If you’re savvy with code, you can employ a script that repeatedly alters your Facebook posts with nonsense, making it more difficult for the social media site to collect user data. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, there’s a widespread movement for people to #DeleteFacebook. But even when you go through all the steps to wipe your account, the odds are high that Facebook still has deep caches of all your user data, which is can still use. Better than simply deleting your account is to replace all that data with nonsense, and if you’re savvy with code, you can do just that. Kevin Matthew, a former systems administrator who owns a small web development company, shared a script he created that replaces existing Facebook posts with randomly-generated nonsense. With a little coding know-how, you could use this script to repeatedly mangle all your Facebook posts over a period of several months, to make the bulk of Facebook’s data on you virtually unusable (though it doesn’t do anything for the data that’s already been scraped by third-parties, like the kind Cambridge Analytica allegedly gained access to). Matthew said his script is simply a proof of concept, because actually doing this may be in violation of Facebook’s terms of service (so use at your own risk). (…) Matthew’s script automatically opens Facebook posts to edit and replaced them with randomly-generated text. The idea is that if you ran the script 100s, or 1000s of times, over the course of several months, on all of your data, it would likely make it more difficult for Facebook’s algorithms to pull useful data it uses to build a profile of you, including your political leanings and sexual orientation.
via vice: Don’t Just Delete Facebook, Poison Your Data First