It has been a terrible week for Facebook; the social media giant got caught up in the data privacy scandal linked with data analytics firm Cambridge analytical (CA). Since the scandal came to light, users have been looking for ways to remove their data from the social media website prompting the #DeleteFacebook online campaign.
A tweet thread by software developer Dylan McKay suggests an interesting revelation wherein Facebook has access to call history details of McKay's conversations with his partner's mother. Add to that, Facebook seems to have historical records of all contacts (even those deleted), metadata of text messages, and metadata of cellular call logs.
Notably, he was using an Android phone during November 2016 and July 2017 when the data breach seems to have occurred.
How to Download Your Facebook History Account Data
To view the history of your Facebook account's data
>> log in to Facebook.com on the desktop browser,
>>click on the drop down icon on the top right of the page and select Settings.
>>In the General tab, you will see the Download a copy of your Facebook dataoption. Clicking that will prompt you to re-enter your Facebook password. An email containing a ZIP file will then be sent to your registered email address.
File size can depend on the activity frequency and age of your Facebook profile. In my case, it was a massive size of 1.6GB
Advertisers Extracting Data From Your Facebook Profile
The ZIP file you downloaded contains an HTML folder, which has a page titled 'ads.html'. Here, you can find the list of "Advertisers with your contact info" buried at the end of the HTML page.
The zip file also contains contains the entire list of third-party apps that you have installed on or linked with your Facebook account. It has IP addresses you've logged in from, email addresses, contact numbers of all friends you have added and pages you have liked; even all your phonebook contacts from Android smartphones you have used to log in to the Facebook account.
It contains metadata on Facebook events, your friend list, messages, places you have checked into, videos you have uploaded/ been tagged in, and also every like and poke you've made.
The zip file contains more, you just need to check it out.
