Facebook Now Allows You To “Download Your Information”

http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/06/facebook-now-allows-you-to-download-your-information/

by ssclafani • 16 years ago

240 109 16 years ago

jmathai• 16 years ago

I'm curious what exactly this means. Are they going to be exposing this via the graph API so that the data can be programatically used to port from one network to another? If not then I don't really see the value of this except for marketing and goodwill.

If they do expose it via the graph API then that truly is a big deal :).

waterlesscloud• 16 years ago

The Techcrunch notes are hard to decipher, being taken real time and all. But it sounds like they're doing something very interesting. Like they want to be the source of all social interactions on the web without having monolithic control.

Which, as Zuckerberg seems to be saying, is a difficult task to balance indeed.

mechanical_fish• 16 years ago

I don't really see the value of this except for marketing and goodwill.

Don't underestimate the power of marketing and goodwill.

More specifically: This feature may make it really hard to sell the average Facebook user on the value of a "more open" system. It will appear to solve 80% of the problem and the other 20% is hard for nonprogrammers to understand.

GEEK: "Come use our Facebook alternative! It's open, and all your data belongs to you!"

USER: "But Facebook is a platform for sending stuff to my friends. It's for things I want to share, not things I want to keep for myself."

GEEK: "But what if Facebook crashes and all your data is lost? Or what if you want to get all those photos back out of Facebook and stuff them into your new photo frame, or something?"

USER: "No problem, I'll use Facebook's download feature. In fact, I stuffed a downloaded copy into Dropbox just last week. [1]"

GEEK: "But Facebook's download feature doesn't include social graph metadata, so you can never put the links all back together again."

USER: "Wait, what did you just say? It sounded like TECH TECH TECH TECH to me."

I'm guessing that, no matter what this feature really is, it will probably accomplish my real-life use case: "My wife uploaded all her photos to Facebook and now I want them back." That's a nice win.

---

[1] Note that I posited a really sophisticated Facebook user who understands the value of periodic offsite backups. Because even that user probably doesn't know what a "social graph" is.

MattBarba• 16 years ago

It appears that it's built as an app that crawls the graph, zips up all your media, photos, videos, etc. Once unzipped, it seems to be html based, browsable format.

Based on this I think its safe to say that even without explicit APIs you could easily whip up some parsers, accept one of these zip files, and pull all the data into your own app.

Here's the live stream if you don't want to take TC's word for it: http://apps.facebook.com/facebooklive/

jonmc122• 16 years ago

Lets say I can convince all of my friends to download and continually sync their FB data. Then, I build a desktop app or web service on top of an open, distributed network with a UI that encompasses most of the features that people use on FB.

It seems like I could interact with my friends, still use facebook as I please, and gradually evolve my social media interactions towards a more open, distributed network.

Any reason why we would not see a handful of such projects emerge?

taylorlb• 16 years ago

My feeling: we are already so close to hitting the lock in point with Facebook, that although many projects will emerge, they will ultimately go nowhere, despite data portability and genuine interest in alternatives.

michael_dorfman• 16 years ago

They can emerge, but they're going to have a hell of a time getting traction, as they've got the mother of all chicken-and-egg problems.

xtacy• 16 years ago

So, would we expect to see downloadable user apps that use this data in this particular format and do crazy things like visualise one's activity on FB over the past few years? How much would an average person's data be on FB (apart from pictures/videos): few megabytes of compressed data?

frisco2• 16 years ago

People seem to be intepreting this as "OMG now we can build a new social network and convert users easily!"

Users still aren't going to leave Facebook. Facebook realizes this, which is why they can do this now. Your mother's cousin is on Facebook. She won't be on Diaspora or (X). That said, this is pretty cool for its own reasons. Like waterlesscloud said, it looks like they "want to be the source of all social interactions on the web without having monolithic control."

This is definitely a smart move for Facebook -- be willing to give a little on data portability to position themselves as open.

