Social media platform Facebook has been in the news a lot recently, especially with Mark Zuckerberg being called before panels in the U.S. and Europe. But how much information does Facebook actually keep and how much of it matters?
Facebook has been getting some bad press over the recent weeks and there’s no shortage of meme material coming off of the back of it. Therefore, in the spirit of openness and transparency, we thought we’d take a look at what information they actually document.
Contrary to popular belief, Facebook probably isn’t spying on you to the extent that the media would to lead us to believe. In essence, the platform’s modus operandi is simply to make a record of the things you put in and your interactions.
There are, however, a couple of creepy parts. The first is that, thanks to their location tracker, you can pretty much see all of the places you’ve accessed the site, but even this can be a little dull. The second is the mobile phone numbers you have stored. If you use Facebook from your mobile, then every number you’ve ever called or who has called you are all stored, whether you want them to be or not.
More useful for advertising though is the data stored on your preferred ads. By looking at how you have interacted with ads, you can get a better understanding of how other people do to and you can start to think about how you can use Facebook’s advertising algorithms to your advantage.
Facebook have recently added an option to the site which allows you to look at all of the data about you that they’ve kept records of. Here is a quick guide on how to access it:
When you are on your Facebook homepage, at the top right of the blue taskbar you’ll see a arrow pointing down. Click on it!
Now you should see a drop down list of options. Go to the bottom section and click on Settings.
Once you are on the General Account Settings page, right at the top there should be the option to ‘go to your Facebook Information’. Click on the words highlighted in blue.
Now you should be on a page called ‘Your Facebook information. Once here you have the choice to view or download your information. The download takes quite a long time so if you want to view all of your information quickly, click on the right where it says view in the ‘Access your information’ option at the top.
Hey Presto! Now you can see all of the data that Facebook has collected on you.
To see your ad preferences, scroll to the bottom section of the ‘Information about you’ and click on ‘Ads’.
The advertising section also provides all of the information about how you have interacted with ads while using Facebook. There is also handy link to a page which tells you all about how Facebook ads work. However, in case you don’t want to have to trawl through your life’s history to get to it, here is a handy shortcut: How Facebook Advertising Works