I Downloaded the Information That Facebook Has on Me

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/technology/personaltech/i-downloaded-the-information-that-facebook-has-on-me-yikes.html

by tim333 • 8 years ago

123 103 8 years ago

nytimes.com

qntty• 8 years ago

On a brighter note, I downloaded an archive of my LinkedIn data. The data set was less than half a megabyte and contained exactly what I had expected: spreadsheets of my LinkedIn contacts and information I had added to my profile.

Somehow I'm unwilling to believe that Linkedin is really an exception here. More likely they don't include all the data they have on you.

I downloaded my facebook data, and the only thing that I was surprised at is that they actually give you so much of the data they have on you. I expected them to redact most of it. Is it really reasonable to think that they don't have even more data than they let you download? They're not required by law to give it all to you, are they?

jordache• 8 years ago

exactly... do not take at face value what these services deliver to you. I chuckled at the guy who assumed he deleted all of his FB data via a data scrapping client..

antisthenes• 8 years ago

Yep, if there's any takeaway from here is that companies will gladly take multiple avenues and channels to lie to you.

1. Not providing tools to see or download your data

2. Simply not providing options to turn off data collection or pretending that the options available are complete.

3. Providing tools to see and download a portion of your data, pretending that it is complete

4. Pretending to delete your data on account deletion but retaining the data, or at least a portion of the data

5. Collecting more data than they say they do

6. Collecting data on people who do not directly interact with the company services

taurath2• 8 years ago

Linkedin is worse than Facebook in terms of privacy. So many dark patterns on their site - someday their reckoning will come just as facebooks. Easier target too since it could hurt people’s jobs and careers.

bhnmmhmd• 8 years ago

When Microsoft acquired LinkedIn I suspected they will go for the top talent with this. Think about it:

Based on users' data and behavior, one can anticipate whether or not he/she is going to quit/leave his/her current job. Microsoft recruiters can then swoop in and offer him/her a job.

Or for example, Microsoft can essentially map all the top IT talents network and use this to its advantage.

The list goes on...

fredliu• 8 years ago

Definitely the things Linkedin do are so much worse and creepier, just by looking at the people they recommend me to connect to, the level of offline tracking they must be doing are creepy beyond imagination.

phy612• 8 years ago

My old boss loved to play big brother on us with LinkedIn. She'd get notified when we were updating our stuff, and I think she could see when we were messaging with recruiters/etc. I'm not entirely sure what the limits were with her upgraded account, but she wasn't good at hiding that she knew when her employees were looking for new jobs.

greggarious3• 8 years ago

Linkedin is worse than Facebook in terms of privacy.

And that sucks since it's hard to have a professional life w/o one. I've known women who were stalked/harassed because despite otherwise being pretty locked down their harassers found their linkedin and used that to harangue them.

FilterSweep• 8 years ago

Facebook's reckoning never came, judging by the laughable "grand inquisition" that happened this past week.

paulie_a5• 8 years ago

I couldn't delete multiple connections at a time. So I deleted my LinkedIn account instead. LinkedIn really serves no purpose if you are not in HR.

sixothree4• 8 years ago

Is it really reasonable to think that they don't have even more data than they let you download?

No. They have more data. They have lots more data. Browsing history for example via trackers.

And no, we (Americans) do not have any meaningful laws. Nothing. Nor do we have any rights to privacy. We have no right to know what personal private information is being collected, bought, or sold.

9080873• 8 years ago

Exactly. The number of "This is all of the data Facebook/Google/etc have on you" articles I've seen recently make me want to bang my head on the wall. They absolutely are not letting you download everything they have.

Maarten88• 8 years ago

As a European, the situation is only slightly better for me. Formally I have some rights, and some things that are legal in the US may be illegal here, but that has not kept any company from doing it anyway. I have yet to receive better privacy in real terms, and hope GDPR will finally make the mass intrusions unprofitable, maybe even criminal.

There was the Bye Bye Facebook event here yesterday, 10k people from the Netherlands deleted their Facebook accounts.