Facebook has a gigantic ecosystem. Thousands of sites use Facebook Connect to provide social context and are predicated on everyone interesting have a Facebook account. A social network is a very complicated webapp -- probably the most complex many of its users interact with on a daily basis -- and literally hundreds of millions of users don't want to have to re-learn that. Remember that we're talking about here: take, for example, the http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_yo... incident. They have such tremendous inertia that even being able to one-click import your data to another app isn't likely to damage them.

This move is kind of like Jobs saying, "all smartphones have problems. We're not perfect. But we're trying to do the best of anyone." At least for the moment, it's changed the discourse from "wow Facebook supports developers terribly" to "hey, Facebook's not entirely a walled garden!": what Scott Adam's called the "high ground maneuver".

avar3• 16 years ago

They might leave Facebook if something comes along that's much better, and importing your data is one click away.

The biggest advantage Facebook has is that it has your data, being able to export it changes the game.

ugh2• 16 years ago

You’ve got it backwards.

The biggest advantage Facebook has is that 500 million people have an account. Facebook would be utterly useless if nobody was using it. Network effects make Facebook hard to beat, not your data. They need your data only to make money but they get your data because you and your mom and everyone else have an account.

zipdog• 16 years ago

This is what I was thinking. FB has reached the marketshare where it's fairly safe for them to relax the control they hold, because even if a variety of open rivals appear, using the data that FB releases, FB will still be the centre of the action.

Alternatively, there may be a parallel to IBM giving away the PC specs, inadvertently pushing the monopoly down to the OS and weakening their market position (though creating a tech boon for everyone that made the market so much bigger).

Jun8• 16 years ago

frisco, very well put! "Wind makes a small fire expire but makes a large one bigger", as you state, I guess FB now feels they're pretty much invincible in their user stickiness, so they don't feel threatened. In fact, as people build other services off this data, they'll have even more visibility (if that's possible).

mkinsella• 16 years ago

That's what people said about MySpace

tptacek• 16 years ago

At its height, how big was MySpace compared to where Facebook is at now?

Somebody has always said something like this about some predecessor.

philwelch• 16 years ago

And people have been making your point ever since Facebook opened up to the general population. But MySpace, even in its heyday, wasn't nearly as big as Facebook was a year or two ago.

jonmc122• 16 years ago

The majority of MS windows users don't use Linux either, and the fact that Linux did not run MS apps did not keep a community from pushing forward what an OS and app ecosystem can do.

I'm not thinking 'OMG now I can convert users!', I'm saying, 'Cool, I can possibly evolve what a social network can do for me and a group of friends, while working with the FB ecosystem.'

Facebook will have to build features for the masses - we can build social networks for the subsets of users. We can convince users to download their piece of the social graph by offering a unique niche experience, and getting creative about what it means to interact socially online for the subsets of the masses.

Today's announcement was more than a 'high-road' PR stunt. To extend the linux analogy, FB just made it easy for each user to create a virtual machine where we can run a niche social network side by side with the gigantic ecosystem that is facebook.

jlgbecom5• 16 years ago

The combined size of social networks that aren't Facebook is over 1.5 billion people, probably more.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websi...

Facebook has the most users in one place, but the dust is nowhere near settled on where everyone will end up.

This bodes very well for a decentralized solution. I doubt Diaspora will be the first (I think Appleseed (http://opensource.appleseedproject.org) is much more likely), but ultimately, it will be an easily implemented protocol with mature cross-platform libraries that'll really take it down.

This is a good PR move on Facebook's part, because it willfully misinterprets people's frustrations with Facebook. It's not that you didn't have a local copy of your data, it's that you had no control over your data when it was out in the wild. This will take some wind out of the sails of the decentralized solutions, but the armada is still coming.

frisco2• 16 years ago

> The combined size of social networks that aren't Facebook is over 1.5 billion people, probably more.

