Automated deletion of Facebook wall posts

I have been getting more and more concerned about privacy on Facebook recently.  One concernin  is that Facebook has a nasty habit of abruptly changing its policies without warning, and always seems to move toward making public what I want to keep private, requiring me to tinker repeatedly with the always evolving privacy controls. 

One thing that really cheesed me off last year was that they made it impossible to hide the list of friends.  It isn't clear to me why each of my friends should be able to see a complete list of all the others.  Last year I had a trick worked out that concealed my list of friends from everyone, including my friends, but the 'improvements' last fall broke that trick and made it impossible to conceal my Friend list.

Another concern I have is that my privacy is only as strong as the passwords and account security of everyone on my friend list.  Several people on my list of friends have had their accounts hacked over the last year or so.  It doesn't matter whose fault it is.  The problem is that anyone who hacks their account can in principle go through my entire history of wall posts, and gather a lot of information about my friends and family.  This has been making me increasingly uncomfortable.

The ideal solution would be for Facebook to set some kind of default expiration date for posts so that they are deleted automatically after a certain number of days or weeks.  That way they wouldn't accumulate over time into a complete history of every interaction I have had, every trip I have made, and so forth, that is available to anyone who hacks the account of a friend, or will suddenly be exposed to the entire web if Facebook changes its policies again. 

Facebook, however, seems to go in the opposite direction, making the process of deleting old posts clumsy.  Within Facebook, there is no way I could find of doing a mass delete of old posts.  Removing posts appeared to require going through them one by one, clicking Delete, and then confirming the Delete. 

After some searching, however, I found that someone named Cynthia Perla had developed a script in imacros, a Firefox add-on, that allows for automated deletion of posts.  Basically it will loop through your posts and delete them one by one.  I ended up tweaking the script a bit and posting a new version.  Until Facebook gives us better control over old posts, and allows mass or automatic deletion, this seems to be the best thing around for wiping the slate clean...

Here is the post at the blog that includes the script.  If you scroll down you will see mine...

http://www.cynthiaperla.com/facebook/460/how-to-delete-all-groups-and-wall-posts-from-facebook-using-imacros.html

Note that this requires that whoever uses it is comfortable with working with macros in Firefox.  If you don't know what a macro or a script is, don't bother with this.  I think this is useful mainly for people who are comfortable with installing a Firefox add-on and running scripts and possibly tweaking them a bit.