Personally I'm waiting until may 25 to do this: I hope that after that date, Facebook will be legally required to really delete my data, and be liable if they don't. I'm afraid that before that date, they'll just hide that data from me, and continue adding to it by tracking, and continue selling it to advertisers outside the Facebook site.

sandbags• 8 years ago

My guess with all of these sites is that they are willing to give me the data I gave them, but not the data they inferred about me or pieced together from other sources. My concern is that this data may be more sensitive and hold more potential for harm than what I gave them (since I was willing to share it with them in the first place).

hunt• 8 years ago

Anecdotally, I had a very strange experience with LinkedIn. I went to stay with my friend in another country for a few days and upon returning home, LinkedIn recommended his father as a connection - despite me never electronically contacting him. The friend I stayed with doesn't have LinkedIn nor have I contacted him over email or similar. My guess is that it must have been location based or because I connected to their WiFi - very weird.

phy612• 8 years ago

Yes, my guess is either public IP or GPS colocation from phone apps, possibly even using the wifi AP name if you both had phones connected. If civilian GPS is good to a few meters, it's easy to look up who lives in that radius.

squarefoot• 8 years ago

"They're not required by law to give it all to you, are they?"

Not sure about the law (which also changes from country to country) but even if they'd be required to give all users their data, it is possible that they keep a relevant slice of the results obtained by matching that data. Releasing all that data public could reveal the inner workings of their algorithms, so I'd understand if they would rather release what people gave them while keeping most of what they inferred from that information, which of course is where the real knowledge is.

whyever• 8 years ago

They're not required by law to give it all to you, are they?

They are in Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems

celticninja• 8 years ago

In the UK, and possibly throughout the EU, they legally have to provide everything they have on you under the Data Protection Act for no more than a £10 administration fee.

WillPostForFood• 8 years ago

Why should Facebook remember the people I’ve cut off from my life?

For one reason, so they aren’t recommended to you as a possible friend in the future. Seems like a minor thing to be upset about in a possibility space of major things.

phy612• 8 years ago

Seems reasonable. I can see the <insert perpetually outraged millennial news site> headline now: "An open letter to Facebook: How dare you recommended I be friends with my rapist"

danso2• 8 years ago

To be fair, that situation sounds like one that would be better served by using the Block option, rather than just inference from the defriending action.

sixothree4• 8 years ago

Too bad this is only a small portion of what Facebook collects. For example, it doesn't include information they have purchased from third parties.

return12• 8 years ago

do they do that?

qaz_plm• 8 years ago

It appears they've been doing it since 2012: https://www.engadget.com/2016/12/30/facebook-buys-data-on-us...

Assuming this is up-to-date this tells you who they buy from: https://www.facebook.com/help/494750870625830

danso2• 8 years ago

The terms of buying that data may prevent them from distributing it.

ygaf2• 8 years ago

The social network had even kept a permanent record of the roughly 100 people I had deleted from my friends list over the last 14 years, including my exes.

How useful is the info one can even get from this?

I mean even if you interpret unfriending as enemying (which is a leap), possibly revealing interests you don't have, associations you don't have.... it's a lot weaker (to advertisers) than positive information.

lordCarbonFiber• 8 years ago

As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, it's probably so they don't recommend those connections in the future. I think the average user would be much more upset at facebook recommending they add their ex as a friend (because of course you have a lot of mutual connections, tagged pictures, and other flags that might indicate a strong bond) than just keeping a black list of people you've chosen to remove.

ygaf2• 8 years ago

My bad; that's social media 101.

paulie_a5• 8 years ago

Which is odd because Facebook routinely has recommended ex's.

phy612• 8 years ago

I had nearly 4500 'friends' I un-friended from back when I did Zynga MafiaWars botting. I wonder what I look like on their stats hahah

danielovichdk• 8 years ago

I also downloaded my data and deleted my account.

I have known for a long time, even before the scandal, that my time on the socalled social media site was coming to an end.

Being a software engineer I believe I am aware of a good deal of what is going on behind the scenes at Facebook, in terms of collecting data etc.

Talking to people which has no technical insight around privacy, and what data is collected as such, frustrates me to a whole new level than before.

It amazes me that people don't sit down for a couple of hours and tries to understand how the company works and what their business model is based on. And what data is collected from them, with or without their knowledge.

I am happy to be off and I will try to convince my peers to understand why.

mixmastamyk• 8 years ago

If it were only social media companies that might be significant, but every company we interact with is doing the same things these days. For example, did you know that employers are selling weekly paycheck info to credit bureaus without consent? Unbelievable it's not illegal.

