Comment by mabbo
7 years ago
Huh. So now I'm starting to think: what if I purposely recorded thousands and thousands of meaningless video? None of my friends would ever see them since I never published them, but Facebook would use up hard drive space storing them.
What if a lot of people did that?
Suddenly Facebook's cost for hanging onto all these videos would become quite high with no value in doing so.
Anyone feel like making a website to help automate that process?
The scale you’d need to achieve to have even the most minor effect on facebooks vast infrastructure would be enormous.
I feel the effort you and countless opt-in people would expend could be redirected to much more fruitful efforts. Convincing people to delete their profiles, for example.
I generally agree with other people's posts that there are better uses of your time.
However, if you wanted to do this, why bother recording it? Read a little about the mp4 spec and it would probably be fairly easy to generate mp4s containing random data. You could even go further and generate video that tricks facial/object recognition.
You should upload random-pixel uncompressible videos and delete them over and over again. It not only increases storage cost but makes the profile SNR very low.
There are general-strike level attack surfaces on these networks, but people don't really care that much.
Does their AUP/TOS allow them to lock you out in that case?
Lockout would be worse than account deletion. You would have no recourse to fight back on any of their use of your data right?
> You would have no recourse to fight back on any of their use of your data right?
Yes you would if you were European. You can't stop people exercising their legal rights because they broke your terms of service.
Facebook might actually love this. Because for every 20 useless videos you upload, you may click, comment, or view some facebook message that pops up while you're uploading. It could become a net gain for them.
What if a lot of people did that?
That is exactly what a lot of people do. I don't think Facebook is conspiratorially hording funny cat videos. It's just standard practice to flag things as deleted. Everyone does it. I certainly have.