How to Upload Archived Information to Facebook Account

I know a lot of people in the security industry, and I know a lot of people who enjoy Facebook. Nonetheless, there's not much overlap betwixt these groups. Equally someone who's in both groups, I'm an oddity. Many security experts either e'er steered clear of the social network or are currently advocating deleting it. I closely follow security topics and products such as antivirus utilities, and I also utilise Facebook, but advisedly. I don't see any demand to delete my Facebook account. Only now that Facebook has fabricated information technology so easy to download everything the social network has nearly me, I went ahead with that process. Perusing the resulting annal, I ran into some surprises, both positive and otherwise.

I'm Careful, Really I Am

I've known for years that with Facebook, I'm not the customer, I'grand the product. I go along my profile individual except to friends. I don't mail a lot in my visible contour, and non all of what I display is true. For example, while it's true that I studied Existentialism in college, I'm not really a Pastafarian; I have not been "touched past his noodly appendage." I never wildly click links that seem shady. And I maintain a security suite that warns if a dangerous link gets by my radar.

I never play Facebook games; you'd be surprised, or appalled, at how much data games can gather. I had to silence one family fellow member considering of a Farmville account that kept pinging me to come play. I've been known to effort some silly quizzes, but simply the ones that enquire yous questions to figure out, say, which Game of Thrones character will kill you. Fifty-fifty then, the questions better not exist the kind of thing that might answer your security questions. Those quizzes that offer to scan your Facebook data and give you lot a consequence? Those are poison! I don't touch them.

I never use Facebook (or my email account) to log into websites. Doing so makes your Facebook password a single point of failure. One exposure and all your accounts are broad open. Instead, I utilise a password manager to create strong, unique passwords for every site.

Simply being careful myself isn't enough. Sloppy security on the part of my friends tin can potentially make some of my information public. So I tightened upwards my settings to keep Facebook from sharing my information. I went all-out, choosing the option to totally disable the sharing platform. Facebook offered dire warnings about how doing so would disable my apps, and keep me from logging in using my Facebook credentials. I smiled and went ahead. Now I'1000 fine, correct? Well, maybe.

Download Your Archive

These days, it'due south easy to download an archive of all the information Facebook has on you. (At least, they say information technology's everything…) Well, it'southward fairly piece of cake. You do have to get through several steps, which are in place to forestall someone else from stealing your annal. Here'south how I did it, and how you can go your own archive.

1. Log into Facebook, click the down-triangle icon at top right, and cull Settings.
2. On the General Settings page, click the last particular, the link to download a copy of your data.
3. Facebook warns that collecting data may take a while. Click Start My Archive.
4. On the next page, click Start My Archive once again, and wait for a notification that it's done.
5. Download your Facebook archive.

Annotation that you'll have to supply your Facebook password twice during this process, because this is sensitive information. Facebook also warns that you should protect the downloaded information, as it contains sensitive material. Your best bet would be to encrypt the information when you're not actively studying it.

No Surprises, to First

One time you unzip the downloaded archive, you'll detect you have a folder containing a file Index.HTM plus folders named html, letters, photos, and videos. Ignore the folders for now; just launch Index.HTM and showtime exploring.

You start at the Contour page, with general data about y'all and your Facebook account. This includes the exact moment you started with Facebook (Th, June 28, 2007 at 8:15 a.m. PDT in my case) as well every bit your address (if you entered it), birthday, gender, hometown, and so on. Information technology doesn't distinguish betwixt public details and those you've fabricated private.

My annal too lists everyone I've identified as family members, all iii dozen of them. Family connections are a big part of what keeps me on Facebook. The lists of Music, Books, Movies, Restaurants, and Websites I've liked are brusk; I don't tend to give likes in those areas. Merely the list of Other likes is more interesting. Apparently, I've liked more than 60 pages, ranging from Notorious RBG to Thic Nhat Hanh to 'The Official Petition to Establish "Hella-" as the SI Prefix for 10^27.' At to the lowest degree Facebook doesn't have a hellabyte of data on me...

This page likewise lists all the Groups I belong to. It'south a bigger list than I expected, by and large because at to the lowest degree one-half of them haven't had whatsoever activity for years. I'one thousand not sure there's any do good in actively disengaging from moribund groups, though.