For some strange reason Americans only care about privacy regarding medical info, but everything else is totally up for grabs. Never understood that dichotomy.

klmr• 8 years ago

By contrast, I found that my Facebook dump was extremely devoid of information. Sure, a few advertisers have my data (but much fewer than in the article, < 200!). Beyond that, the dump contains very little information that I didn’t explicitly provide to Facebook (such as Timeline posts, images, etc). At most it assigned a very broad category to me (“Established Adult Life” — OK, duh).

Of note, it did not contain any record of phone calls or SMS conversations I’ve had. This is probably because I didn’t give Facebook permission to collect this data, when asked.

Of course I’m under no illusion that this is the only data that Facebook has on me. Based on my (even sporadic) activity they must be able to infer lots more (and then there’s all that tracker data). They just don’t make the interesting bits downloadable.

phy612• 8 years ago

For a while I had enabled Messenger to handle texts on my phone, because it kept nagging me to do so, and also the one built in to the phone was terrible. So that means for a time they saw all my github/gmail authenticator login codes, delivery notifications, etc. I'm sure that's all somewhere.

paulie_a5• 8 years ago

I can't even imagine how terrible that phone app was that Facebook messenger was a viable alternative. The floating head thing was truly awful.

bdamm2• 8 years ago

Agreed; missing from the list is which entities have me in their list of contacts. This is of course available to Facebook. Of course they can't give me this data because they don't have consent from the other party, but still at least a nod to the missing data would be appropriate.

9080873• 8 years ago

No, they downloaded the portion Facebook is willing to allow them to download. This is absolutely not everything Facebook has.

Note the wording here, which is similar to the misleading wording Zuckerberg used to avoid honestly answering certain questions in recent days:

“allows people to see and take out all the information they’ve put into Facebook.”

This doesn't include data such as:

- Data your "friends" have "put into Facebook" about you, which could include SMS/call records of your communications with those friends and various other details.

- Data Facebook purchases or collects from data brokers or public records

- Data Facebook collects on the broader web via "like" buttons, etc

phy612• 8 years ago

Exactly. I downloaded mine and there were entire chat histories missing, and some of the ones I explored were incomplete. I could see more data in the actual browser chat interface than what was in the download. It didn't include posts I made on other people pages, all the likes, shares, and the thousands of gifs I've sh!tposted. It also did not include data from the pages I manage/own.

deckar01• 8 years ago

An additional concern is an attacker phishing a user’s email/Facebook password and downloading this dump to aid with identity theft or blackmail.

wnevets• 8 years ago

I did this last night and the only surprising thing about the data they had were contact details from ~8 years ago.

giarc• 8 years ago

More important, the pieces of data that I found objectionable, like the record of people I had unfriended, could not be removed from Facebook, either.

The article somewhat alludes to this practice as nefarious so that Facebook can serve better ads. Through a different view, one where you don't assume the worst, you could argue they keep a record of who you unfriend, so they don't recommend them as a friend again.

We are currently in a place where everything Facebook does is bad. Let's be a bit more rationale at times.

itakedrugs• 8 years ago

I wish that I could download all the information that Google has on me, but I was stupid and I asked them to hide it from me...

zuckdrink• 8 years ago

https://takeout.google.com

return12• 8 years ago

Can the US government please make such a tool for foreign citizens?

phy612• 8 years ago

If you believe Conspiracy Theories™ , and have a comfy tinfoil hat, this is it. There was something called Lifelog. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog

laythea• 8 years ago

Sorry but I fear the horse has already bolted.

Even if you were able to delete yourself entirely from Facebook. You have been "consumed" already.

Your data was valuable in at least 2 ways: - Monetize to companies such as Cambridge Analytics. - Train Facebook's AI models using it.

What was probably happening, was that Facebook was selling your data to other companies so that they can train AI models/make conclusions etc. In addition, Facebook itself is using this data to train AI, make conclusions etc.

Facebook will no longer be able to Monetize to companies as much after this media.

However, and this is the big one, if they use your data to train their models to target individuals (and therefore "take advantage" of them), then they can claim that your data was not used. And then they sell the models, or the results of the models. Its like indirectly selling your data.

This could be a big win for Facebook, because if Facebook does not dish out our information to other companies, it will *uniquely" be placed to provide such services to the rest of the world.

And this will be almost impossible to regulate.

B1FF_PSUVM2• 8 years ago

then they sell the models, or the results of the models

Meh, the models will be worthless in a few months, and that is if they aren't already worthless right now.

