How To See What Facebook Knows About You
2 min read
This is a companion post for the Security In Five podcast episode 203 – How To See What Facebook Knows About You. The past few weeks opened the eyes to Facebook’s true privacy practices and how they really see your data. These are not new activities but only newly brought to the front of the public eye. Privacy control is not in our hands. The old saying that ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’ is 100% true.
All of theses social networks are not free. They are not charging us money to use it but we are all paying a price. We are paying with our data, all the details about ourselves, our lives, our behaviors and our personal connections. The Internet is forever and just because each event seems meaningless that I gave my birthday here, my home city there, each little detail by themselves is not necessarily a problem but over time those are kept, recorded, correlated to the master profile about you. That’s how it works.
Facebook then sells that data to advertisers in order to deliver targeted ads that give the maximum chance you will act on it and buy something.
Through new laws and pressures Facebook now has a feature for you to download all the data, mostly, of what Facebook has on you.
I highly encourage everyone that sees this to go through and download this. It’s eye opening on what they have and how they got it.
To access your Facebook profile data start in the upper right corner and click the triangle to access the menu.
Select Settings.
At the bottom of the main page you will see a link, Download A Copy of your Facebook data. Click on that.
You will then be taken to a page to start the process. This is not an instant process. Once you request your Archive Facebook will start the process. You will receive an email when your archive is available. Depending on how long you have been a Facebook user and how active you are in it will change how big the archive is. For some this could be a several Gigabyte file in size.
Once you download the zip file, unpack it and open the Index file in your browser, double click on it. The data is laid out in a fairly easy format for your review.
Binary Blogger has spent 20 years in the Information Security space currently providing security solutions and evangelism to clients. From early web application programming, system administration, senior management to enterprise consulting I provide practical security analysis and solutions to help companies and individuals figure out HOW to be secure every day.
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