How To Download Your Data From Facebook

I know a lot of people in the security industry, and I know a lot of people who enjoy Facebook. All the same, there'south not much overlap between these groups. As someone who's in both groups, I'm an oddity. Many security experts either always steered articulate of the social network or are currently advocating deleting it. I closely follow security topics and products such equally antivirus utilities, and I also use Facebook, simply carefully. I don't run into whatever demand to delete my Facebook account. Simply now that Facebook has fabricated it so easy to download everything the social network has about me, I went ahead with that procedure. 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 not the client, I'm the production. I keep my profile individual except to friends. I don't post a lot in my visible profile, and not all of what I brandish is truthful. For example, while it's truthful that I studied Existentialism in college, I'k 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 by my radar.

I never play Facebook games; you'd exist surprised, or appalled, at how much data games can gather. I had to silence one family unit member considering of a Farmville account that kept pinging me to come play. I've been known to try some silly quizzes, simply only the ones that ask you questions to figure out, say, which Game of Thrones character will kill you. Fifty-fifty then, the questions better not be the kind of thing that might reply your security questions. Those quizzes that offer to scan your Facebook information and give yous a result? Those are poison! I don't touch them.

I never use Facebook (or my electronic mail account) to log into websites. Doing then makes your Facebook countersign a single indicate of failure. 1 exposure and all your accounts are wide open. Instead, I use a password managing director to create strong, unique passwords for every site.

Only being careful myself isn't enough. Sloppy security on the part of my friends tin potentially make some of my information public. Then I tightened up my settings to keep Facebook from sharing my data. I went all-out, choosing the option to totally disable the sharing platform. Facebook offered dire warnings near 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'grand fine, right? Well, maybe.

Download Your Annal

These days, it'due south easy to download an archive of all the information Facebook has on yous. (At least, they say it's everything…) Well, information technology's fairly like shooting fish in a barrel. You practise have to go through several steps, which are in place to prevent someone else from stealing your archive. Here's how I did it, and how y'all can get your own archive.

1. Log into Facebook, click the down-triangle icon at top correct, and cull Settings.
2. On the General Settings page, click the last item, the link to download a re-create of your information.
3. Facebook warns that collecting data may take a while. Click Outset My Archive.
4. On the adjacent folio, click Start My Annal again, and wait for a notification that it'southward done.
5. Download your Facebook archive.

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

No Surprises, to Kickoff

Once you unzip the downloaded archive, you lot'll detect you lot have a folder containing a file Alphabetize.HTM plus folders named html, letters, photos, and videos. Ignore the folders for now; simply launch Index.HTM and commencement exploring.

You start at the Profile page, with full general data nearly you and your Facebook account. This includes the verbal moment you started with Facebook (Th, June 28, 2007 at 8:15 a.chiliad. PDT in my instance) equally well as your address (if you lot entered it), birthday, gender, hometown, and so on. It doesn't distinguish between public details and those you've made private.

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

This page besides lists all the Groups I belong to. It's a bigger list than I expected, mostly because at least one-half of them haven't had whatsoever activeness for years. I'g non sure there's whatsoever do good in actively disengaging from moribund groups, though.

Friends and Not-Friends

Clicking the Friends link got me a list of all my Facebook friends, sorted from newest to oldest. No surprise at that place! But scrolling down farther, I constitute a lot more than. It too lists: Sent Friend Requests, Received Friend Requests, Declined Friend Requests, and Removed Friends. That's correct. Facebook knows everybody you've unfriended, and always friend request yous've denied, or ignored.

I dumped the list into Excel for analysis, because that'southward what I do. I found that several dozen of the entries announced in more than 1 category, and that some of these duplicates seem to tell a story. Some years ago, I purged my friends list down to something manageable, but later added some of the purged folks back. And there they are—Removed Friends, but after, Friends. Others were persistent folks, Declined Friend Request followed later past Received Friend Request (which I ignored).

Possibly the almost interesting category involve people who showed up in the Received Friend Request listing and no other. That means I received the asking and simply ignored information technology, without actively declining. I confess to friend-request overload. And after ignoring requests for a while, information technology gets tough to actively go through and decline the unwanted ones. To the seventy people in that category—sorry!

At the tail end of the list, I found a couple other pocket-size categories. I take exactly one Followee, significant there's i semi-public figure that I follow without actually being FB friends. Yous may have more. Facebook'south analysis of my friend drove places me in the Friend Peer Group chosen "Established Adult Life." Why? Perhaps for advertisement?