All those black boxes with magic coefficients from inputs to outputs are inherently unmaintainable. Toss them a black swan, and it all goes pear-shaped.

spullara2• 8 years ago

Facebook doesn't and has never sold data. It has a free developer platform that has been reduced over time to almost nothing and it has ad products where it uses the data it has to deliver ads to people that match criteria.

bdamm2• 8 years ago

Missing from the list is any way to find out what some of these listed entities mean. For example, under "Advertisers who uploaded a contact list with your information" is claimed "Nebula Mars". What exactly is that? I can't google it and get any useful result. It both meaningless in its terminally symbolic state and deeply meaningful as an indicator of where my data is truly living in the world.

abalone6• 8 years ago

I just downloaded my Facebook data archive. It is incomplete. They are leaving out one of the creepiest aspects: Your search history.

Click in the search bar on Facebook. On the right is an Edit button. This shows the search history they keep on you -- all the people you've looked up. Says a lot about you. It goes back years, unless you clear it. (And who knows what "clear" really means.)

This would be a rather unsettling thing to see in your archive. They totally left it out.

sschueller3• 8 years ago

I believe data about you missing from the export would be a violation of the EU law that requires companies to provide this feature.

WA4• 8 years ago

True but how do you prove it and how do you claim an honest full download?

Because one thing is clear: the data they have on me in my archive is by far not enough to train the feed in the way it is shown to me. How do I know? Because my download archive doesn’t have that much info on me and there must be more.

nerfhammer• 8 years ago

GPDR (assuming that's what you're talking about) doesn't take effect until next month

WA4• 8 years ago

More missing:

- Likes on everything I liked on FB and external

- Shares via Share Buttons on external websites

- Websites I visited and where I was tracked because of Social Media buttons

- Time spent on FB

- Status updates I changed or dismissed

- Mouse hovering behavior to train the feed

- Data like my phone number that wasn’t put there by me but correlated through my friends address books

- Metadata through WhatsApp acquisition

- ...

icedchai2• 8 years ago

Do you really think they're obligated to provide you absolutely everything they know about you? I don't.

I would say if they provide everything you've directly provided, they've fulfilled their "obligation."

Obligation is in quotes, because I don't actually believe they should even be required to do this.

toufka• 8 years ago

From Mark's testimony yesterday, it seems like the above attributes are not your data, but FB's data about you - to which you are not entitled. "You own your data" means any messages, photos, and posts you write you keep your copyright to, and FB will make those data easily exportable. But any metadata, or any usage data is not actually your data, Facebook currently contends. Nor is any data about you that Facebook has, acquired, or purchased.

sschueller3• 8 years ago

Would be a neat little project to try to scrape your own data out of Facebook.

mudil2• 8 years ago

Can anyone explain to me why FB and Google surveillance of me does not violate the 4th amendment? "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated..."

greggarious3• 8 years ago

Because Facebook is not a governmental agency for starters...

mudil2• 8 years ago

The amendment doesn't say anything about the government agencies. It says about the unreasonable search.

B1FF_PSUVM2• 8 years ago

There's a form of doublethink going around that says that, for instance, censorship is fine as long as it isn't the state doing it directly.

(Usually only when the sauce is for the goose. If for the gander, indignation ensues.)

spullara2• 8 years ago

These dumps of all the stuff that is in the service about you is super dangerous. If they get your account they can then download everything you have ever posted almost effortlessly. I can imagine these will be on sale in the dark web.

dc2• 8 years ago

It's interesting to note that the data Google stored was more alarming, though was taken up at the bottom of the article and with less detail. It also didn't make the headline. This is because bashing Facebook gets more views currently. This is a good example of how media bias can distort opinion, while maintaining that all data stated is accurate.

In other words, it's not enough that media is accurate. Bias is just as important.

tzury• 8 years ago

You downloaded the information Facebook shared with you when you asked for the information they have on you.

Tracking cookies, personal profiling, and several other trails would probably never be exposed.

ta23464947• 8 years ago

I left Facebook years ago for this kind of privacy scraping antisocial greed (and LinkedIn et al), but one thing I'm curious about with this latest 'revelation' is whether or not you can get information about your shadow profile.

Presumably that doesn't mean an email address, they actually collate information about you the individual - what's the process of having a look at that?

I Downloaded the Information That Facebook Has on Me

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