How Do You Download Your Facebook Data

I know a lot of people in the security industry, and I know a lot of people who enjoy Facebook. However, there's not much overlap betwixt these groups. As someone who's in both groups, I'm an oddity. Many security experts either always steered clear of the social network or are currently advocating deleting information technology. I closely follow security topics and products such every bit antivirus utilities, and I besides use Facebook, just carefully. I don't see any need to delete my Facebook account. Just now that Facebook has fabricated it so easy to download everything the social network has about me, I went ahead with that process. Perusing the resulting archive, I ran into some surprises, both positive and otherwise.

I'm Careful, Really I Am

I've known for years that with Facebook, I'm non the client, I'm the product. I proceed my profile private except to friends. I don't mail service a lot in my visible profile, and not all of what I display is true. For example, while it's true that I studied Existentialism in college, I'g not actually a Pastafarian; I have not been "touched by his noodly appendage." I never wildly click links that seem shady. And I maintain a security suite that warns if a dangerous link gets past my radar.

I never play Facebook games; y'all'd be surprised, or appalled, at how much data games tin gather. I had to silence one family unit member because of a Farmville business relationship that kept pinging me to come play. I've been known to effort some silly quizzes, but only the ones that ask you questions to figure out, say, which Game of Thrones graphic symbol volition kill yous. Even so, the questions ameliorate non be the kind of thing that might answer your security questions. Those quizzes that offering to browse your Facebook data and give you a issue? Those are toxicant! I don't bear on them.

I never utilise Facebook (or my email account) to log into websites. Doing so makes your Facebook password a single point of failure. One exposure and all your accounts are wide open up. Instead, I use a password manager to create strong, unique passwords for every site.

Only being careful myself isn't enough. Sloppy security on the part of my friends can potentially make some of my data public. So I tightened up my settings to go on Facebook from sharing my information. I went all-out, choosing the option to totally disable the sharing platform. Facebook offered dire warnings about how doing and then would disable my apps, and keep me from logging in using my Facebook credentials. I smiled and went ahead. Now I'm fine, right? Well, perchance.

Download Your Annal

These days, it'due south easy to download an archive of all the information Facebook has on you. (At least, they say it's everything…) Well, information technology's adequately piece of cake. You do have to get through several steps, which are in place to prevent someone else from stealing your archive. Here'southward how I did information technology, and how you tin can get your own archive.

1. Log into Facebook, click the down-triangle icon at height correct, and cull Settings.
2. On the General Settings folio, click the last item, the link to download a copy of your data.
3. Facebook warns that collecting data may take a while. Click Showtime My Archive.
4. On the next page, click Start My Archive once more, and wait for a notification that it's done.
5. Download your Facebook archive.

Note that you lot'll have to supply your Facebook countersign twice during this process, because this is sensitive information. Facebook also warns that you should protect the downloaded information, as it contains sensitive material. Your best bet would be to encrypt the information when y'all're not actively studying information technology.

No Surprises, to Start

Once you unzip the downloaded archive, you'll find you have a folder containing a file Alphabetize.HTM plus folders named html, messages, photos, and videos. Ignore the folders for now; just launch INDEX.HTM and start exploring.

Yous starting time at the Contour page, with general information about y'all and your Facebook business relationship. This includes the exact moment yous started with Facebook (Thursday, June 28, 2007 at eight:15 a.m. PDT in my case) every bit well equally your accost (if you lot entered it), birthday, gender, hometown, and so on. Information technology doesn't distinguish between public details and those you've made private.

My archive also lists everyone I've identified every bit family unit members, all iii dozen of them. Family connections are a big part of what keeps me on Facebook. The lists of Music, Books, Movies, Restaurants, and Websites I've liked are brusk; I don't tend to give likes in those areas. But the listing of Other likes is more interesting. Apparently, I've liked more than threescore pages, ranging from Notorious RBG to Thic Nhat Hanh to 'The Official Petition to Found "Hella-" every bit the SI Prefix for 10^27.' At to the lowest degree Facebook doesn't have a hellabyte of data on me...

This page as well lists all the Groups I belong to. It's a bigger list than I expected, mostly because at least half of them oasis't had any activeness for years. I'm not certain at that place'south any benefit in actively disengaging from moribund groups, though.