The Friends page makes sense, though it includes more information than I thought information technology would. But the Contact Info folio totally mystifies me. Information technology lists hundreds of people, in no apparent social club, along with 1, two, or three telephone 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 list into Excel as well, and checked off any that I might have actually chosen on the telephone. That accounts for just 10 pct of the list. Well-nigh 6 percent of the contacts appear twice, most with the same phone number. Near all of the names seem at least vaguely familiar, but not through Facebook.

For a sanity bank 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 percent of my friends. Looking the other direction, because there are more Contacts than Friends, but half-dozen.5 percentage of my Contacts match the Friends list.

I don't know for certain how Facebook got this list of contacts and their phone numbers. I must take given it permission to run across my contacts on some platform, but even and then, I more often than not continue electronic mail addresses (notably absent from this list), not telephone numbers. Information technology's a puzzlement!

My Whole Timeline at a Glance

At first, I was unimpressed with the page reached past clicking Timeline. Like many, I frequently mail service an paradigm with a snarky comment. The Timeline view skips the images, and the snarky comments alone don't make sense. Then I hit Ctrl+Terminate, to become to the end of the page. Wow!

Every post I always made on Facebook is hither in the timeline. I don't know if it's fifty-fifty possible to go this far back within the Facebook user interface. If information technology were possible, it would take hours, maybe days, of scrolling downwardly, downward, downwards. I found the virtually ten-year-onetime posts fascinating. The mail service "feeling chilled after biking ten miles in the rain Sunday to watch the Amgen riders start the offset 100-mile ride" reminded me of the thrill of watching the opening of the commencement Amgen Tour of California bicycle race. And I was proud to recall my grown girl'south high-school success, Grand Prize in a regional blitheness contest.

Even in this user-friendly i-long-page course, paging through the entire Timeline would exist as well much to handle. But if you lot desire to cheque just when a certain upshot happened, an event yous posted on Facebook, you can easily search the page for details. In consequence, it's an index for your unabridged Facebook history. What an unexpected treasure this is.

Every Photo, Awkwardly

Clicking Photos gets y'all a similar list, a timeline of every photo or anthology you always posted. Information technology includes the appointment for albums, and whatever comments, only not the text you shared forth with the anthology. When you lot click through to the private photos, you don't encounter the dates, unless the photo itself has comments. Facebook reports a raft of (to me) pointless information. Camera make and model. Orientation, width, and top. F-end, ISO, and focal length. In my oldest photos, these are all the more useless because they're often either bare or nothing. I couldn't effigy out why some iPhone photos include a modicum of information, while others get null.

Some photos announced automatically in predefined folders such as Mobile Photos, Timeline Photos, and Profile Pictures. As with photos in your handcrafted folders, these brandish the non-useful camera data, followed by any comments. Any mail service that went along with the photo doesn't announced, nor is there any indication of a appointment, unless in the comments.

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

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

Pocket-sized-Screen Video

Clicking Videos, equally expected, gets a list of all the videos you've posted, from newest to oldest, with a 284 past 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 total-size video that you lot posted. When I launched i of those, I found that the sound worked fine, just the video itself merely showed shifting bands of color. I tried a one-half-dozen videos, and the same thing happened with all of them.

That was under Firefox. When I opened the same folio in Chrome or Border, the video played back just fine. Internet Explorer didn't try internal playback, only instead suggested opening the video in the Movies & TV app. Moving-picture show & Telly blew the video up to full screen, making it blurry, but it worked. I'm not certain what the problem is with Firefox, but at that place are plenty of other browsers for viewing your archive.

What if your existent urge is to find the full-scale original video that y'all uploaded? You lot can't get there directly from the archive, but it tin can be a help. Bank check the appointment nether the desired video, then open up the list of videos correct in your Facebook account online. Make a estimate equally to how far you should scroll down. Click a video and check the appointment in the post that appears. Whorl up or down as necessary to bracket the desired date. It's not ideal, but besides not too difficult.

Ads and More than Ads

Facebook exists to tempt you and other users with ads. Every time you click an ad, that's another data betoken for your profile. The first thing you see when you click the Ads link is a list of all the topics Facebook thinks interest you. In my case, the list runs to more than v dozen items. Some brand sense: coffee, California, figurer security, network security, journalism, Alejandro Jodorowsky. Others accept 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 than interesting is the following section, Ads History. This is simply a list of ads and sponsored posts you've clicked on recently. I'm not certain of the time period; the oldest one in my feed is from about seven weeks ago. Information technology could also exist a fixed number of the most contempo ad-clicks. In my archive the total number lists comes out at the suspiciously round number 100. Yeah, I confess, I clicked 100 ads. To be off-white, I avoid clicking unsupported "Sponsored posts," but I practice sometimes click ads shared past friends.

