4 Mar 2022

Saving Facebook Posts And Conversations

Much of what we read and post on Facebook has no intrinsic, long-term value. Sometimes, though, there might be a conversation or a post thread that you'd like to keep. Let's see what can be done.

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My older daughter suffered acute, unexpected, life-threatening liver failure in May 2017. She was in a coma for most of a week and received a liver transplant. The transplant process usually spans several months, but there was no time for normal procedures. We were at Ohio State University Hospital most of the time in meetings with emergency department physicians, transplant center physicians, and others. There was no time to contact family and friends in the usual way, so we turned to Facebook.

The transplant was successful and I knew that Elizabeth would want to know what happened during the week she was unconscious. She was in a coma from shortly after arriving at University Hospital until the day after her surgery, so I wanted to keep a copy of the messages we posted and the responses.

Now, nearly five years later, being able to look back at those days is comforting.

Saving the occasional instant-message conversation might also be desirable. As helpful as electronic messaging is, a lot of good information is lost. Letters sent from authors to editors, between politicians, or even from one family member to another in an earlier era offer important insights. But who sends letters today?

At best, we have short IM chats. Example:

Dave: (link to) 3D printing your pet.
Me: Cat is already available in 3D, limited editions available in 4D.
Dave: A 4D cat is a frightening intracatastrophy waiting for a portal to open to a parallel felinity. Ouch. I actually prefer the Fifth Dimension, especially their version of “The Age of Aquarius.” “Can you say ‘orthogonality’?” Mr. Rogers never ever asked. (Or DID he!??!)
Me: I'm pretty sure that Chloe alternates between parallel existences.
Dave: I knew a guy who was a gymnast. Specialty was the parallel bars. They were directly across the street from each other.
Me: He needs a parallel cat.

I can't think of a good reason to save that chat. In fact, I can think of several reasons for deleting it and denying that it ever existed. But some conversations may be worth retaining.

You can always go back to Facebook and scroll through existing chats and posts, but there are better options when you've been involved in a conversation or post discussion that's so meaningful that you want to keep a copy.

This is less important for posts than it is for instant message threads. Although I have a PDF file that includes all the posts and responses around Elizabeth's time in the hospital, it would be easy enough to find the original post and expand the comments. Sharing the post with others, and particularly those who aren't on Facebook, is difficult. So if you have a topic that has significant historic or personal value, creating a PDF is good even if it won't be perfect.

Start by opening the post and expanding all the comments. Then choose the print option and specify Save as PDF as the destination. The process will depend in part on which browser you're using and what PDF printing options are installed. Modern operating systems all have a PDF option, but you may have to look for it. Choosing portrait instead of landscape usually works better for Facebook pages.

Print all the pages.

If you have Adobe Acrobat or some other application that allows PDF editing, you can remove unwanted pages near the end of the file. Then you have a PDF document that can be shared.

I mentioned that the process isn't perfect. Unfortunately the Print to PDF process will drop some text that is in the top and bottom margin areas. This is usually just one or two lines of text, but it's important to know that this will happen.

In this example, one person's comment says "Other than that, I am set with food and drink, and there will definitely be baking." This is clearly visible on Facebook. However, the PDF version truncates the text following "Other than".

Saving IM Conversations

Not every conversation should be saved. Few conversations should be saved. In most cases, my conversations consist of a comment followed by a few additional bits of text. But occasionally there's a serious conversation with information that I might want later, or a series of increasingly bad puns.

But there's no method provided by Facebook for users to save individual messages. You can save all your data, but that's likely to be a gigantic file and finding what you're looking for in the downloaded file would be just as difficult as finding it online.

If you decide that you want to download everything, start by clicking the (1) menu icon in the upper right corner of the Facebook window, then choose (2) Settings and Privacy, and finally (3) Settings. You'll see Your Facebook Information near the top of the left column. Click it.

When Your Facebook Information opens, click (1) View on the line labeled Download Your Information. This will open a panel that will allow you to specify (2) which kinds of data you want to download and to choose (3) the format, media quality, and date range.

At the bottom of the page (and it's a long page), click the button labeled Request a Download. The download won't be ready right away. Facebook says that the request will be shown as Pending in the Available Copies section and that it may take several days for the process to be complete.

The process is similar to that used for Amazon and Google that we looked at earlier, Amazon on 11 February and Google on 18 February.

I received two zip files from Facebook. The zip files were big — a total of eight gigabytes — that extracted 20,684 files to 876 folders. If you receive multiple zip files, extract them all into the same folder. Unlike Amazon and Google, Facebook provides a framework for easily viewing your data. There's an index.html file in the directory and double clicking it opens a well organized directory. Even so, there's no search function; but if you remember who you had the conversation with, you can select that person's name and then use the browser's Find function to look for a word. The posts are in reverse time order, though, with the most recent comment first.

Having the full download could be useful, but Facebook offers an online option for viewing your information. It's the link at the top of the Facebook Information page. That might be a better choice if you just want to view the information, not save it locally.

But if you do want to save a specific conversation locally, performing a screen scrape could be the easiest choice becuase you can paste the data into a word processor or text editor.

