tl;dr: Needing some advice on changing facebook privacy settings for posts in bulk
So, I have been heavily researching data collection and surveillance. In this process, I have learned about how often and extensive social media profiles are scraped, allowing data collection companies to always have the most up to date profile of you. Really doesn't matter what privacy settings you've enabled tbh.
Because of this, I decided that simply deleting your account is not enough. Especially since the deletion is never immediate; seems like every platform keeps your account on their servers for at least a month before deletion. In this time, it is not known what is happening with that data but it can be safely assumed that they are getting a final scrape out of it. So I have been deleting all posted content before the full account deletion. This includes: unsending/deleting all messages, unliking/reacting to all posts... essentially undoing as much as possible.
Now, I understand there may not be a lot of research or solid information into what I am doing. There is a reality where this is pointless.. And I don't care tbh. So this isn't an invite to debate on whether or not this process has any value. I am already very deep into the trenches and the only way out is forward. Plus, I generally recommend a full social media account audit. Some of us have accounts that are 2 decades old.
I intend to make a full detailed review of this process but here is a rundown:
-Began with downloading both json and html copies of my accounts
-Used third party tools (not sure if I can mention them here) to download various other content I wanted saved
-Used other third party tools to bulk remove content; unsending messages, unliking posts, redacting/removing posts
I am now working on facebook, and it has proven to be most difficult... well I just recently got hit by an Instagram account restriction lol So Meta in general is hard to work with. Because this particular account is almost 20 years old, removing content has been.. laggy at best. My plan was to bulk change the audience visibility for all posts to "only me". This would allow me to continue use of the account until deletion day while ensuring nobody(?) could see any of my past content while I was in the process of deleting/backing it up with a specific third party tool.
The issue is the native architecture designed to help you remove content is obviously not very efficient. You can actually very quickly and easily limit all past posts to "friends only" by clicking a button... but that is all you can do. If you want to limit them to "only me"; you must go into activity log and scroll until the page is fully loaded, then select all. But this is easier said than done. For older accounts, this will not work. Facebook either cannot load all of it or cannot actually select all of it. So you have to go year by year... and it is not any better.
You select a year, scroll until full page has loaded, select all, and then pick your setting. But even this bugs facebook out. Sometimes it wont load the whole year at all, so you have to go month by month. And every time you sweep a full year, it really only gets to may before it stops. So you still have to go and get the rest of the months individually. And whether you've selected a year, a month, or just more than 10 posts; the process seemingly takes facebook 12-24 hours to complete.
Anyone else have experience with this? Is there any tactic or tool that would make this easier? Or is the final boss always going to be the platform itself?