Wipe Out: A Social Media Data Eraser


    Do you know, about 60% of internet users said they were not worried about how much information about them was available online, as per a study by Pew Research Center? And most of them said they were not concerned about taking steps to limit the information that can be found about them online.


Although this research may be a bit old, and the current findings might slightly differ, there’s no denying the fact that internet users leave a good amount of digital footprint online, and most of it is while using social media. 


Leaving a huge amount of digital trace could, however, backfire. It is a big privacy concern and should be taken seriously. Stalking, identity theft, personal attacks, and misuse of information are some of the threats that are associated with it. 


In a recent short survey that we conducted to understand the awareness general social media users have about the content that they have put up online in the past, we found that over 55% of the users find it tedious to manually delete their past activities on their social media accounts. 




We then asked, “What if this deletion process was somehow automated? Would users be more willing to delete their past data?” And about 66% of the users agreed. 



 


If you want to decrease your digital footprint on social media but wish there was a tool to automate this, you’re at the right place! 

We introduce Wipe Out. 

Wipe Out saves you from the hassle of manually browsing and deleting each of your past activities. It automatically deletes them for you. All you need to do is enter your user credentials on the Wipe Out UI and select appropriate options from the menu and sit back! 


Wipe Out comes as a bundle of two applications. WipeOut for Facebook and WipeOut for Twitter. 

WipeOut for Facebook is a web-scraping tool which scrapes the activity log of your Facebook account and deletes the desired number of activities, whereas WipeOut for Twitter utilizes the Twitter API to delete your past tweets in a particular date range. Let’s get into more details. 

 


WipeOut for Facebook 


We have created an Interactive Web Application for WipeOut-FB using XAMPP Server. The Front-End is made using HTML & CSS whereas the back-end is in Python. The whole automation process is handled using Selenium WebDriver (and Geckodriver) in Python. Python scripts are connected to the HTML pages using its Common Gateway Interface (CGI) module. The XAMPP Server is re-configured by editing the Apache httpd.conf configuration file in order to support Python. The overall flowchart of the application is provided below: 

        

 

Fig. WipeOut-FB Flowchart 


Using this application, a user can wipeout his/her digital footprint from Facebook in just a few clicks by automatically deleting his/her Activity Log. The overall flow of the application from a user’s perspective is as follows: 

  • User opens the application and provides his/her Facebook login credentials. 

  • User then chooses any one of the two options for deleting his/her activity log:

    • All Activities
    • A particular no. of activities.

  • If user chooses the option “A particular no. of activities”, then the user must specify the exact count of activities (minimum count: 1) he/she wants to delete in reverse chronological order. 

  • User clicks on SUBMIT. 

  • The page redirects to a new page where all the log statements of this automation activity will be displayed step-by-step: 

    • If the credentials are Invalid, there will be a prompt stating “Invalid Username / Password.. Exiting!!” and the page will redirect the user to the Index page. 
    • If there is some error from Facebook’s side in opening the user’s Activity Log page, the page will load a message stating “ERROR opening the Activity Log page. LOGGING OUT...”. You will be logged out automatically from Facebook. You can then try again from the beginning. 
    • If there is some Internal error related to the Server or Code, there will be a prompt stating “TIMEOUT!! Please check your Internet Connection. LOGGING OUT...”. The application will log you out from Facebook. You can then try again from the beginning. 
    • If everything is alright, then:
      1. The user will be automatically Logged in to Facebook. 
      2. User’s activity log will be Opened automatically. 
      3. One-by-one the user activities will be deleted automatically as per the user’s choice of action.
      4. After the deletion process, the user will be automatically Logged Out.

            

                Some of the screenshots of the application are provided below for illustration: 


      


Fig. Wipeout-FB Index Page. 


 



Fig. Left Window: Automated Window opened by Selenium to login to FB.

 




Fig. LEFT WINDOW: Automated Window opened by Selenium to go the Activity Log and  

delete the activities. RIGHT WINDOW: Log window open by the application on user’s side. 

 

 

       


Fig. Log window after completion of the whole automation process. 

 

 


 

 

WipeOut for Twitter 

 

 Wipeout for Twitter offers an interactive and appealing CLI for the functionalities stated formerly, along with some supplementary peculiarities for keeping track of your tweets. 


The program is built using the Twitter API, which furnishes us with some knack for accessing the contents of a user's account and fetching the aggregates to present the user with some stats. 

The main features provided in the program are- 

  • Deletion of tweets in a given date range. 
  • Anchoring a threshold date range for deletion. 
  • Getting the number of tweets before the threshold date.


    •     

    Fig. Wipeout for Twitter CLI
     

    The default delete-threshold date is set to 5-years, i.e., a user can get insights of a number of tweets he did 5 years ago, by choosing the insights option. 

     

    The default threshold date can be changed by selecting the first option and can be set to 0 years for seeing the count of all the tweets. 

    The insights option is dynamic in nature and gets updated with every change with the help of twitter API. 

     

    Fig. CLI menu

     

         


    Fig. CLI menu



    The wipe out option asks the user for a date range in terms of day, year and month and after that the tweets within the given date range are wiped out from the user’s profile.



    You can download Wipe Out from here.


    You can watch the demo video from here.



    Thanks a lot for reading!


    Meet our Team:


    Aditya Bhadouria      UG3, ECE

    Aditya Mahajan         PG2, CSIS

    Mohit Manwani          PG2, CSE

    Suman Mitra              PG2, CSIS

    Shivam Puri               PG2, CSE

    Tushar Asopa            UG3, ECE






     

     

     

     

     

     

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