The problem with using a word processor is that a small amount of information consumes a lot of space. A short discussion with a friend consumed two pages and a lot of useless formatting. Copying and pasting the conversation into a plain text editor such as UltraEdit, Notepad++, or even Notepad drops all of the graphic and other less useful information, but it also eliminates all graphics and links to external sites. If that information is important to you, then a word processor is the better choice.

There's not really a good way to extract this information, but at least there are less bad methods. Sometimes finding that is the best solution.

Short Circuits

DuckDuckGo Adds Protections To Most Browsers

The DuckDuckGo search engine doesn't collect or sell user information. Maybe you already use it instead of Google, but there's more from from the duck.

Privacy Essentials is a browser extension that's available for all major browsers and for both Android and IOS mobile devices. It adds a small icon at the top of the page so that users can see at a glance how well the site treats your privacy. Each site gets a letter grade, from A to F and the extension blocks questionable activities with additional privacy protection that can be enabled or disabled on each site you visit.

Privacy Protection is enabled by default, but it can be disabled because blocking data collection may cause some sites to fail. This is rare and I leave the protections enabled for all sites.

Most of the trackers installed on websites won't be able to track you. The number of trackers may vary as site developers add and remove them. On one day in mid February, Security Essentials found 10 trackers on the Washington Post website and blocked 8 of them.

So at its most basic, the browser extension is an ad blocker that prevents sites from showing you banners, pop-ups, and any other ads. Some sites need to be able to show pop-ups for legitimate functions and, if Security Extensions blocks these, you can whitelist the site. The TechByter website uses pop-up technology to display larger copies of thumbnail images, but the browser extension is smart enough to know that these are not security issues. There's no need to whitelist this site.

The Privacy Essentials extension is available for Firefox, Chrome, Safari, IOS, and Android officially, but if you use Opera, Vivaldi, Microsoft Edge, Brave, or any of the other browsers based on Chrome, the Chrome extension will work.

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When visiting a website, users can click on the Privacy Essentials icon for information about the site. The New York Times website is rated B+, which has been enhanced from C. Disabling privacy protection on the site will drop its grade to C. The site uses an encrypted connection, which all sites should do, and sites with unencrypted connections are automatically downgraded.

Three trackers have been blocked and clicking the disclosure triangle on the trackers line shows which trackers are blocked — two from Google in this case and one from Amazon. Most sites will display "Unknown Privacy Practices", but a few will display information about privacy. DuckDuckGo depends on Terms of Service Didn't Read, a service that collects privacy data from websites. It's worth visiting this site and searching for sites that you visit.

Websites often embed YouTube or Facebook videos, and these are blocked by default. The extension will display a message that describes the block and offers a large blue button uses can click to unblock the video. Doing so will allow the content provider to know about your activity, and collect information that includes your IP address.

The DuckDuckGo search engine is a useful alternative to Google and it's what I use most of the time, switching to Google only when I want a second opinion. The Privacy Essentials extension is a valuable addition to any browser. It can be downloaded using your browser's Extensions page. For more information, visit DuckDuckGo's app page, which will attempt to detect the browser you're using and offer an installation link.

Never Relax Because Crooks Don't

Using multi-factor authentication is supposed to ensure that crooks can't steal your credentials because logging in requires a user name, a password, and a code that's delivered separately. Crooks have noticed and they're developing ways to defeat the technology.

It's a lot like Whack-A-Mole and it's reminiscent of the back and forth between police radar manufacturers and radar detector manufacturers.

Multi-factor authentication requires that the user provide a security token provided via a smart phone or an authenticator application. The code is not delivered in an online session, but though a separate connection and possibly even a separate device. This used to be called out-of-band authentication, meaning that a separate means of authentication would be provided using a method that's not visible to the connection being validated.

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But what if someone manages to find a way to read all of the data from the person who's trying to log in to the remote server? That person wouldn't need to see the out-of-band authenticator because the user would need to provide it to log in. The name for this is man in the middle and it's not new. Users think they are connected to a their intended service, but instead they're connected to a crook who is connected to the user's intended service. This person can see the victim's user name, password, and the time-limited token.

Security firm Proofpoint says phishing kits can be purchased for "less than a cup of coffee." Read the full article by Proofpoint on the company's website. These new tools for criminals don't require that crooks create a duplicate of the target website. Instead, they use a transparent reverse proxy to present the actual website to the victim. The victim sees the legitimate website, but the crook sees it, too, and the crook can capture even the session cookie. Wikipedia has an article that explains how a reverse proxy works.

Although crooks can't obtain external validation codes directly, they can follow a user into a site and create a lot of trouble.

Twenty Years Ago

New Media Were Still Trying To Establish Themselves

In 2002, I wasn't impressed by the new media. The New York Times had a story about the demise of many of the "e-zines". "Even with wireless devices that can let you read these Web sites while you're on the go," I wrote, "it's still much more convenient to carry around a copy of The Economist and read it as time is available."

Virtually every book I read today is on a tablet, but I was all about paper 20 years ago: "You don't have to turn it on or off. You don't have to set a bookmark. Just fold over a page corner as a reminder of where you are and -- when you want to read more -- open the magazine to that page."

Early ebooks were relatively hard to use and they're still inconvenient with books that required jumping around a lot. I said "When somebody can make an electronic book or magazine that's as easy to use as the printed version (and this will happen), the new media will catch on. But don't hold your breath." Many of the problems have been resolved, but electronic versions of text books and reference books can still be difficult.