Of course, you can't delete their site without going to prison. This is about deleting an account.
You probably saw the S/N article Adobe and Meta Drive the Visual Digital Arts in Deeper Enshit[ment] where it was shown that Meta is changing its policy next week, allowing itself to legally steal your copyrighted content to train its AI (for those under a rock, "Artificial Intelligence").
You probably also know that I'm a writer since about 1997. I am also a former visual art and design student with dozens of images, if not hundreds. As I have posted stories here at S/N, and slashdot (years ago, I left when S/N was started), I also posted at Facebook for about five years or so; my daughter convinced me that I could popularize my books there.
In my last book, Voyage to Madness about a trip to Proxima Centauri via Einstein's time warp (real science, no fantasy), there are no human visual artists, poets, or writers. It's all produced by computers. I do not want to be a contributor to that future! So when I first got word of this latest evil from Meta, I posted there that I was deleting my account and where to look for my writing. I set last night as the date, and then forgot until this morning after my coffee.
Even sober and full of coffee, It was extremely difficult and frustrating. Meta made getting out of their data prison extremely difficult. Harder than Wolfenstein and unlike it, no fun at all.
First, I suspect that there's a robots.txt file in the directory that holds the file that actually explains, very poorly, how to delete an account, because I of course googled to see how to do it. It was a facebook.com file, but very outdated. There is no possible way I found using it to actually delete.
Even after logging into Farsebook and looking for a help file there, it was obvious that they don't want anyone to leave. I wish I would have written this as I was deleting the account, I could have given step by step instructions; even following their flawed program (i.e., list of steps, for you non-programmers) they leave out much needed information and force you to guess.
It took over an hour. But I encourage all of you with Meta accounts to fight this evil. Maybe we CAN delete facebook! If you see me there with the same photo that was posted, please let me know so I can sue them. I don't need the money, I just want to destroy Meta. If it happens, unlikely as that is, I'll donate the winnings to S/N.
I may open another account just to poison their stupid "intelligent" computer.
Related Stories
Adobe
June 8 - Adobe users are furious about the company's terms of service change to help it train AI
Adobe is facing backlash over recent updates to its Terms of Service for the company's generative AI products.
The revised terms, affecting over 20 million global users of Adobe's Creative Cloud Suite, include language that some users interpret as allowing Adobe to access, view or listen to their content, including sensitive content such as information protected by non-disclosure agreements.
Updates to the Terms of Service have also sparked concern among creative users, with some alleging that Adobe is surveilling their work and potentially using it to train AI models.
Section 2.2 states that Adobe may use techniques such as machine learning to analyze user content to improve its services and software.
Instagram/Meta
In short: Meta is about to start using social activity on Facebook and Instagram accounts to train its AI tools, and in Australia, users won't be able to opt out.
Data from as far back as 2007 will be used, including posts, photos and messages to Meta's AI chatbot.
What's next? The policy comes into effect on June 26.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Saturday June 22 2024, @03:36AM (2 children)
One of my Facebook friends died in 2016. The last activity on his page was 5 years ago, and yet his page is still present. About the only official FB acknowledgment I can see that he's gone is that for his location, it says "lived", not "lives". Will it all still be present a century from now? What is Facebook doing, keeping all this stuff for future historians and archaeologists? They're being sensitive to his still living friends? Naahh. Probably it's more that it's still of value for LLM training, and boosting their number of users and therefore their stock value.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Saturday June 22 2024, @03:41PM (1 child)
Sorry about your buddy. However the answer to your Q is "Pushing online ads to the grieving relatives, of course." Which is scummy but that's FB.
I was tenuously involved in my recent high school reunion and I noticed something interesting about "normies" and social media accounts. Computer scientist DBA type people like the idea of all our social media accounts and all our data being in the advanced forms of Codd Normal form. So, I/we have precisely one FB acct and precisely one Google Wave and precisely one Google Plus and precisely one Live Journal and precisely one MySpace and precisely one /. account going back in time etc. But normies are like "who the f cares", and as such, my first high school girlfriend has about five FB accts and you can see by the pix when she forgot her passwords or got a new phone or otherwise somehow got locked our of her account LOL. Believe it or not she's logged into one acct on her phone and one acct on her desktop so if you want to set messages about the HS reunion you have to select which acct depending on where you think she might be sitting at this moment. She's a reasonably successful operating room nurse not a database analyst so she just doesn't care about data quality and account management and stuff like we would care about. The point of this anecdote is careful account management improves the quality of their data about you and therefore individuals performing careful account management is making FB money. So, unless you like the idea of donating charitable contributions to FB, don't bother putting effort into careful acct management. F facebook, everyone should have like seven accounts they use randomly, all our dead relatives and friends should also have multiple accounts, etc.
