Saleef Shah Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify before Congress this week to explicate how his company accumulates and handles users’ personal information.
The past few weeks have been arduous for Facebook over concerns that the data of millions of users has been breached.
Facebook stores details of virtually every action you have taken and interaction you have engaged in on its platform.
What many Facebook users are incognizant of, though, is that you can facilely download and optically discern all the information Facebook has accumulated from you in just a few minutes.
How to Download Your Facebook Data:
Here’s how to ascertain what data Facebook has accumulated over time, including all your past posts, messages, photos, videos and more.
Facebook will then let you download a zipped folder titled “facebook-yourusername.” Once you unzip it, you will find that it contains a few different folders—for photos, videos, messages, an ‘html’ folder of other data, and a .htm Index file to avail you navigate through different sections or categories of data.
What You Can To Find:
Index.html , you will find some fundamental information about your profile including any profile names you have had in the past, all your contact info, any pages and fascinates you relished, groups you joined, and any Facebook pages you are a page administrator for. The index withal contains information about every Event invite you got, every Poke and Message you’ve sent or received (even if you are not Facebook friends with the person, or if they are no longer on Facebook), any Facebook applications you installed (even if you don’t utilize them anymore), and any Facebook “Places” (locations) you may have engendered.
Contact Info, section contains all the contacts on your mobile phone. You may additionally find adscititious info if you utilized an Android phone—it was recently revealed that Facebook scraped Android users’ call and text message data through a default opt-in feature many users weren’t explicitly vigilant of.
Timeline section , contains all of your status updates and posts from friends on your timeline. The Photos and Videos sections contain photos and videos you posted; the former withal contains code about your Facial Apperception info.
Friends Section , contains list of all your Facebook friends with the date you become friends. It withal contains a list of friends you unfriended and when, friend requests you declined, a list of friend requests you sent that are pending being accepted, a list of people who “Follow” you by clicking the follow button on your profile, and anyone you are following.
The amount of data Facebook can amass is admittedly staggering. For conventional Facebook users, who’ve been on the platform for some time, downloading and going through one’s digital footprint can definitely make one a little squeamish (and not just because of your status messages from 2008 that seemed so witty back in the day!).
Daunting as the experience might be, being cognizant of what information of yours is being accumulated is the first step to securing it.
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