Friends and Not-Friends

Clicking the Friends link got me a listing of all my Facebook friends, sorted from newest to oldest. No surprise there! Merely scrolling down farther, I found a lot more. It likewise lists: Sent Friend Requests, Received Friend Requests, Declined Friend Requests, and Removed Friends. That'southward right. Facebook knows everybody you've unfriended, and e'er friend request you've denied, or ignored.

I dumped the list into Excel for analysis, considering that's what I practise. I found that several dozen of the entries appear in more than ane category, and that some of these duplicates seem to tell a story. Some years ago, I purged my friends list down to something manageable, merely later on added some of the purged folks back. And there they are—Removed Friends, but subsequently, Friends. Others were persistent folks, Declined Friend Asking followed afterward by Received Friend Asking (which I ignored).

Possibly the most interesting category involve people who showed up in the Received Friend Request list and no other. That means I received the request and just ignored it, without actively declining. I confess to friend-request overload. And later ignoring requests for a while, it gets tough to actively go through and pass up the unwanted ones. To the lxx people in that category—distressing!

At the tail end of the list, I institute a couple other minor categories. I have exactly i Followee, meaning at that place's one semi-public figure that I follow without really being FB friends. You may have more. Facebook'southward analysis of my friend collection places me in the Friend Peer Group chosen "Established Adult Life." Why? Perhaps for advertising?

The Friends page makes sense, though it includes more information than I thought it would. But the Contact Info page totally mystifies me. It lists hundreds of people, in no apparent lodge, along with i, two, or iii phone numbers. Who are these people, and where did they come from? The listing even includes entries for people no longer living, some of them deceased before I ever joined Facebook.

I dumped this listing into Excel also, and checked off any that I might take actually called on the telephone. That accounts for just 10 pct of the list. Nigh half-dozen percentage of the contacts announced twice, most with the same phone number. Nigh all of the names seem at least vaguely familiar, just not through Facebook.

For a sanity check, I used an Excel formula to flag every proper name from my Friends list that also appears in the Contacts listing. That accounts for eleven per centum of my friends. Looking the other direction, because there are more than Contacts than Friends, merely half-dozen.5 percent of my Contacts match the Friends list.

I don't know for sure how Facebook got this list of contacts and their phone numbers. I must have given information technology permission to see my contacts on some platform, but even and so, I by and large keep email addresses (notably absent from this listing), not phone numbers. It's a puzzlement!

My Whole Timeline at a Glance

At first, I was unimpressed with the folio reached by clicking Timeline. Similar many, I frequently postal service an image with a snarky annotate. The Timeline view skips the images, and the snarky comments alone don't brand sense. Then I hit Ctrl+Finish, to go to the terminate of the page. Wow!

Every post I ever made on Facebook is here in the timeline. I don't know if it's even possible to go this far back inside the Facebook user interface. If it were possible, information technology would take hours, maybe days, of scrolling down, downward, down. I found the nearly ten-twelvemonth-old posts fascinating. The post "feeling chilled after biking 10 miles in the rain Sunday to watch the Amgen riders start the first 100-mile ride" reminded me of the thrill of watching the opening of the beginning Amgen Bout of California bicycle race. And I was proud to think my grown daughter'southward high-school success, One thousand Prize in a regional blitheness contest.

Even in this user-friendly 1-long-folio form, paging through the unabridged Timeline would exist too much to handle. Merely if you want to check just when a sure event happened, an event yous posted on Facebook, y'all tin easily search the folio for details. In outcome, information technology'southward an index for your entire Facebook history. What an unexpected treasure this is.

Every Photo, Awkwardly

Clicking Photos gets you a similar list, a timeline of every photo or anthology you ever posted. It includes the date for albums, and any comments, but not the text you shared forth with the album. When y'all click through to the individual photos, you don't see the dates, unless the photo itself has comments. Facebook reports a raft of (to me) pointless information. Camera make and model. Orientation, width, and acme. F-stop, ISO, and focal length. In my oldest photos, these are all the more than useless because they're ofttimes either blank or zilch. I couldn't figure out why some iPhone photos include a modicum of information, while others get null.