Friends and Non-Friends

Clicking the Friends link got me a list of all my Facebook friends, sorted from newest to oldest. No surprise at that place! Simply scrolling downward farther, I constitute a lot more. Information technology also lists: Sent Friend Requests, Received Friend Requests, Declined Friend Requests, and Removed Friends. That'south right. Facebook knows everybody you've unfriended, and ever friend request you lot've denied, or ignored.

I dumped the listing into Excel for analysis, considering that's what I do. I establish that several dozen of the entries announced in more than than one category, and that some of these duplicates seem to tell a story. Some years agone, I purged my friends list downwards to something manageable, but subsequently added some of the purged folks back. And there they are—Removed Friends, only later, Friends. Others were persistent folks, Declined Friend Request followed later past Received Friend Asking (which I ignored).

Peradventure the almost interesting category involve people who showed upwards in the Received Friend Request list and no other. That means I received the asking and just ignored information technology, without actively declining. I confess to friend-request overload. And afterward ignoring requests for a while, it gets tough to actively go through and decline the unwanted ones. To the 70 people in that category—distressing!

At the tail end of the list, I found a couple other minor categories. I take exactly one Followee, pregnant there's one semi-public figure that I follow without actually existence FB friends. You may have more than. Facebook'due south analysis of my friend collection places me in the Friend Peer Group called "Established Adult Life." Why? Perhaps for advertising?

The Friends page makes sense, though information technology includes more information than I thought it would. Just the Contact Info page totally mystifies me. It lists hundreds of people, in no apparent social club, along with 1, 2, or three phone numbers. Who are these people, and where did they come from? The list fifty-fifty includes entries for people no longer living, some of them deceased before I ever joined Facebook.

I dumped this listing into Excel besides, and checked off any that I might have actually called on the phone. That accounts for just 10 percentage of the list. About vi percent of the contacts appear twice, well-nigh with the same phone number. Almost all of the names seem at least vaguely familiar, only non through Facebook.

For a sanity check, I used an Excel formula to flag every name from my Friends list that also appears in the Contacts list. That accounts for 11 percentage of my friends. Looking the other direction, because in that location are more than Contacts than Friends, but 6.v percentage of my Contacts match the Friends list.

I don't know for sure how Facebook got this list of contacts and their phone numbers. I must have given it permission to run across my contacts on some platform, but even and so, I mostly keep email addresses (notably absent from this list), not phone numbers. It'due south a puzzlement!

My Whole Timeline at a Glance

At starting time, I was unimpressed with the page reached by clicking Timeline. Like many, I often post an epitome with a snarky comment. The Timeline view skips the images, and the snarky comments alone don't make sense. Then I hit Ctrl+End, to go to the end of the folio. Wow!

Every post I ever fabricated on Facebook is here in the timeline. I don't know if it's fifty-fifty possible to go this far dorsum within the Facebook user interface. If it were possible, information technology would take hours, maybe days, of scrolling downwards, down, down. I found the nearly ten-year-one-time posts fascinating. The post "feeling chilled afterwards biking 10 miles in the rain Sunday to sentinel the Amgen riders showtime the first 100-mile ride" reminded me of the thrill of watching the opening of the offset Amgen Bout of California bicycle race. And I was proud to remember my grown daughter's high-schoolhouse success, Yard Prize in a regional animation contest.

Even in this user-friendly one-long-page form, paging through the unabridged Timeline would be too much to handle. Only if you want to check just when a sure outcome happened, an issue you posted on Facebook, yous can easily search the page for details. In result, information technology's an index for your unabridged Facebook history. What an unexpected treasure this is.

Every Photo, Awkwardly

Clicking Photos gets you a similar list, a timeline of every photo or album you ever posted. Information technology includes the date for albums, and any comments, merely not the text you shared forth with the album. When you click through to the individual photos, you lot don't see the dates, unless the photograph itself has comments. Facebook reports a raft of (to me) pointless information. Camera brand and model. Orientation, width, and tiptop. F-stop, ISO, and focal length. In my oldest photos, these are all the more useless because they're frequently either bare or cipher. I couldn't figure out why some iPhone photos include a modicum of information, while others get nothing.

Some photos appear automatically in predefined folders such equally Mobile Photos, Timeline Photos, and Profile Pictures. As with photos in your handcrafted folders, these display the non-useful camera information, followed by any comments. Whatsoever post that went along with the photo doesn't announced, nor is there whatever indication of a date, unless in the comments.

