In the middle of January 2018, I was in a theatre with my love, on my left side. We discussed anything, our journey, observing people and waiting before the drama begins. On the other side: another woman. Her husband was just on her right too. What did she do?
Liking e-ve-ry comments of her Facebook friends. Like: “I’ve read your comment, so I like it!”. She was like a robot, face down to her smartphone. She wasn’t sharing her day or anything with her husband and vice-versa. She was utterly disconnected from the real world during 20 minutes, before the show. The point is: we all have done this shitty behavior once. Like robots:
we like, react, comment on social networks. But it’s communication, right? Is it okay? Yes, it is. Next, I asked myself: “What does my Facebook history looks like now, with all this activity?” Comments, likes, posts, etc. What the value of it? Is my life too exposed? Is it useful to let your prints everywhere you walk, every time you enter a shop, every time
you dislike a movie, a restaurant, or a bar? The first fact is every content can be liked (or disliked) today, like this Medium post. It makes sense because it’s the only mean to share your instant feeling to the other ones on this virtual communication network: the Internet. Clapping a Medium post is like clapping at the theater or during a TED talk right? How about commenting a video that you will entirely forget the next two months? What the purpose of this? The
other fact is that your comment or your likes will be saved on servers. Most of the time, it’s public. So, ask yourself: In 2019, it will be 10 years. 10 years that I’ve started using Facebook. 10 years that Facebook will have my data. How about you? A
light percentage of our life: feelings fingerprinted into the Facebook servers, with many personal feelings, traits details, pictures, etc. Recently, after starting to declutter my digital life, I’ve been aware of 3 main things: That’s why I’ve decided to start this experiment and share it with you: delete old Facebook and social data over the past years. And I’ve learned a lot of things… Just talk a little about your Facebook dataWhat we care about is data, not technology.I give you two scenarios:
Perhaps your hard-disk drive will be stolen, or your Dropbox account will be hacked too. Ultimately, real feelings mainly stay at home, as they remain in your brain. It is the same with Facebook and others social network: we don’t care about the technology, we care about our life data. Today with the big data shared across the Web, it’s important to think about your data. Do you want your memories or feelings be in your brain or be public on the Internet? You have no time to consult them.If you have good friends, it’s not because you’ll dislike, or delete some of your old comments that you don’t like them anymore, or they don’t like you anymore. We don’t care because we forget the moment of laughing or commenting posts on the Internet. What we keep in mind is the feeling, the friendship ones. A feeling is difficult to save elsewhere than in your brain. Facebook or any social network is not friendship: it’s connections. True friendship happens in real life. Imagine if the “memories” feature of Facebook (that reminds you a two years old post for instance), does not exist. We will don’t care about of our old life anymore, as we do before Facebook. The only purpose is to re-engage you into the service. So, why keep this data? Not all memories have to be saved or re-shared. It’s not life.Memories are in your brain. There is no value to let your print on the Internet. Worst: it could disadvantage you in the future. Let me ask you a simple question: tell me what you’ve commented and liked the most on Facebook the year before? You maybe can’t. Now, tell me what you’ve enjoyed the most in your life, the year before? Much easier isn’t it? It’s because we remember values and accurate memory of life, feelings. You remember your life, your experiences, your family or friends moments. It’s your life. Facebook is not your life.It’s only a space of sharing, feeling, liking or disagreeing. Memories moments are important, not your Facebook activity. Your data influence yourself on other domains.That makes sense. But according to your profile, likes, following, and comments: you are a target. Social media filter bubbles and Facebook algorithms influence elections, products, and adds showed to you. Go to the ads page to be aware of it. This page is weirdly amazing. You gonna be aware on how Facebook use your data to show you ads and influence you. Hopefully, you can remove some interests.What I’ve decided to doThe targets: Facebook & Twitter.I’ve decided to delete the principals Twitter posts and mentions that doesn’t concern my job. I’m mainly using Twitter for my professional life. On Facebook, my purpose was to delete all types of past activity, over 2 years before. Perhaps I’m too obsessed with it, because nobody cares about your past data or because “nobody got time for that”. It’s true. Until someone else or third parties apps will badly use your