Where’d my Facebook Statuses Go?

by dez on May 10, 2010 · 3 comments

in Facebook Privacy, Social

Oh yeah… never mind. I deleted them.

Why?

I’m halting use of the service for anything personal (excluding events). I removed all the ‘likes’ to pages that I wasn’t an administrator of. I’m in the process of removing all my images from the site (and copying them back to my harddrive if I don’t have them any more).

One thing that I found interesting was that there was NOTHING remaining on the site like status updates, links, or wall posts BEFORE 2009. It seems like as of midnight 01/01/2009 Facebook started, however I joined the site in 2006 so I know it was there at some point.

I wonder if I still ‘own’ that data since they don’t delete anything (they just mark the deleted column in the database to 1 instead of 0).

I know it’s been talked about before, but pictures don’t really go anywhere once you ‘delete them’.

Take this confused looking one of me (It’s gone): I deleted this hours ago, but it will probably be there for quite a while. I’m going to be checking it daily (hopefully) to find out when it is actually ‘gone’.

  • http://the-waiting-line.blogspot.com Ren

    I deleted the majority of my photo albums and notes. Next up is links which is nearly a thousand. doh.

    • http://iamdez.com dez

      It took me about 3 hours yesterday to delete my 2010 and 2009 statuses wall posts. I initially left the posts regarding my engagement up, but that just seemed silly.

      One thing to make sure of is that you select (From your wall) “Options–> Name+Friends” so that you can get rid of everything.

      The easiest way for me was to make my profile completely public during the deletion process because Facebook tends to hide information from you as well if you have your privacy set like that.

  • http://myboyfriendisonlysortofannoying.tumblr.com Heidi

    I’ve been doing the same thing for awhile now! So much work, but I’m reduced to a photo album of my mom’s kitten and a quote from “Through the Looking Glass”. I realized that my life from 17 and on was almost entirely online, and that disturbed me. I’m done proving my existence digitally because I remember life without social networking!

    Now, what to do about twitter….

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