For a few photos, Facebook provides a link titled Facial Recognition Data. Clicking the link brings upwards a prepare of incomprehensible numbers and raw data. The fact that all of these were photos of Halloween pumpkins doesn't inspire conviction.

In my view, Facebook could handle this a lot better. Suppress the camera data except when requested. Include the date for any photo. And when I snap a photo and post it, include the text of the mail service with the photo.

Small-scale-Screen Video

Clicking Videos, equally expected, gets a list of all the videos you've posted, from newest to oldest, with a 284 by 160 pixel thumbnail. You also get the video's date and time, and any comments. When I clicked on a video, though, I got a surprise.

The Facebook archive stores videos every bit 400 by 224 MP4 files; it doesn't link to the full-size video that y'all posted. When I launched i of those, I constitute that the audio worked fine, simply the video itself merely showed shifting bands of colour. I tried a one-half-dozen videos, and the aforementioned matter happened with all of them.

That was under Firefox. When I opened the same page in Chrome or Edge, the video played back only fine. Cyberspace Explorer didn't effort internal playback, but instead suggested opening the video in the Movies & Tv app. Movie & Television set blew the video up to total screen, making it blurry, but it worked. I'chiliad non sure what the problem is with Firefox, but there are plenty of other browsers for viewing your archive.

What if your real urge is to find the full-calibration original video that you lot uploaded? You can't get there direct from the archive, but it can exist a help. Check the appointment under the desired video, so open up the list of videos right in your Facebook account online. Make a guess equally to how far you should scroll down. Click a video and check the engagement in the postal service that appears. Curlicue up or down equally necessary to bracket the desired appointment. It'south not ideal, just too not too hard.

Ads and More Ads

Facebook exists to tempt yous and other users with ads. Every time you click an ad, that'south some other data indicate for your profile. The first matter y'all encounter when yous click the Ads link is a list of all the topics Facebook thinks interest yous. In my case, the list runs to more than than five dozen items. Some make sense: coffee, California, computer security, network security, journalism, Alejandro Jodorowsky. Others take me head-scratching, things like water, landform, watermelon, and Order of Interbeing (what?). But those are the topics that inform just what ads Facebook inflicts on my feed.

More interesting is the post-obit section, Ads History. This is only a list of ads and sponsored posts you've clicked on recently. I'1000 not sure of the fourth dimension flow; the oldest 1 in my feed is from about vii weeks ago. It could also be a fixed number of the most recent ad-clicks. In my archive the total number lists comes out at the suspiciously round number 100. Yes, I confess, I clicked 100 ads. To exist off-white, I avoid clicking unsupported "Sponsored posts," but I do sometimes click ads shared past friends.

At the very end, the archive lists "Advertisers with your contact info," 8 of them, in my case. I recognize most of them, though I'm non sure how they got my contact info, or what information technology ways that they did. But a couple are completely unfamiliar. I'm very deliberately not Googling these, figuring that doing and so might just give The Watchers more than information.

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A Mess of Letters

Not surprisingly, Facebook keeps a tape of every conversation y'all hold using Facebook Messenger. All those conversations show upwards when you click Messages. And the resulting page is well-nigh completely useless.

In my archive, there is a list of about 200 names and name-groups, in no discernible society. To encounter a chat, you click the name. Quite a few have no conversations associated with them at all. Others are attempts at Messenger chat from people I don't know. At that place'due south no manner to tell if a given name or group leads to an actual conversation.

Checking on names where I know I have a Messenger history, I found that indeed it lists every substitution, back to the very first. The letters show up in reverse chronological order, so to read a unmarried chat, you must scan the date/fourth dimension stamps to find the initiating bulletin and and then read from bottom to peak. What a mess! And if you lot remember that yous had a conversation on a certain topic, but forget who y'all were chatting with, forget about it. There's no manner to search except by opening every name and searching.

Facebook, this could exist and so much amend! Give u.s. a list of names, yep, just show the number of messages associated with each. Let us sort by proper name or by number of letters. When we open the list of messages for a given person, show them in oldest-to-newest society, and employ some visual cue to testify the beginning of each new chat. Finally, let u.s. search across all messages. Now that would be a useful listing of letters!