Some photos announced automatically in predefined folders such as Mobile Photos, Timeline Photos, and Profile Pictures. Equally with photos in your handcrafted folders, these display the non-useful camera data, followed by any comments. Any mail that went along with the photo doesn't appear, nor is there whatsoever indication of a appointment, unless in the comments.

For a few photos, Facebook provides a link titled Facial Recognition Data. Clicking the link brings up a prepare of incomprehensible numbers and raw information. The fact that all of these were photos of Halloween pumpkins doesn't inspire conviction.

In my view, Facebook could handle this a lot amend. Suppress the camera data except when requested. Include the date for any photograph. And when I snap a photo and post it, include the text of the postal service with the photo.

Small-Screen Video

Clicking Videos, equally expected, gets a list of all the videos you've posted, from newest to oldest, with a 284 by 160 pixel thumbnail. You as well get the video'due south date and time, and any comments. When I clicked on a video, though, I got a surprise.

The Facebook archive stores videos as 400 by 224 MP4 files; it doesn't link to the full-size video that you posted. When I launched one of those, I found that the sound worked fine, merely the video itself only showed shifting bands of color. I tried a one-half-dozen videos, and the same thing happened with all of them.

That was under Firefox. When I opened the same page in Chrome or Edge, the video played back just fine. Internet Explorer didn't try internal playback, but instead suggested opening the video in the Movies & TV app. Motion-picture show & TV blew the video upwards to full screen, making it blurry, simply it worked. I'm not sure what the problem is with Firefox, but there are plenty of other browsers for viewing your annal.

What if your existent urge is to find the full-calibration original video that you uploaded? You can't become there directly from the archive, but it can be a help. Check the date under the desired video, and then open the list of videos correct in your Facebook business relationship online. Make a estimate as to how far you should scroll down. Click a video and check the engagement in the postal service that appears. Gyre upwardly or down as necessary to bracket the desired date. It's not ideal, but as well not too hard.

Ads and More than Ads

Facebook exists to tempt you and other users with ads. Every time you click an advertisement, that's another data point for your profile. The first thing you see when you click the Ads link is a list of all the topics Facebook thinks involvement you. In my instance, the list runs to more than five dozen items. Some brand sense: coffee, California, computer security, network security, journalism, Alejandro Jodorowsky. Others have me head-scratching, things like water, landform, watermelon, and Club of Interbeing (what?). Only those are the topics that inform just what ads Facebook inflicts on my feed.

More interesting is the following section, Ads History. This is simply a list of ads and sponsored posts you've clicked on recently. I'm non certain of the time flow; the oldest one in my feed is from about seven weeks agone. Information technology could as well be a fixed number of the most recent ad-clicks. In my archive the full number lists comes out at the suspiciously circular number 100. Yes, I confess, I clicked 100 ads. To be fair, I avoid clicking unsupported "Sponsored posts," but I do sometimes click ads shared past friends.

At the very end, the archive lists "Advertisers with your contact info," 8 of them, in my example. I recognize most of them, though I'thousand not certain how they got my contact info, or what it means that they did. But a couple are completely unfamiliar. I'm very deliberately not Googling these, figuring that doing and so might but give The Watchers more information.

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A Mess of Messages

Not surprisingly, Facebook keeps a record of every chat you hold using Facebook Messenger. All those conversations show up when you click Messages. And the resulting page is almost completely useless.

In my archive, there is a list of most 200 names and proper noun-groups, in no discernible order. To meet a conversation, you click the name. Quite a few take no conversations associated with them at all. Others are attempts at Messenger conversation from people I don't know. At that place's no way to tell if a given name or group leads to an bodily conversation.

Checking on names where I know I have a Messenger history, I found that indeed it lists every substitution, back to the very kickoff. The messages show up in contrary chronological order, then to read a single chat, you lot must scan the appointment/time stamps to find the initiating message then read from bottom to top. What a mess! And if you remember that you had a conversation on a certain topic, just forget who y'all were chatting with, forget virtually it. There'south no way to search except by opening every name and searching.

Facebook, this could be and then much ameliorate! Give us a listing of names, yep, only show the number of letters associated with each. Let u.s. sort by name or by number of letters. When we open the list of messages for a given person, evidence them in oldest-to-newest order, and use some visual cue to testify the first of each new chat. Finally, permit usa search across all messages. At present that would be a useful listing of messages!

