wont be able to see what they are doing with their lives. Then few traps with agreeing about deletion with switched meanings of buttons. In the end you wont actualy be deleted. You will be put to deactivate mode for 14 days, if your browser accidentaly auto logins then you have to do it again. After 14 days you are sent email and if you miss it and wont acept it in certain time - you wont be deleted. Of course since 1. 1. 2014 it realy doesnt matter because facebook keeps your data even if you delete account. (i deleted it just before 1. 1. 2014 and i still think they kept all the shit, because how would anyone know).
I've heard that rather than deleting your FB account, it's better to turn it into a piece of obviously-fictitious performance art. Don't try to remove your data from the Internet (which is futile; you know Facebook still has it on some archive somewhere anyway). Instead, replace it with nonsense. Set your interests to your competitors so that you get notifications everytime they release a new feature, and full information about their advertising campaigns. De-friend your actual friends, and friend random celebrities. Make your political views insane. Post status updates generated by Markov-chain or recursive neural net; if you're feeling particularly bold, you could try to reverse-engineer the weights on Facebook's classifiers by generating data and seeing what sort of ads you get.
Chances are, doing this will get you kicked off Facebook and deleted pretty quickly. And if it doesn't, you've just fucked with not just Facebook, but all their advertisers. GIGO.
Here is an idea. Get a bunch of cute pictures of cats or babies from the internet. Add text with anti-FB messages and a link to these HN threads. Then write a script to upload the photos to your account, preferably on an endless loop.
If FB does not block/delete your account, it will be non-stop hilarity for your friends, who will probably share the pics too and maybe some of them will actually pause and think. If they do delete your account, you are now mostly free from their clutches without unnecessarily defacing your own profile.
Someone please write this script and put it on GitHub. :-)
> which is futile; you know Facebook still has it on some archive somewhere anyway
If Facebook does this with the data of an EU resident, they are breaking the law. The Irish Data Protection Commissioner has audited Facebook and found that their deletion of user data was in compliance.
Sounds like you could achieve this easily by feeding your facebook account's updates from a markov chain bot set to train on the @realDonaldTrump twitter feed.
I was expanding on how to achieve "Make your political views insane. Post status updates generated by Markov-chain or recursive neural net". Did you mean to reply to the grandparent rather than me?
I've thought about posting some really over-the-top shock/porn imagery to my Facebook wall, basically making it look like it was hacked. Maybe then they'll cancel my account, like I've asked them to do several times.
Random evil thought: could you sell your Facebook account to hackers? You've built up a multi-year reputation as a "known good" account; that'd be incredibly valuable to someone trying to generate cross-correlations between your interests and their product. After all, the whole reason Facebook is worth $300B is because they have all this data on their users; since it's your data to begin with, shouldn't you be able monetize it just the way Facebook does?
It could sour your relationships with actual friends. But if you're ok with them being deceptively advertised to, maybe they weren't such close friends to begin with...
More likely the hacker would rather use it to steal your identity and f. you over very, very hard. Much more lucrative than spoofing with a "known-good" account, right? So you'd really, really better trust those hackers you're selling to.
I would lean more towards setting up a script that will post whatever the 400th most popular story on Google News, thus destroying your demographic membership. Turn yourself into noise.
Sorry, I'm new to Markov Chains, but recently I've been thinking about a way to "beat" ML algorithms of GOOG, FB, etc. So that the information stored about me is NOT true. For example, if someone keeps searching for "LGBT" while he/she is not one, GOOG will assume he IS one, or at least, interested in the topic.
My question is, is there a general method for beating ML/AI algorithms and stay hidden from them?
Thank you.
If you watch the following video from Google (for about 5 minutes from the marked location), it looks like these algorithms have a pretty big blind spot: the unknown.
