How To See Everything Facebook Knows About You
March 24, 2018 | Technology
Facebook stores everything you’ve ever done on its service. Here’s how to find out what it knows.
Just like Google and Apple, Facebook knows almost everything we do online. Facebook never forgets.
And never was this realisation as stark as it is now, following the mess Facebook has found itself in with its Cambridge Analytica dealings. Cambridge Analytica hit the headlines mid-March after it transpired that the British analytics firm allegedly acquired data from millions of Facebook users, without consent, to help target certain voters in the 2016 Presidential election. Facebook is accused of enabling the company and the pairing is now under investigation.
This has led to a spike in searches for how to delete a Facebook account as well as people looking for ways to have greater control of their Facebook data and what the site knows about them. This is possible by downloading your Facebook history, and we've explained how to do that below.
Be warned, though, there really is a worrying amount of information. This isn’t just a Reader’s Digest version of your Facebook profile, this is everything you’ve ever done on the social network. It knows when you’ve logged in, where you’ve logged in, the ads you’ve clicked on, the people you’ve unfriended, the locations of the photos you’ve taken and even every event you’ve ever been invited to – whether you actually went or not.
READ NEXT: How to delete Facebook permanently.
So, if you still want to see everything Facebook knows about you with just a couple of clicks and a bit of patience, here’s how:
Download your Facebook information:
- Click the down arrow on your Facebook account and head to “Settings”.
- At the bottom of “Settings” you’ll see “Download a copy of your Facebook data” click it.
- On the next page click “Download Archive” and enter your Facebook password for security confirmation.
- You’ll now be sent an email with your entire archive. The time this takes is very much dependent on how large it actually is. Ours took around 20 minutes to come through.
- A time-sensitive link will arrive in your inbox prompting you to download your archive.
- The file comes down as a .zip so make sure you have something capable of unpacking them, both OS X and Windows 10 handle this without the need for extra software.
- Now you can browse your way through a set of web page-like stores of information. For instance, “index.htm” is an archived version of your Facebook profile including past relationships, jobs and education institutions (my account is in “l33t” so that’s why everything is written weirdly).
- You can view every photo you’ve uploaded along with all the EXIF data Facebook has on it – i.e. where and when it was taken, and even where it was uploaded.
- You can even see everyone you’ve ever unfriended. Sorry guys…
- In fact, Facebook has kept track of every event you’ve ever attended, videos uploaded, locations and devices you've logged in from, the messages you’ve sent, the images it compiles for facial recognition and even what advertising topics it thinks you prefer being served...
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- Article originally on alphr.com.