Events and Pokes

I'grand sure you lot've received invitations to plenty of events via Facebook. If I get an invitation to a truly personal happening, I make a point of actively choosing accept or decline. But if I'm but not interested, perhaps because the event is impossibly distant, or sounds boring, I don't usually do anything. Surprise! The Events folio lists every result invitation you lot ever received, even those that you totally ignored. I don't see a lot of value in this list, just it seems harmless.

As well both useless and harmless is the list of pokes. Who pokes anybody these days?

Security Overload

I figured that clicking Security would evidence my Facebook Security settings, mayhap with a history of changes. Male child, was I wrong!

This page starts with a confusing listing of Agile Sessions. Information technology listed 17 active sessions, one (correctly) identified every bit Facebook for iPad and sixteen marked Unknown. Who knows what to make of that?

The following list of Account Activeness proved even more than birdbrained. A seemingly endless listing of entries reports, in painful detail, on events like Session updated (these are the vast bulk, for me), Spider web Session Terminated, and Login. The one slightly interesting entry accurately reported the appointment and time of the last password change. These entries only go back near two years.

Next up is a list of Recognized Machines, including entries for two iPads and two iPhones. Which ones? I've had several. The engagement/time stamps were no help; all four say they were created December 31, 1969 at four:00 p.m. PST. That date seems unlikely. None of the terminal-modified dates are newer than 2014, and the entries include no identifying device information, beyond the IP accost.

I found piffling use for a list of logins and logouts during the previous twelvemonth. A listing of Login Protection Data reveals cookies and IP addresses used or updated in the last twelvemonth. The list ends with estimated locations based on IP addresses, simply unproblematic decimal latitude and longitude, with no link to a map view.

At the very, very end is a short department that might be useful to some. The Administrative Records department lists things like changes to your password, changes to your security answers, and something called "Checkpoint completed."

So, OK, it'south true that Facebook keeps painfully detailed information most your logins and devices. You lot can wait at information technology until your optics cross. A security expert might dump this data to find possible hacking, but the boilerplate consumer will find piddling of interest.

Things I Didn't Know Facebook Knew

Before my recent experimentation, I hadn't actually thought almost what-all data Facebook keeps about me. Clearly, it has to retain my posts and pics, and I know it uses some techniques to decide which ads it'll bear witness. Downloading and paging through my Facebook archive was a real center-opener. I ran into existent surprises, some positive, some negative, some only…surprising.

1. The Timeline annal can be a fantastic index for your unabridged Facebook history. It'southward well-about incommunicable to gyre back a few years in your live Facebook feed, but in the archive, you can easily search the entire timeline.
2. Facebook doesn't only know my friends. It knows everyone who's asked to be a friend, even if I ignored the asking. It knows anybody I've unfriended, and every friend request I've rejected. Maybe that'southward not so bad, but I was surprised.
3. The archive'due south listing of videos displays nicely from newest to oldest, with a date/time stamp for each video. But you don't go to run across the actual post, the video displays in a tiny rectangle, and it seems not to work in Firefox.
4. Some items in Facebook's list of "my" advertising topics make sense; others seem off the wall. The revelation that I've clicked 100 ads in less than 2 months is an eye-opener.
5. Something I did, at some past time, gave Facebook permission to catch all kinds of unrelated contact info. Weirdly, it only shows telephone numbers, fifty-fifty though I've never called 90 percent of those people, and a fair number of them are dead. Unsettling.
6. Your annal lists everyone with whom you've e'er chatted using Messenger, which sounds like it would be handy. Simply the information is disorganized and hard to follow, and there's no mode to search your messages.

If you oasis't yet done it, scroll back to the top of this article and follow the instructions to download your own archive. Page through it, recall about it, do your best to get by the poorly designed parts. The archive isn't just bear witness for you of what Facebook has on you. You can too get in a useful resources, assuming it doesn't inspire you to simply delete Facebook.

Presuming you're keeping Facebook, I strongly advise that you bite the bullet and disable the platform that lets Facebook share your data. Yes, that means you surrender your games and apps, those nasty little spies. And you lot must log in to websites using unique passwords. Merely these are good things! With these precautions, you lot tin can keep using Facebook and still keep (virtually of) your privacy.

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Source: https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-download-your-facebook-data-and-6-surprising-things-i-found

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