As a current Facebook employee, for various reasons I would rather not get into I still need to have a personal Facebook account.

I do not really want it to keep a trail of my personal life to be squeezed for every last cent of advertising revenue, though. And slashing-and-burning by deleting this account and starting a new one might cause technical issues so … better not to try it.

Enter Activity Log. While available on both web and the Facebook apps, currently only the app version (the full Android and iOS apps as well as Facebook Lite) let you delete your activity in bulk. For some interpretations of bulk.

Here’s a few bugs I’ve already discovered, and why after more than a week my profile is still not a nice clean slate:

  • You have to delete one page at a time
  • Date stamps appear even for dates that have no activity of the kind you’ve filtered for
  • Because of this weird filtering, sometimes going to the next page and deleting one full page is faster than deleting all visible items in the current page and then seeing only a few items being brought forward
  • If you’re a page admin any interactions between your personal profile and that page cannot be deleted
  • Page likes cannot be deleted. You would have to click through, and unlike the page – rinse and repeat
  • Sometimes page likes get repeated in the activity log, and unliking only remove one of them. So you have this dangling item you can never clear
  • After clearing all activities you can think of, a subsequent pass might show some of them to still exist. It’s a good idea to check with various tools (e.g. web, lite, full app) to be sure

TL;DR - this obviously does not spark joy. If I were not an employee I would just delete this account and be done with it. Kind of glad I don’t need to have an Instagram account and mine has been gone for some months now.

This post is day 7 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Visit https://100daystooffload.com to get more info, or to get involved.

Have a comment on one of my posts? Start a discussion in my public inbox by sending an email to ~michel-slm/public-inbox@lists.sr.ht [mailing list etiquette]

Posts are also tooted to @michel_slm@floss.social