After the revelations about the Cambridge Analytica data leak which exposed the personal information on fifty million Facebook users, time to ask what information does Facebook keep on us?
Everyone who has a Facebook account will be surprised at the amount of information, which is much greater than expected, that Facebook has on them.
First of all, every single account holder can download their own profile information.
Just go to settings, then click on “Download a copy of your Facebook data”.
To browse them fully, it’s better to have time in front of you: there are hundreds of files, says Le Monde.
What is the content kept by Facebook?
In the big file downloaded, there is first of all the daily contents posted by the account holder: photos, statutes, first to last.
There are also all your exchanges with pages, or with your friends.
This includes messages (private ones like those on your profile), documents, audio files, videos, emojis, gifs, stickers or pokes sent.
Nothing that you do on Facebook is ever erased and they invested massively in servers that will keep all the information you posted, and the interactions you had on the platform.
Perhaps this information will remain available after you delete your account!
And there is also a list of events to which the account holders were invited, the history of advertisements that were clicked, the list of all the places and devices from which we have connected.
And it goes on. The list of more or less shameful groups integrated, liked pages, deleted friends. They are all recorded.
“If you’ve filled them in, Facebook also keeps the names of your siblings, and your ex-boyfriends and girlfriends,” says the French newspaper.
Of particular worry are calls made even from your mobile phone.
Dylan McKay, a developer from New Zealand, has noticed that the history of his calls with his mother-in-law (passed from his mobile phone, not from Facebook) was included in his data.
He also retrieved information about SMS messages that he sent or received, such as the date and time of sending, and the recipient’s phone number.
Finally, all the numbers of the people he had spoken to one day or the other in the contacts of his mobile also appeared.
Several Internet users have made the same observation. Would you considering all this “a little scary”?
The list of numbers in your contacts is related to whether or not you have synchronized your contacts.
Le Monde says according to their tests, this is possible for both Android and iPhone.
Call logs and SMS, on the other hand, appear only for people who own an Android phone, and use either Messenger or Facebook Lite, a smaller and lighter version of the application, useful for devices with a low power or in case of limited Internet connection.
However, it is possible to go back to delete the contacts already imported.
But it is done through a very difficult page to find called “Importing and managing your contacts”.
To disable synchronization, go to Messenger settings and then “People” or “Contacts”.
The story is adapted from an article that appeared on Le Monde