The next "internet bubble" to pop will be related to Dead Internet theory where "everyone already knows" almost all the stats for online advertising are fake and fraudulent but the bubble hasn't popped yet. Soon enough. I can't imagine as a small business owner being stupid enough to spend money on social media advertising, knowing what I know about how all the stats come from bots, all the views are bots, the main purpose of AI/LLMs is to avoid advertising anyway, any human with an IQ over 90 has adblockers, etc.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 23 2024, @05:05AM
> don't bother putting effort into careful acct management. F facebook, everyone should have like seven accounts they use randomly,
Nice idea, but my guess is that even though your old flame has multiple FB accounts, and can't even access them all anymore...the clever folks at FB have code that already figured out that those accounts are all owned by the same person, and, they have logically connected them.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 22 2024, @04:14AM (1 child)
Sorry to hear your tale and hope you were actually successful in deleting your info.
I'd advise against taking any sort of legal action unless you can join some large group that can pool resources (for example, one of the Writers Guild orgs.) Based on similar solo legal actions that I've been close to, all it will get you is heartache, an ulcer, or worse. There's no point in taking on a deep pocket like FB alone, the deck is heavily stacked against you.
Several friends have tried to get me on FB over the years, but I never signed up or gave FB any info, at least not directly. My picture (in group shots) is probably up there somewhere, but I haven't even looked for it.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday June 22 2024, @02:14PM
They say it will be gone in a month. As for a lawsuit, there are various deep pocket organizations like the SFWA, ACLU, several other acronym organizations. I wouldn't even try without that.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 5, Informative) by pkrasimirov on Saturday June 22 2024, @06:03AM (5 children)
I deleted my Fb years ago, it was again some change of their "policy" that was shoving it deeper in my private area. I don't remember all but it was something like "you click delete and we promise to do it after 30 days but if you open Fb during this time we cancel".
I've searched now and it says:
https://www.facebook.com/help/250563911970368 [facebook.com]
Note I'm in EU, your mileage may vary.
These 90 days sound like pretty enough time to feed your data to their ML, assuming it isn't already done.
I, for one, don't believe their "deletion" one little bit. Your data is their blood and they will cling on it for dear life.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 22 2024, @01:50PM
For a car analogy (to the FB heavily obfuscated instructions to delete an account), see the engine diagnostic codes used before OBD-II was standardized by regulation. To figure out what the engine trouble warning light meant, you had to go through gymnastics with different switches and count the long and short pulses of the light on the dashboard. Then use a look-up table to see what was wrong when, for example, there were three short flashes followed by a long flash.
I did this once with a '92 Corolla, turning the key and I've forgotten what other switches to read out the codes--step by step guided by a shop manual. Learned that the oxygen sensor was the problem. Then fixing the sensor (the housing had rusted apart, sensing element still OK) and resetting the computer.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday June 22 2024, @02:19PM (3 children)
Yes, they're forced by your laws. The EU isn't Fascist like America and you actually have protections against giant corporations. I'm pretty sure there are separate redirections in their code that sends you to a page tailored to your location.
We used to have a sensible government that protected citizens against corporations, then Ronald Reagan and George Bush happened.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 0, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 22 2024, @11:53PM (2 children)
Really? When?
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 23 2024, @07:36AM (1 child)
Look, kiddo, just because you're not old enough to personally remember US presidents #40 and #41fucking with their country, the "when" is literally
RIGHT
THERE
IN
THE
POST
so your excuses don't fly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 25 2024, @02:41AM
You're funny! You really think it was better before Reagan? The naïveté is astouding!
(Score: 3, Funny) by RamiK on Saturday June 22 2024, @09:25AM (1 child)
It simply tells scrapers (like Googlebot and GPTBot) what they're allowed to use when indexing / collecting data model training at the URL level: https://facebook.com/robots.txt [facebook.com]
Anyhow, Facebook has a help page on how to delete you account though I don't know if it's up-to-date seeing how I never opened a facebook account: https://www.facebook.com/help/1248946995836019 [facebook.com]
compiling...
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday June 22 2024, @02:25PM
There is more than one. The American one is abysmal, if it were a computer program it wouldn't run. It was obviously designed that way.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 2) by Frosty Piss on Saturday June 22 2024, @11:40AM (9 children)
...has a Facebook account.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Saturday June 22 2024, @12:12PM (8 children)
I think that we also have/had a twitter account too. I don't think that there is anyone who knows on which server they reside or how to set them up.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by RamiK on Saturday June 22 2024, @04:30PM (7 children)
While everyone is setting off on the Butlerian Jihad war path, it might be a good chance to note soylent's robots.txt doesn't disallow chatgpt's GPTBot while the green site does: https://slashdot.org/robots.txt [slashdot.org]
compiling...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fab23 on Saturday June 22 2024, @05:08PM (4 children)
For my own websites I have currently this in robots.txt to tell OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and Apple do not use my content to train their AI:
I guess there are more of which I am not aware yet, which could and should be added as well.