How much of that overlaps with Facebook? Approximately 500 million? Also, they're measuring total registrations: FB has probably close to a billion registrations on their 500 million actives. All that statistic tells you is that FB has room to grow.

gecko• 16 years ago

I don't want to take this too far off-topic, but: why Appleseed? I hadn't heard of them until just now.

joe_the_user2• 16 years ago

Scanning your link,

It seems like the majority of the non-Facebook figure comes from Chinese language sites. Since social networking sites will quite likely be segmented by language for the foreseeable future, I don't think this really counts. In the English-language world, Facebook has serious network effect and you would be hard-pressed to combine all of FB's competitors into anything.

I agree dispersed social networking is coming... I'm not sure if "control" of data is the way to phrase the "problem"... Still, creating a dispersed network where each contributor controls where their data goes is a very hard problem.

ugh2• 16 years ago

My sister is in four social networks other than Facebook. I don’t think it matters. (Five if you insist on counting MySpace.) She would pick Facebook if she had to.

eogas2• 16 years ago

>Your mother's cousin is on Facebook. She won't be on Diaspora or (X).

All the more reason to use Diaspora or (X).

chrischen2• 16 years ago

Yea as facebook becomes more mainstream the hip people will need a new place to go.

sprout• 16 years ago

Glad to hear Zuckerberg has made good on his previously stated commitment to openness.

ceejayoz2• 16 years ago

Let's see how usable the exports are before we say that.

ghempton• 16 years ago

Regardless of whatever intentions fb has behind this, it honestly makes me feel warmer towards fb and their service. It now feels more like a personal data store that I can retrieve when I please.

chaostheory2• 16 years ago

Data export is nice... now if only I can delete the data I don't want Facebook to have, like phone numbers of people who aren't even on Facebook.

ceejayoz2• 16 years ago

You didn't look very hard...

http://www.facebook.com/contact_importer/remove_uploads.php?...

ktsmith• 16 years ago

Too bad a lot of people have already pointed out that it doesn't even work.

chaostheory2• 16 years ago

"Please try again later"

As kt has already pointed out, it hasn't worked. To my knowledge it hasn't worked for weeks now. Facebook has made no mention of its status.

moultano6• 16 years ago

Kudos. This fixes my biggest criticism of Facebook. I'm going to be a lot more comfortable using it now. The moving target privacy policies are a bit of an issue still, but I'm willing to give them a half pass on that as the price of innovation.

jacquesm5• 16 years ago

I think you are living proof their PR department is on top of their game again.

moultano6• 16 years ago

If their PR department influences their engineers to implement features that I want, good for them. I'm not inclined to care which part of the organization made the proposal.

jacoblyles• 16 years ago

Sometimes a cool feature is just a cool feature.

pclark• 16 years ago

You know, what exactly can Facebook do to make people like you happy?

Facebook has to make money to do this they have to have users to do this they have to make a good product to do this they have to hire good engineers and to do that they have to make money, oh and if they're super evil no one will want to work for them, let alone use their product

Facebook really isn't as evil as most of these comments make out, and the fact Facebook lets you download your data isn't good enough makes you, whatever the opposite of a fanboy is, to Facebook.

Can I download my data off Google? Flickr? Any other major consumer site? Amazon doesn't hold my hand if I want to move to another service.

If you assume anything non-evil that a company does is "because the PR says so" I pity your outlook on the world.

Here's what I think. I don't think Facebook is evil. I think Facebook is young and they're pushing the boundaries of the web, and sometimes - sometimes - they over step a line and do something wrong. And what do Facebook do? They apologize. They change the features. And it doesn't make any difference to people like you.

Oh and by the way, normal users don't give a shit about any of this.

Haters gonna hate, indeed.

lwhi5• 16 years ago

Perhaps some people need to realise that using Facebook involves creating data, in the same sense that creating documents in MS Word or Excel creates files.

