A little about me
I'm an Australian internet veteran, self-declared. I have been involved in online communities since the halcyon bulletin board days when Julian Assange was a neighbour in the Dandenong Mountains of Victoria, Australia. Through the years I've held accounts on Compuserve, an internet predecessor, and have been online continually for 35 years in some way or another. Many communities have come and gone over the years, remember Geocities and more recently Myspace? They all came and went.
Online Privacy Is Important
I have always told my friends to remember the adage "If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold" and only post online what you are happy to have shared with the world, within your private circle or elsewhere, as once information is online it can and will escape and it is extremely hard, if not impossible to remove.
I've made many errors myself posting very personal thoughts and experiences only to regret it later and only a few times managing to remove it, sometimes lucky as the host disappears forever along with my information. Check out the Internet Archive (http://archive.org/web/) not much ever really goes away...
If you remember only to share what you would deem okay to shout out or display in public then okay you may not regret much in the future.
I hope to write numerous posts to help people that might have something they need to remove and help them do so, we'll see how we go with that.
All Hail Facebook
Now we have the almost ubiquitous Facebook which seems to be an unstoppable juggernaut, for the time being, though cracks are beginning to show. People see FB losing its shine due to many recent disclosures of personal data misuse, not to forget allowing a clown into the White House through misinformation and "fake news". Facebook has taken a public relations hit of late as Mark Zuckerberg struggles to retain that personal touch within his business. People are becoming rightfully disillusioned and turning away from Facebook in droves. I count myself as one of these with my daily Facebook usage a thing of the past and it seems many are doing the same with Facebook daily usage declining.
Can Anything Be Done If You Shared Too Much On Facebook?
Truthfully only a little can be done to clean up what is public but sadly there is not much you can do to truly erase your Facebook sharing or internet shares in general but you do have a couple of options to clean up the visible information.
I will detail two quite useful tools you have at your disposal.
Erasing selections from your Facebook history
Check out the very helpful Chrome extension Social Book Post Manager which will allow key word searches and then let you choose to delete related posts. Find those old back tattoo posts and delete them, find some old risque photos or anything you may remember that you want hidden from a friend's trawl through your history. This tool makes the process much easier than doing the scroll back yourself.
You can target posts easily using
- Year
- Month
- Contains text
- Does not contain text
And then you can choose to:
- Delete
- Hide/Unhide
- Unlike
A very powerful tool and the process can fun at that.
The information stored on Facebook for developers
The recent update on Facebook, in light of Cambridge Analyticas abuse of information access, was to allow you to block access from Platform API developers. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a fantastic post about turning off this access and why you might want to do so, check it out here: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/how-change-your-facebook-settings-opt-out-platform-api-sharing
I highly recommend doing this!
I hope some of the above was useful to somebody. I have posted it with the plan to share it amongst my friends and thought it might be worth sharing here on Steemit. If you think your friends might find it useful please resteem or give it an upvote. Take care online and before posting anything remember "What if this went public? Am I okay with that?"