What Does Facebook Know About You?

Facebook now say Cambridge Analytica had access to 87 million accounts

Mark Zuckerberg has said that 1.1 million of the accounts improperly accessed by the political consultancy were from UK based users. He said that some malicious services had used a facility that allowed them to link the public profile of a user to an email or mobile phone number acquired elsewhere.

What does Facebook know about you?

In the light of the Cambridge Analytica (BBC New Story) many users have closed or suspended their Facebook accounts.

You can find out what information Facebook has about you. If you’ve been a facebook user for a number of years it’s a good idea to see how much history is on the social platform, and if necessary remove any information you don’t want them knowing.

To begin with, you need to download a .zip file of all your data. Go to your facebook account on a computer (the settings are not available to mobile apps) and click on the dropdown arrow in the blue bar at the top, to get to your settings (My Settings Page)

On the General Settings page, at the bottom, click the Download A Copy Of Your Facebook Data link, you’ll need to type in your Facebook password again, and then wait. Facebook will send you an email with a link to your file when it has got all the information together.

Once you receive the email with the link, click on it and download the archive, it will be called something like ‘facebook-username.zip’ and could be quite large (if you’ve had an account for 5 years, expect it to be about 200mb or more)

Once it’s downloaded, extract the file with whatever .zip tool you have (on Windows, open the Downloads folder (or wherever you downloaded it to) and right-click on the .zip file, then choose Extract All and follow the prompts)

When it’s extracted, go to the folder and double-click on the index.htm file. This will open the file in your web browser and allow you to browse the information.

You’ll see your current profile picture and name, and on the first page ‘Profile’ you’ll see a list of information about you that Facebook has. When you joined Facebook, your email accounts, your personal information, interests, groups etc. On the left are some links to other types of data, most are obvious, but a few are of particular interest.

Contact Info

On here is a list of contacts Facebook have for you, recognise that information? It’s compiled mostly from the Facebook mobile app, and is taken from your phone book, call logs and text logs. On modern android phones you have to grant the permission for Facebook to take this information, but on older versions of Android, Facebook was able to take this information without specifically asking.

Timeline

This is a list of all your posts (and posts from apps on your behalf) going back to the beginning of your Facebook profile.

Photos and Videos

These links show you photos and videos you’ve posted to your timeline. They also have additional metadata where it’s available (such as the IP address you were on when you uploaded the data)

Friends

A list of your Facebook friends, any friend requests you’ve sent that have not been accepted, friend requests you have not accepted, friend requests you have declined, friends you have removed and users who follow your profile. All have the relevant date of the action associated with them.

At the bottom is a Friend Peer Group ranking that is somehow calculated by Facebook, we’ve seen profiles listed as “Starting Adult Life” or “Established Adult Life” but others might exist. We assume this is used for marketing.

Messages

See your history of Facebook Messages to individuals or to friend groups, including any links, documents or photos you have shared.

Pokes

Remember poking people when you were first on Facebook? for some reason the list only shows a few pokes you sent or received.

Events

A list of all the events you have interacted with, either creating, showing interest in, attending or declining.

Security

This link shows your login security information, it shows what sessions were active when the .zip file was created with a wealth of information on each session, such as device used, browser details and IP address. The Account Activity section appears to be sessions that have been updated somehow (logging in to, out of or changing cookie information) and the Logins and Logouts section is self explanatory. Login Protection Data interestingly shows how Facebook tracks where you are even without GPS access, by using the known details from your IP address.

The IP address section lists all the IP addresses you’ve used, and the final section shows information about where you were when you made changes to your account.

Ads

This section appears to list keywords that Facebook has identified as relevant to you, some of them will be obvious to you while some might be a bit more obscure. Below this list, the Ads History shows how you have interacted with adverts on facebook.

At the bottom is a section called Advertisers With Your Contact Info, Facebook say this is a list of companies that have had your information previously and used that to identify your account on the platform. It’s worth having a look at this list and trying to identify how some of the companies might have got your details in the first place.

Places Created

This lists places you have created on Facebook, including their co-ordinates and the date and time that the location was created.

Applications

This is also worth having a look though, it lists all the applications you have ‘installed’ with facebook details, so any apps that you have connected to your facebook account or used your facebook account to log on with. One such app might be the ‘This Is Your Digital Life’ app.

This Is Your Digital Life

The facebook app ‘This Is Your digital Life’ was a quiz that, when used, harvested your profile information and passed it onto other companies.

It’s likely that this is not the only facebook app that has acquired your information in this way, think of all those games, quizzes and apps that you see posted from friends accounts, especially the ones that purport to show who your naughties friends are, or find your perfect drink, or predict who is most likely to do something… well the only way they can work is by reading your profile information and picking up keywords and phrases from what you post.

Always make sure if you are going to use these types of Facebook apps that you review the permissions they request when they connect to your profile, and make sure there’s a valid reason for them having those permissions. If in doubt, don’t allow the app any access at all.

Removing Facebook Data

If you decide to delete some of the data Facebook has on you, but you want to keep your account, the steps are below. Facebook have said they are going to roll out an easier way for people to manage their data, but until that happens there are a few steps to take, some of these will only work from a PC (or from a tablet, but on the full facebook site)

Contacts

Go to the Manage Invites And Imported Contacts page for your Facebook contacts, and for Messenger contacts, go to Upload And Manage Your Contacts

Here you can select to remove specific contact information, or if you scroll down to the bottom, there’s a ‘Remove All Contacts’ button. These are NOT your friends, if any of your friends are in the list it’s because you have multiple email accounts for them, the one listed here is the account NOT associated with facebook

Posts, photos and videos

To delete your posts, go to your timeline by clicking on your name in the blue bar at the top of the screen, click the “…” on the top-right of a post and choose DELETE to remove it. to quickly scroll to the first post you made, scroll down the screen a bit then use the menu at the top left of the screen to hop to the year of your choice.

Similarly with Videos and Photos, go to the appropriate section of Facebook and delete individual albums, photos or videos from your profile.

You can find some tools that will help you, including some Chrome plugins, but we have not tried any of them out to be able to recommend them.

Securing your Facebook account

If you want more information on securing your facebook profile, have a look at our Facebook security post here Facebook Security Settings

Deactivating or Deleting Your Account

If you want to deactivate your account, it’s quite easy. Head to your settings, on the General page click on Manage Account and then select Deactivate Account (or click this Quick Link)

Deactivating your account removes you temporarily from Facebook, but keeps your account open. You can’t use Facebook until you reactivate your account.

Deleting your account is permanent (after a 30-day cooling off period) but the settings to get to delete your account are well and truly hidden. Click this Quick Link to be taken to the account deletion pages. Note that if you log in during the cooling-off period, your account deletion will be stopped and you’ll have to go through the process again.

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