We're looking at privacy this week, and in order to get a better understanding of the data that large companies hold on users, we're taking a look at some of the data held by large tech companies.
Pick one of the companies below, download your data and analyse what you've found. Share the types of data you found, and point out one thing that surprised you.
I picked Facebook to look at as I have recently done a purge of my profile. I want to see if any of the removed data still remains in facebook’s databases.
Data from: 23/05/2009 to 22/07/2019. 10 years of data!
Compressed File Size: 4.06 GB Thats a lot of possible dirt on me.
Interesting Things Found:
My address book containing contact information of some friends and other people.
A list containing all advertisements that align with my interests based on facebook activity. This allows them to show me relevant adds.
A list containing all advertisements I have interacted in the past. Surprising but also I guess expected as there has been times where an ad shows up more frequently after I clicked on it.
A list of all applications or websites that I have linked my facebook account to.
Every single comment I have posted in the 10 years I have used facebook. It appears that comments that I have deleted are not on this list.
A list showing all removed friends and the date and time I unfriended them. Not quite sure why they want to store that to be honest.
A list of likes on external sites. I assume this is to further build my profile so they can show me relevant advertisements. Surprising as I don’t recall linking my account to some of these websites but that might just be my memory failing me.
Luckily I don’t do location checkins on facebook so it appears they don't have a lot of information about my location in the past. Well at least not in the location folder. The logged in location however is a different story ...
A list of all the stickers I have used in messenger. This I find useful as I really do like some of the stickers and since they provided a PNG file of them all, I can probably use them elsewhere.
The messages folder contains files for every single person I have ever messaged as well as any messages, files, audio, and other things I have sent to them. This is great for finding that 1 specific thing I sent to a specific person years ago.
The “Where you’re logged in” contains quite a lot of information such as: type of device, location, IP address, browser, cookies (first 4 characters shown)
Most of the things that did surprise me were listed above, but at the same time, a lot of the information I found isn't particularly surprising as it made sense why they were storing them. I was also pleased to know that deleted comments and searches are not stored (at least they haven’t given any indication for these information being stalled in the files downloaded).
Overall, this going through these files were quite the trip down memory lane. I will however probably save some of the photos or files that I have posted on Facebook in the past and do another “spring cleaning” of my account.
In the future, I plan on having a look at the Google and Android equivalent to see that data they are keeping track of and are storing with or without my knowledge.