This might be an important step in educating people to think differently about what Facebook is and what the implications of using it might be - for instance, not many people like the idea of a stranger gaining access to the files on their local hard disk. In many ways, the privacy implications involved in using Facebook are similar.

mp3jeep012• 16 years ago

This seems pretty interesting - it's a good opportunity for sites like Flickr and the like to allow 'Facebook Zip' uploads and they'll automatically parse out your photos and store them in your account.

timmaah• 16 years ago

Their Graph API allows this to be done without the ugly hacks.

mp3jeep012• 16 years ago

People may feel more open when they are sharing a .zip rather than 'logging in' - I know a lot of people that are still opposed to 'connecting' accounts - this avoids that connection, regardless of OAuth, straight username/password, etc.,

It's not clear to a lot of people 'what exactly' they are sharing when they link accounts, but when you upload a .zip, you are ONLY sharing what's contained in that file - there really is a big difference between uploading and linking =p

skbohra123• 16 years ago

waiting for that download button to appear.

marknutter• 16 years ago

So all those donations to the Diaspora project seem to have paid off, but not in the way we expected. Instead of it spawning an alternative to Facebook, it put sufficient pressure on Facebook to compel them to allow users to easily download and port their data any time they want to. The internet works in mysterious ways, doesn't it?

xelipe• 16 years ago

I'm glad Facebook did this. I've wished for a long time that Google had this feature since I care about my Google Mail and Google Docs a lot more than my Facebook Status updates. This is a step in the right direction for people like me that backs up my twitter updates because Twitter is sometimes does not give you access to your entire history. More services should implement similar features, I'm sure that companies like will create import tools for this data.

Now, if only Facebook simplified it's process to delete an account...

nfriedly• 16 years ago

Is there any way to export your contacts including email and phone numbers? I know there was a greasemonkey script for it a while back, but facebook had apparently changed the html enough that it didn't work when I tried it.

kenjackson• 16 years ago

Facebook you just kept me from leaving your service. Keep this up and I might actually become an advocate. :-)

ajju4• 16 years ago

I think Facebook has designed this feature very carefully so as to make sure it doesn't make it easier for another platform to use this as a data import feature. First, the process to get your data is not "click a button and download" but "click a button - wait for emailed link - download". This means that unless you are comfortable giving the new platform access to your inbox, they can't get your data.

Secondly, Mark seemed to be pretty clear in his reply to the last question: The information you download will not contain any information about your friends. It won't have their contact details. I am not sure if it will have a list of their names, but without an email address, such a list would be largely useless to any new platform.

So yeah, I think this is a pretty crafty P.R. move, a decent feature for users (hey, being able to download all my FB photos and videos would mean I have to stop worrying about backing them up), but this is not going to help new social networks recruit users.

_delirium• 16 years ago

That seems like it also reduces some of the potential security downsides. You probably don't want a situation where tricking a user into giving up their password results in the ability to instantly pull huge piles of information.

ajju4• 16 years ago

It certainly reduces the potential security downside for Facebook. If someone tricks you into giving up your email password, they could get all of your email but is that a valid argument against letting you download all of your contacts and emails?

ynniv3• 16 years ago

unless you are comfortable giving the new platform access to your inbox, they can't get your data

Huh? You receive a link to a zip file, which you then download. Your statement would be pretty FUDly if it weren't so busy being wrong.

I am not sure if it will have a list of their names, but without an email address, such a list would be largely useless to any new platform.

If your friend also dumps their Facebook data into the new platform, they could be trivially identified as your friend by Facebook id. If ids are scrubbed from all of the data (unlikely), any decent competing service should have the ability for you to find your friends.

this is not going to help new social networks recruit users

On the contrary, this provides everything that a new social network could ask for. It makes it simple for a user to collect all of their data for import into another site. But here's the amazing part: this has been an open possibility since the f8 conference in April:

[ http://www.insidefacebook.com/2010/04/21/facebook-removing-2... ]

The convenience and openness of this latest feature show how confident Facebook is that people won't leave, and they're right. Facebook has become a well regarded premium household brand, and that's extremely difficult to overcome. There is no credible competition at this point, and it will take years to build something which is merely a better loser than MySpace.

Robin_Message• 16 years ago

>>unless you are comfortable giving the new platform access to your inbox, they can't get your data

>Huh? You receive a link to a zip file, which you then download. Your statement would be pretty FUDly if it weren't so busy being wrong.

