Ok, well this one has been in the news quite a lot recently – as in how Facebook may have been playing fast and loose with your personal information. It’s a great one for the conspiracy theorists of course but there is a reasonable amount of truth in the stories, of course the devil is in the detail. Did most of the people who had their personal information used give their concent by signing up to the Facebook third party apps in the first place? I guess we will never really know the full truth of it all, but whilst we ponder, there is something positive that you can do to discover exactly what information Facebook store about you and your friends by using their new service which allows you to download and view all of this information.
You can find full details at the address https://www.facebook.com/help/212802592074644 – there you will discover the procedure that you can follow to download a copy of your full Facebook history, all of your interactions with the site, everything you have ever liked, shared or signed up to is available.
Once you kick off the process it takes facebook a little time to gather everything together. Once they’ve done this they send you an email, so make sure you have the correct and current email address registered with them. In the email is a link that will allow you to physically download everything. Once downloaded you will have (in your downloads folder) a compressed file called facebook-yourname.zip just right click that file and choose the option to extract or unzip the contents. Once done, you will have a bunch of files sitting on your computer. Locate and double click on the file called index.html and you will see your own personal website (on your computer only) that has your full Facebook history.
You can browse your profile information, contact info, all of the photos and videos you have ever uploaded etc. More importantly, you can see the topics that Facebook are using to target you with advertising and you can see which applications you have agreed to share your personal information with – it’s this information that you can then use to revoke access to the applications that you no longer wish to have access to your personal information. In order to remove certain apps from your Facebook profile, login to Facebook, click Settings and choose “apps and websites”, from here you will be able to see any apps or websites that have access to your information currently and you can leave them or remove them as you want.