(Score: 3, Informative) by RamiK on Saturday June 22 2024, @05:45PM (3 children)
Ironically, quick googling suggests there's a whole bunch more: https://darkvisitors.com/agents [darkvisitors.com]
Anyhow, it looks like Google standardized the file with RFC 9309 some time ago while making sure not to include categories... Well played.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by fab23 on Saturday June 22 2024, @06:40PM
I am kind of biased with blocking AI crawlers. I was already thinking of e.g. not to block Apple for AI, as they are not using the data to sell a product and just are using it to be helpful for their users (which does count me in as well).
I have difficulties to trust the list you linked, as it does categorize the 'Applebot' as an 'AI Search Crawler', but according to Apples own information [apple.com] to not allow my content to be used for AI only the 'Applebot-Extended' needs to be set in robots.txt.
To try to better block AI crawlers I still had that tab [lobste.rs] open with this suggestions to be used in the Apache web server config (but of course this does only work as long as the crawler don't lie about their user-agent):
(Score: 2) by fab23 on Sunday June 23 2024, @05:52PM (1 child)
I have now looked a little bit deeper into all this and for now I have only added most 'AI Data Scraper' from the list you linked. I have not included CCBot [commoncrawl.org] as that will also exclude my content in their search index, which is freely available. As mention, we will never be able to fully prevent our content being used to train AI. :-(
So for me that seems to be what currently is needed to be in robots.txt to try to prevent the use of my personal web content to train AI:
I don't have a problem when AI tools answer with my content when the user does ask for it and does reference it. This is why I do not block 'AI Assistant' and 'AI Search Crawler'.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday June 24 2024, @10:50AM
If that's how you feel about such bots you should probably also look to see if something equivocal to an adblock list on a github repo or the likes matches your preferences beyond what I've linked since I only just dug up that site off the top google hits and really haven't looked too hard at any of it.
compiling...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Frosty Piss on Saturday June 22 2024, @08:58PM (1 child)
Do you really think crawlers pay any attention to robots.txt? REALLY? You are naieve.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RamiK on Sunday June 23 2024, @07:54AM
You can just setup your web server to log IPs along with user-agents and DB-IP while throwing in a few empty pages in your sitemap along with some invisible links leading to them that are in disallowed paths so you'll have an easy way to verify what the crawlers are doing.
It's actually common practice to do this regardless to differentiate real users from bot access.
compiling...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Saturday June 22 2024, @12:37PM (3 children)
I also never started with Facefook. It was obvious from day one all they wanted to do was suck up every last bit of personal data from their "dumb fuck" users and find ways to sell it. They even got intrusive enough trying to get scripts embedded in every web site, I blocked their IP address.
I encourage everyone to get the off of that site, and delete all publicly visible traces, but don't pretend they don't keep every last bit of data locked away somewhere
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday June 22 2024, @02:40PM (1 child)
If they don't publish it, you don't have grounds to sue.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 3, Insightful) by gnuman on Saturday June 22 2024, @03:33PM
Ground to sue is always if there is damage inflicted on the party. You can't sue because you don't like it -- that will just fail. You have to show actual damage done.
Regarding "who published what", if Meta is made aware that something is posted that is causing you damage, and they do not remove it, that gives you firepower in any lawsuit. If they remove it, then you can probably just sue the people that are posting the damaging material.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday June 23 2024, @02:55AM
So, the only use for Facebook is cheap advertising -- data you want the whole world to know!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1, Troll) by jelizondo on Sunday June 23 2024, @12:33AM
You should have written a detailed HOW-TO for the benefit of others in the same plight, but that did not cross your mind, you insensitive clod!
Clearly not a writer of HOW-Tos
Lack of attention to detail got you booted off, I see
Well, you should cut her for any inheritance, clearly she doesn’t deserve it
DISCLAIMER: It is a JOKE. And you deserve being made fun of because you have a FB account and much more for thinking you can actually delete it.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Mykl on Monday June 24 2024, @04:00AM
So you're feeling pretty smug there, looking out at all of those mouth-breathers who signed up for Facebook and sold their souls. Not you - you knew it was bad news.
Unfortunately, FB already has an account for you - it's just not visible to you. Any time you are tagged in a photo, are mentioned in a post etc, FB is adding detail to your hidden profile. The more FB users you know, the more detailed that profile will be.
Now, how exactly do you think you can go about having that account deleted?