I'm assuming the grandparent is talking about an automated site that imports from facebook by asking for my facebook username and password. This can't work, because the zip link goes to my e-mail, so I either have to copy-paste the link from my e-mail or provide my e-mail address and e-mail password as well, as the grandparent said. Your statement would pretty wrong if it weren't so busy being rude :-P

tocomment• 16 years ago

I don't see it in my facebook account pages. Is it not operational yet? I'd love to be able to back up all of my posts, comments, like, and photos. Is that what this is saying?

rythie• 16 years ago

When will we see the Twitter zip file? It's still limited to 3200 of your own tweets.

AdamTReineke• 16 years ago

I would love this. I use BackupMyTweets.com, but I didn't know it existed until I had around 3500, so my first 300 or so updates are missing. (They might be on Facebook; after I download my data, I'll see when I started importing updates from Twitter.)

Tichy• 16 years ago

I have signed up for some tweet backup service. Unfortunately I forgot which one :-(

It's not a good solution.

plainOldText• 16 years ago

How about deleting your information after downloading that zip file?

napierzaza• 16 years ago

But you still can't delete the data they have about you right?

Derferman• 16 years ago

I wrote a similar Python script[1] a couple of months ago that crawls the Graph API and downloads all your Facebook notes and photos. I recently started work on the script again, but after today's announcement, I will probably stop development. Oh well.

[1] http://www.github.com/derferman/scrapebook

quadhome• 16 years ago

I did something similar for e-mail back when the Graph API was broken for it. [2]

... I say "back," presuming it's fixed.

[2] http://fb.quadhome.com/

David3• 16 years ago

Question for you all. A bit ago, I posted the following, which was in minutes at -5 and counting:

-----------------------------------

This is disturbing. Yes, Facebook was sharing your information before -- it was the source of all their ad revenue. But now, instead of individual pieces of data (location, specific interests, etc.), they have the potential to share (read:sell) an entire person's worth of data in a lump. Not saying it will happen immediately, or at all, but I see some serious possibility for harm here. (Cross-site behavior tracking just got a whole lot scarier, if you can link it to a FB profile...) Of course, there could be some serious academic applications to this, too. And it makes them look more open, and access to your own data is good.

-----------------------------------

I'm on HN to learn, but the downvotes told me nothing. (No child comments.) So in the interest of writing better comments (and hopefully improving my own analyses), what's wrong with this one?

Is it the cynical outlook? Is there something factually incorrect? Is mine just an unpopular opinion? I'm looking for feedback, because I didn't expect my comment to bomb like it did.

Anything you can offer is appreciated!

moultano6• 16 years ago

Your comment just didn't make any sense. They already have all of this information. How on earth does giving it to you in a zip file make it more likely for them to sell it to other people?

David3• 16 years ago

...That... _does_ makes sense. Color me embarassed.

jacquesm5• 16 years ago

I didn't downvote you, but here is what I think may have motivated the downvoters:

Assuming facebook is using some form of SQL doing that would be as simple as "SELECT INTO OUTFILE" with the appropriate clauses, so this doesn't add anything whatsoever to the threat from the direction of facebook.

If someone manages to hack in to your facebook account it's become marginally easier, but a well written bot would have a lesser problem digging out your profile than you as a user would, so facebook just made it a bit easier for users to get at their own data at 0 cost to them, and with a negligible security risk in the case of a compromised account.

That does not detract from the fact that I think that this is largely a PR move and that any real benefit is quite small, other than for those people that would like to have their data in several places.

In those cases facebook probably comes out ahead because you now only have to upload to facebook to be able to export it to another service (I don't think it will be long before the first 'import' utilities will be made).

David3• 16 years ago

Had an exam earlier... hasn't done well for my brainpower. Of course they already have the data, and as you mention, exporting it is fantastically easy from their end.

My line of thinking probably evolved from the ease with which Facebook could just push the entire zipped file to purchasers, instead of just the relevant info. This is incorrect in that 1) I wouldn't imagine facebook shares its actual data, just uses it to allow advertisers to target their ads, and 2) even if they did, I seriously doubt they would group data by user thoroughly enough to be identifiable.