At the very end, the annal lists "Advertisers with your contact info," eight of them, in my case. I recognize almost of them, though I'one thousand not sure how they got my contact info, or what it ways that they did. But a couple are completely unfamiliar. I'g 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 Messages

Not surprisingly, Facebook keeps a record of every chat you concord using Facebook Messenger. All those conversations evidence upwardly when y'all click Messages. And the resulting page is nigh completely useless.

In my archive, at that place is a list of almost 200 names and name-groups, in no discernible social club. To encounter a conversation, 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. In that location'south no fashion 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 exchange, dorsum to the very get-go. The messages prove up in opposite chronological order, so to read a unmarried conversation, y'all must scan the engagement/time stamps to notice the initiating message and so read from bottom to top. What a mess! And if you remember that you had a chat on a certain topic, simply forget who you were chatting with, forget about it. There's no manner to search except by opening every proper noun and searching.

Facebook, this could be and then much better! Requite us a list of names, yes, but testify the number of letters associated with each. Let us sort by name or by number of letters. When nosotros open the list of letters for a given person, show them in oldest-to-newest order, and apply some visual cue to testify the start of each new conversation. Finally, permit the states search beyond all messages. Now that would be a useful list of messages!

Events and Pokes

I'g sure y'all've received invitations to plenty of events via Facebook. If I get an invitation to a truly personal happening, I make a point of actively choosing accept or reject. Only if I'm just not interested, perhaps considering the effect is impossibly distant, or sounds deadening, I don't unremarkably do annihilation. Surprise! The Events folio lists every consequence invitation y'all ever received, even those that yous totally ignored. I don't come across a lot of value in this list, just 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, perchance with a history of changes. Boy, was I wrong!

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

The following list of Account Activeness proved even more obtuse. A seemingly countless listing of entries reports, in painful particular, on events like Session updated (these are the vast bulk, for me), Web Session Terminated, and Login. The one slightly interesting entry accurately reported the date and time of the last password alter. These entries only become dorsum almost two years.

Next up is a listing of Recognized Machines, including entries for two iPads and two iPhones. Which ones? I've had several. The date/time stamps were no help; all iv say they were created December 31, 1969 at 4:00 p.k. PST. That appointment seems unlikely. None of the concluding-modified dates are newer than 2014, and the entries include no identifying device information, across the IP address.

I found little employ for a listing of logins and logouts during the previous year. A listing 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, merely simple decimal latitude and longitude, with no link to a map view.

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

So, OK, it's true that Facebook keeps painfully detailed data about your logins and devices. You can look at it until your eyes cross. A security proficient might dump this data to detect possible hacking, but the boilerplate consumer volition discover little of interest.

Things I Didn't Know Facebook Knew

Before my recent experimentation, I hadn't actually thought about what-all information Facebook keeps most me. Conspicuously, it has to retain my posts and pics, and I know it uses some techniques to decide which ads information technology'll evidence. Downloading and paging through my Facebook archive was a real eye-opener. I ran into real surprises, some positive, some negative, some merely…surprising.

1. The Timeline archive can be a fantastic index for your entire Facebook history. It's well-near incommunicable to scroll back a few years in your live Facebook feed, just 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, even if I ignored the request. It knows everyone I've unfriended, and every friend request I've rejected. Maybe that'southward not then bad, but I was surprised.
3. The archive's listing of videos displays nicely from newest to oldest, with a date/time stamp for each video. Just you lot don't become to see the bodily post, the video displays in a tiny rectangle, and it seems not to piece of work in Firefox.
4. Some items in Facebook's list of "my" ad topics brand sense; others seem off the wall. The revelation that I've clicked 100 ads in less than two months is an eye-opener.
5. Something I did, at some past time, gave Facebook permission to grab all kinds of unrelated contact info. Weirdly, it simply shows telephone numbers, even though I've never chosen 90 percent of those people, and a fair number of them are expressionless. Unsettling.
6. Your archive lists everyone with whom you lot've always chatted using Messenger, which sounds similar information technology would exist handy. But the data is disorganized and hard to follow, and there's no way to search your messages.

If you haven't yet done it, scroll back to the top of this article and follow the instructions to download your own archive. Page through it, recall about it, do your best to become by the poorly designed parts. The annal isn't just evidence for you lot of what Facebook has on y'all. You tin can also make it a useful resources, assuming it doesn't inspire y'all to merely delete Facebook.

Presuming yous're keeping Facebook, I strongly advise that you bite the bullet and disable the platform that lets Facebook share your data. Yeah, that ways you surrender your games and apps, those nasty petty spies. And you must log in to websites using unique passwords. But these are practiced things! With these precautions, y'all tin can continue using Facebook and still go along (near 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: ingramwhily1955.blogspot.com

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