On March 28 2018 Facebook announced that in response to recent events they are rolling out its activity monitor that is in part designed to help Facebook users manage and delete anything they posted using Facebook.
In addition, on March 29 2018 Facebook announced that they are suspending its partnership with many third party data providers. This might give some users the illusion, that what they post using Facebook, is now protected.
One of the more popular services that websites use from Facebook, is the Facebook comments plugin. Sites like BuzzFeed are amongst the approximately 400,000 websites that utilize the plugin to allow its visitors to post comments on their websites.
Facebook’s new update does in fact allow its users to see all the sites they posted comments on and delete the comments. However, this is very misleading as Facebook DOES NOT remove the comment from the actual site. Most users would assume that is they delete a comment from Facebook, it is deleted from the source site as well.
There is now at least one site https://www.tris.com/facebook/ that has harvested what they claim to be millions of those comments, some are obviously comments that are very controversial that users think they removed when in fact, Facebook did not remove the comments. There are an incredible number of posts online from people desperately trying to find a way to delete their comments on all the sites they posted on, here is one such discussion https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=1660802184202118 as you can see no solution has been provided.
This is a perfect example why Facebook needs to educate its users and investors and not mislead them into thinking that breaking off partnerships with third party data harvesters stops all data harvesting, and solves the users privacy concerns.
We downloaded the Tris app and we were able to search and discover comments from users that have been posted across many websites across the web. The content of some of the comments was shocking especially as it is attached to a person’s real Facebook profile.
You can see some sampling of comments by visiting https://www.tris.com/facebook/.
The good news is that the company behind the Tris app is pro privacy and seeks to use this to raise awareness about your data online and removes all your data from their system when you download the app.