Facebook profile delete but not entirely it seems ...

In April 2015 I decided to get rid of my Facebook profile. I first downloaded a report to see what they had about me and then deleted the profile. One can assume that the good people that work there keep their promise and delete the profile.

I am currently working on a slides for a presentation about securing your Facebook account and setting up your privacy settings as restrictive as possible. Since I had no account I needed to make a temporary account, with a fake first and last name (I know against the EULA), and used the same e-mail address than the account deleted in April.

One can suppose that the 'old' data is gone but interestingly every friend Facebook proposes was in the friend list I had before.

I can only come to one conclusion and that is that they do not actually delete everything otherwise those friend proposals should have been random strangers (maybe living in the same town).

Facebook and security

I discovered something interesting recently. I knew that Facebook checked if it was a know connection before giving you access to your homepage and otherwise it tells you it is an unknown device. Well in my recent experience they made quite a lot of mistakes in the process.

I made a connection from abroad with my laptop so it was the same device but it triggered the same mechanism. To prove I was myself I had to identify people in pictures they uploaded.

The interesting thing is that some of the people I know have put family pictures up. One series of photos was the dad in one picture, the mom in another one and a daughter in the last one. Looking at the names I could figure out which name I had to select but it was interesting that it was 3 times a different person.

While doing the procedure I thought of how I would attack it and it would be actually quite easy. You just have to do some homework like figuring out family and friends which is not that hard. I guess facial recognition software would be a possibility too.