data… The process: a looooong oneWhat a mess! It’s at this moment of data deletion process that you’ve been aware of your life exposition. Moreover, you’ve been aware of how Facebook or Twitter try to avoid and discourage you to delete your primary data. It’s comprehensive. Your life “activities” are their data, and their data are their business. Pages or ads recommendations are based on those data, with sophisticated algorithms and advanced analysis. So, how to proceed? For Twitter, it’s complicated. You have to go to your profile feed and do a large infinite scroll. You don’t have a timeline quick access. Next, on each tweet, do “more” action, “delete”, and “confirm”. For retweets and likes? Undo them. For Facebook? It’s worst! You have to go on your profile page, next “history activity”. You’re going to arrive on your Facebook history. Years are on the right, to quickly move into your timeline history, which is in the center. No, you don’t have a “clear all activity» button. The only one button like this is in your video history. Yes, every video you’ve been watching or starting is saved here. Now you start panicking. You know what? The clear button only deletes the items which are displayed. So, you have to infinite scroll to the beginning of your history to delete all of the items! Bug feature? Next, you go in the music section and you’ve seen every Spotify music you’ve listened every day. Wow. Delete app you’re not using anymore. It will delete all data related to it. “This may take a few minutes”.Some interesting things to know about Facebook data deletion features:
For all other main content like comments, like, status and profile messages, you have to delete them one by one.It’s currently at this time that you’ve said: “Oh f*** this shit, I don’t have time to do it. Anyway, we‘re screwed.” You’ll start to give up…Yes, you’re right. You don’t have time to delete every 20 or 30 activities of a past Facebook day. Persist. Have the courage to do it. It took me weeks to daily delete old activities before 2016. By regularly doing it, you’ll succeed. Last tip: use the Facebook app to avoids confirmation pop-ups, it’s a quicker mean to delete activity items with two taps only. … but never gonna give up! What I’ve learned?By doing all this process, I’ve been aware of weird, dangerous comments, proves, etc. Here a resume. Children are growing fast, and they don’t want to be on Facebook anymore.Children are growing fast, and their pics are still right here. Now they have the choice and the right to say to their parents: “Hey mom, why are you letting my childhood pictures on the Internet? I don’t want it!”. And your daughter is right. It’s her life, not yours. People are growing fast. They share their memories with their friends, but also publicly.By deleting my activities from 2009 to 2016, I’ve seen a lot, lot of things: broken love relationships, old pics with old friend’s, girlfriends or boyfriends, old political points, etc. You can’t imagine how people can sharing their life’s feeling in the instant and forgetting deleting their posts after five years… until you’ll see it. I don’t think that every people want to let this or this old comment, posts, or pictures. First, we just don’t think about it. Next, we don’t see the problem instantly. But, it could be a problem soon or later. The worst? A lot of old publications are still public. I’ve grown fast too.The 20 years old one I was is not the 29 years man I am. Opinions, likes, new friends, old friends, and relationships. All of this has to be in my brain. We all remember things we care. Why keep showing old comments and likes on Facebook of people we don’t care anymore? It’s just improving anxiety and bad feelings to re-seeing them. It was removed from your brain because you don’t want it. So delete it to from Facebook too. I already have a regular cleaning process on my Facebook feed. Approximately every 3 months, I’m deleting older posts and keep ones that give me remembering social network values. The rest is a group of one-shots and instant sharing. When you take a step back on post or comment, you said to yourself: “Why buddy? What the point of sharing this?!”. And you delete it. 9 years ago, Facebook was focused on people.That’s Mark Zuckerberg said too, Facebook has to re-invent itself:
I’ve seen a lot of sharing, love, and comments between people between 2009 and 2012. It’s less today. Now Facebook contains news, ads, and buzz posts. It’s just a micro Internet in the Internet. It’s not about people connections anymore. Facebook avoids you to delete your data.If you’ve read the process of my data deletion, you’ve noticed that there are bugs, the impossibility of removing tags, history events, hidden events, broken database, etc. There are bugs, features, and bugs features. Most of all, as every service, there still are server copies of our history and I don’t think our data are immediately deleted. Perhaps my process was useless, who knows? Anyway, the Facebook Engineering team still have work to do about caring of user data… People don’t share privately anymore, they