Half of my concern was what would be accessible via facebook connect, and the ability of a malicious website to harvest scary amounts of personal information via this + cross-site user tracking (about which, admittedly, I know almost nothing). Again, the data dump is only about ease of access, not a totally new ability.

I'm also talking about things I don't really know about. I've never used fb connect, nor do I have experience with cross-site user tracking. But I'm certainly under the impression that it would be possible to combine these two concepts into something disturbing. (http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1250497 would seem to imply that a large advertising network could do this sort of thing (though I'm not sure where the fbconnect info would come from, exactly).

mwytock• 16 years ago

This looks like a pure fluff announcement to me -- it's not enabling any new functionality. Mark Zuckerberg even said that this is built on top of the Graph API so anyone could have built this app but no one cares.

It looks to me like facebook slipped on the deadline to launch whatever they've been in "lockdown" for and they had to scramble to put this and the other minor things together for the press.

qjz• 16 years ago

It's a smart move to offer a backup tool, especially when enforcing a TOS that's subject to interpretation and causes (alleged) violators to complain very loudly in public forums when their accounts are permanently canceled and their data becomes inaccessible. They'll get less sympathy this way ("You backed up your data, didn't you?"), although the most important thing here is that all users are given a chance to feel that they own their own data. That's more than a mere PR move, it's a perceived right.

travisjeffery• 16 years ago

The Social Network comes out in theatre and first Zuckerberg gives $100 million to a public school and now they're allowing you to download your data.

Who knows what will happen if there is a sequel? :D

makmanalp• 16 years ago

People are missing the point - you can get a copy of your information but I doubt they'd erase their own copy for you.

djacobs• 16 years ago

Privacy and data portability are two separate concerns. For those of us who don't post unwanted information online, we are only really concerned with the latter. For us, this is a big win.

nphase• 16 years ago

I wonder if they're going to provide all revisions of all data you've ever given them, or just the most recent version. It looks like it's only the most recent stuff.

Just imagine the look on her face when your mother's cousin opens the zip file and sees every piece of profile text she's ever typed in it. Creeeeeeeepy.

daten• 16 years ago

I think this would be more interesting if it included the behavior profile facebook keeps on you. I've read articles where they describe tracking every page you visit, when, how many times and for how long. Facebook is interested in knowing which of your friends you're paying attention to, who comments you read and which photos you like.

I would like to see their "file" on me. I would like that to be more transparent to users who don't realize it's being kept as well.

Google started doing something like this where they let you see (and delete?) the browsing and search histories they keep based on your gmail account, google cookies and advertising partners logs.

jscore• 16 years ago

It's a genius PR move, nothing more.

aik• 16 years ago

"People own and have control over all info they put into Facebook and “Download Your Information” enables people to take stuff with them"

I don't find that very true. I don't think one has control unless one personally hosts the data. You have control over deleting your account and now control over downloading your data. This says nothing about how the ("the" not "your") data is to be used and what can be done with it outside your control.

mmaunder• 16 years ago

I give it 7 days till the exploit hits.

cpr• 16 years ago

Isn't this a great opening for a small FaceBook personal data backup startup? Just forward the email with the download link to them, and backups start happening even without signup (since it's all email-linked). If you want them to continue, pay some small monthly charge.

olalonde• 16 years ago

This is pretty useless for competing social networks as it doesn't seem to contain social graph meta data.

jakewalker• 16 years ago

I have been contemplating leaving Facebook for a few months - - not just because of some of the privacy issues, but also because I feel like it's been a timesuck with little payoff. I have held off because of pictures, mostly.

I don't have access to the tool yet, but if it pulls off all my photos and other content, I'm likely to delete my facebook account.

Some people complain that they can't delete all the data from facebook, and while I get the complaint, that's certainly not a reason to stick around or not delete. If they are saving everything, and I delete my account, at least they can't save anything new going forward.

Facebook Now Allows You To “Download Your Information”

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