As you may know, #deletefacebook is trending nowadays. But, you might be having a trouble deleting your Facebook account and you are probably thinking about sharing a lot less than before. Well, there is a way to know, what data Facebook has on you. It is easy but you may found the results a bit scary.
A software developer, Dylan McKay downloaded his data from Facebook, he was shocked when he saw that even the timestamps of his messages and calls were being logged by Facebook and he didn’t even use the app for texts or calls.
Downloaded my facebook data as a ZIP file
Somehow it has my entire call history with my partner's mum pic.twitter.com/CIRUguf4vD
— Dylan McKay (@dylanmckaynz) March 21, 2018
If you want to see your data which Facebook posses, just visit the Facebook Settings page and click on Download a copy of your Facebook data at the bottom of that page. Facebook will take a little bit of time to collect all your data, in my experience, it takes about less than 10 minutes. After it has been done, you’ll receive a notification to download the data after entering your password.
You get a ZIP file to download (most probably huge in size). Once you download it, extract it, and open the index.html file to see your data. Don’t forget to check out the Contact Info tab where you will find the list of everyone you’ve known and their phone numbers. Also, check out the Friends tab where you can know about the phase of your life. In my case, it was “Starting Adult Life”.
I've written a script to dump all cell records in the ZIP file and print statistics
Here is what it shows on my profile, pretty chilling
The Ruby script can be found at https://t.co/xiXj2ke7PI pic.twitter.com/jvutJoJ4Lc
— Dylan McKay (@dylanmckaynz) March 22, 2018
McKay also created a script on GitHub which can help you in analyzing your data. However, it might not be a friendly tool if you are not a coder.