Events and Pokes

I'yard sure you've received invitations to enough of events via Facebook. If I go an invitation to a truly personal happening, I make a point of actively choosing take or decline. Just if I'one thousand just not interested, perhaps because the consequence is impossibly distant, or sounds wearisome, I don't ordinarily do annihilation. Surprise! The Events page lists every event invitation you always received, fifty-fifty those that y'all totally ignored. I don't see a lot of value in this list, simply it seems harmless.

Likewise both useless and harmless is the list of pokes. Who pokes anybody these days?

Security Overload

I figured that clicking Security would show my Facebook Security settings, perhaps with a history of changes. Boy, was I wrong!

This page starts with a confusing list of Active Sessions. Information technology listed 17 active sessions, ane (correctly) identified as Facebook for iPad and 16 marked Unknown. Who knows what to brand of that?

The following list of Account Activity proved fifty-fifty more obtuse. A seemingly endless list of entries reports, in painful detail, on events like Session updated (these are the vast majority, for me), Spider web Session Terminated, and Login. The one slightly interesting entry accurately reported the engagement and fourth dimension of the last password alter. These entries only become dorsum most ii years.

Side by side upwardly is a listing of Recognized Machines, including entries for two iPads and 2 iPhones. Which ones? I've had several. The appointment/fourth dimension stamps were no assistance; all four say they were created December 31, 1969 at 4:00 p.thou. PST. That date seems unlikely. None of the concluding-modified dates are newer than 2014, and the entries include no identifying device information, beyond the IP address.

I plant niggling utilise for a list of logins and logouts during the previous year. A list of Login Protection Data reveals cookies and IP addresses used or updated in the last year. The list ends with estimated locations based on IP addresses, just simple decimal latitude and longitude, with no link to a map view.

At the very, very end is a short section that might be useful to some. The Administrative Records department lists things like changes to your password, changes to your security answers, and something chosen "Checkpoint completed."

So, OK, it's truthful that Facebook keeps painfully detailed information near your logins and devices. You tin look at it until your eyes cross. A security expert might dump this data to detect possible hacking, simply the average consumer will find lilliputian of interest.

Things I Didn't Know Facebook Knew

Earlier my recent experimentation, I hadn't really idea almost what-all data Facebook keeps near me. Clearly, it has to retain my posts and pics, and I know it uses some techniques to decide which ads it'll testify. Downloading and paging through my Facebook archive was a real eye-opener. I ran into real surprises, some positive, some negative, some just…surprising.

1. The Timeline archive can be a fantastic index for your entire Facebook history. It'south well-well-nigh impossible to scroll dorsum a few years in your live Facebook feed, but in the archive, you can easily search the entire timeline.
2. Facebook doesn't just know my friends. It knows everyone who's asked to be a friend, fifty-fifty if I ignored the request. It knows everyone I've unfriended, and every friend asking I've rejected. Possibly that's non so bad, only I was surprised.
3. The archive'due south list of videos displays nicely from newest to oldest, with a date/time stamp for each video. Merely you don't get to run across the actual post, the video displays in a tiny rectangle, and it seems not to piece of work in Firefox.
4. Some items in Facebook's listing of "my" ad topics make sense; others seem off the wall. The revelation that I've clicked 100 ads in less than ii months is an heart-opener.
5. Something I did, at some by fourth dimension, gave Facebook permission to grab all kinds of unrelated contact info. Weirdly, it simply shows phone numbers, even though I've never called 90 percentage of those people, and a fair number of them are dead. Unsettling.
6. Your annal lists everyone with whom you've ever chatted using Messenger, which sounds like it would be handy. Simply the information is disorganized and hard to follow, and there's no way to search your messages.

If you haven't yet washed it, coil back to the meridian of this article and follow the instructions to download your own archive. Page through it, think nearly it, do your best to get by the poorly designed parts. The annal isn't just evidence for yous of what Facebook has on you. Y'all can also brand it a useful resource, assuming it doesn't inspire you to simply delete Facebook.

Presuming yous're keeping Facebook, I strongly advise that you lot bite the bullet and disable the platform that lets Facebook share your information. Yes, that means you give up your games and apps, those nasty little spies. And you must log in to websites using unique passwords. But these are good things! With these precautions, you tin proceed using Facebook and however proceed (most of) your privacy.

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Source: https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-download-your-facebook-data-and-6-surprising-things-i-found

Posted by: marquezsuble1955.blogspot.com

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