are mentioning publicly.A few years ago on Facebook, when we watch or like something on the Internet, we posted the link on the friend’s wall or created a status post. Now, it’s entirely different. We mentioned people with @tags in a Facebook video’s post, discuss on the post itself, which is public. It’s very utopian because people care about their privacy but write feelings publicly. Bashing or discuss with their friends on public posts they’ve liked. Wow. We forget to take care of it. But yeah, we can keep some posts on Facebook.Pictures are the most difficult contents to delete. It’s more difficult on Facebook than on your Dropbox because you’ve shared it with your friends, who liked it and commented it, you’ve laughed about it, etc. Yes, you can keep it. But print-it in a paper album will be better, by sharing it with your friends later at home, or when you’ll be older. I’ve been aware that I have to share more moments with friends that I care.All these days on Facebook. Liking friends moments but not seeing them for real. Deleting my history, deleting old friends, (sometimes unintentionally deleting friends because of automatic delete mechanism with my fingers 😅): all of this process was like re-watch, clean et assume a part of my life. Something exploded inside me: I was not sharing enough with my friends in real life. We’ve become selfish, locked up and watchers. Not actors. Fuck it. We have to become human again. What’s next?Deleting and re-discover all my sharing and Facebook comments were right on one thing: nostalgia. It’s a good feeling. There is the good nostalgia and the bad one. We have to face the bad ones to delete them to not remembering it again after. We don’t care about bad things. We want positive ones! Using Facebook less and less. But Facebook has to change too.I’ve already started doing it. I describe it in my first part of “Become a human again” series: There is still work to do. The more effort to do is to the Facebook engineers side: Facebook has to be re-centered on people. A new feature may be a parameter of auto-deleting. Like with the “recently deleting” on your iPhone’s library or Snapchat (if it can truly be deleted). You’ll be able to decide what to keep or delete. Another cool feature may be an advanced deleting activity feature. Like “Delete all my activity of 2015”. By using algorithms and neural network, it will show you a mosaic of content to confirm their deletion. Old posts or pics which was very important to you, of your friends and your past. Next, you decide what to keep, what to print, or what to share again. That’s why I want to start a photo album.My father, since the beginning of public personal computer with printers, has resumed all our family life and pics albums from the date of meeting my mom. It’s an intense feeling to reopen them and see their life, your life, brother and sister growth, carefully in your hands. It’s unique. It’s private. You can have the same feeling on Facebook, but it’s really not the same. Nostalgia.By smiling, laughing, crying with your family or friends. With no screen, just moments printed, feelings and this real instant of life: sharing. This is the pure sense of life. Today we have gigabytes of videos and pictures. It’s like wanting to save our entire life in a big video compilation, as a computer. We are collecting our life on an external hard drive or Dropbox. But we less and less print them into photo albums. Life can’t be replayed. You will never replay the 400 pics of each trip you’ve done. Only good feelings, some pics, and video montages count. That’s why I wanted to start personal life albums, which resumes some great moments of my life. On paper or numerical? I don’t know yet, but it will be a great thing to achieve. Finally, what keeps us happy and healthy as we go through life?Finally, just watch and remember this: Robert Waldinger has unprecedented access to data on true happiness and satisfaction: 75-years-old study on adult development. In this talk, he shares three important lessons learned from the study as well as some practical, old-as-the-hills wisdom on how to build a fulfilling, long life. Thanks for reading 🍻. What do my friends see when I deactivate Facebook?When your account is deactivated: No one else can see your profile. Some information, like messages you sent to friends, may still be visible. Your friends may still see your name in their friends list.
Does deactivating Facebook remove all posts?Deactivating your Facebook account won't delete any of your data, but it will make your page inaccessible to other users. It might be a good option if you want to take a break from Facebook but don't want to go so far as deleting your account entirely.
What happens when you temporarily deactivate Facebook?If you temporarily disable your account:
Your profile, photos, comments and likes will be hidden. You can reactivate your account by logging back in.
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Do your comments disappear when you deactivate facebook
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