So you can use Google itself to find words which are obviously not well known (just construct a dictionary filled with random characters and see how many results come back for each word). Take a passage of clean text, and randomly replace the nouns in the text with these garbage words (capitalize the first character), and post it to your social network. The surrounding text will provide legitimacy, but the garbage words will probably throw off the algorithms. Do it often enough, and someone at Google will probably investigate the issue :-)
Or maybe go and get public domain text which has a lot of words which are not in use today and fill up your FB/Google/Twitter feeds with such data. My view is that such data will very likely throw off the existing algorithms, and if people do it at sufficient scale, we may discover that ML algorithms are only as smart as the training data set.
Markov chains aren't really relevant here - they're a way to generate random but "seemingly plausible" data - but yes, there is a way to fool the type of convolutional neural networks used in image recognition. Paper here:
I recently deleted an old account, and it was significantly easier than before: I just clicked a link on one of the help pages, entered my password, and that was it. And this was for deleting, not deactivating, my account.
It used to be more difficult: I remember following the process you're describing for some other account I had. It might still be that difficult in some cases, I don't know.
They still won't delete your information from their servers, and they'll keep a shadow profile of you as long as you keep sending requests through the like buttons..
Depends on the jurisdiction. In the EU (maybe only Germany?) you can legally request all information Facebook has on you, as well as request that all information is removed (as long as it's no longer needed for billing purposes, etc.).
Please be careful about rationalisation of things. Its easy to build up argument for why you need to have Facebook. We all know how dark the waters of Facebook are (with all the tech knowledge, monetising schemes and smelly dark patterns). Yet very few actualy at least try to do something about it. Its part addiction, part fear and well i dont know what. I think that least everyone here should do is to think about the problem hard and try to be honest with yourself. I bet you believe in net neutrality and open-source. Well Facebook is in direct opposition of that. It realy is, we all know it. Even though they make open-source software they would love to see world where Facebook is the net (look at India and Facebook net).
Who else should stop using the Facebook than the people who actualy understands how it works.
I am saying this becuase over a year ago i deleted FB. It was more for the fact that i started to measure how i use FB and i realized i was giving it quite bit of my focus. It wasnt taking much of my time but it was constant distraction. So i stopped. After 14 days i never felt urge or need to use facebook again. Seriously it was like some spell. And outcome? All the worries about not being able to reach foreing friends or see what are my friends up to. Well the interesting people luckily found another way to contact me and since then all the important stuff was much more focused. Other people started to talk with me, they had a reason to talk with me in a pub because they got something new i didnt know about. And leaving fb became theme for conversations because people wondered why i did it.
And its not only me, there are 4 people i know around me who came to the same conclusion. None of us came back.
Btw when you will try to actualy delete your fb account, its a minefield of dark patterns. First you need special link, because you can only deactivate from settings. Then you will have to go through pile of emotionaly draining photos of friends with claims that they will mis you and you wont be able to see what they are doing with their lives. Then few traps with agreeing about deletion with switched meanings of buttons. In the end you wont actualy be deleted. You will be put to deactivate mode for 14 days, if your browser accidentaly auto logins then you have to do it again. After 14 days you are sent email and if you miss it and wont acept it in certain time - you wont be deleted. Of course since 1. 1. 2014 it realy doesnt matter because facebook keeps your data even if you delete account. (i deleted it just before 1. 1. 2014 and i still think they kept all the shit, because how would anyone know).
Yeah, hey, thanks, that's all great advice except I never had a Facebook account in the first place. I mean, I'm sure whoever you imagine yourself to be talking to would find all that super useful, though.
I dont know about Wings3D that is probably casual tool. But ZBrush? Are you sure? ZBrush is notorious for its crazy learning curve. I mean sure you can do something with it instantly but to make something meaningful is hard.
Besides you should compare it to game engines like unity or ue4, its very differend thing than 3D modeler.
Wings3D is not a casual tool. It is a fully featured 3d modeling application that does that very well. It works on the box modelling principle. ZBrush is really easy to get into and make something instantly like you say, but yes it's really difficult to learn. I started with Wings3D and still use it.
