Exploration/Facebook

We want to explore what data Facebook has about us.

• go to Facebook on your laptop
• go to your "Settings" (little arrow in top right pointing down, then "Settings")

Access your information

• go to "Settings > Your Facebook Information > Access Your Information"
• explore a bit, in particular from "Settings > Your Facebook Information > Access Your Information":
  • in the first section, Your Information:
    • " Apps and Websites > Apps and Websites" (and related tabs): these are all the sites where you have logged in over time using Facebook
    • " Location > Location History": why would Facebook trace this? what can be done with it? to help you? to help Facebook? is it a good thing? a bad thing? what helps us decide?
  • in the second section, Information About You:
    • in the subsection About You:
      • "Videos You've Watched"
      • "Your Address Books" why plural? how will that impact the privacy of others? do you think you are in someone else's list of contacts, as known by Facebook?
      • "Face Recognition" what data do they possibly have there?
    • in the subsection Search History:
      • "Your Search History" and "Videos You Have Searched For" how private is this information?
    • in the subsection Security and Login Information:
      • "Where You Are Logged In": pay attention to the duration of your logins. The whole time you are logged in, you are subject to Facebook's Terms of Service. Do you know what they say?
    • in the subsection Ads:
      • "Ads Interests" these are things you have actively provided, mostly
      • "Advertisers Who Uploaded a Contact List With Your Information"
        • in tab Who uploaded a list with your info and advertised to it, you can find a list of different advertisers who advertised to you. Many more have presumably uploaded information about you, but you don't know and Facebook won't tell. See here for a history of how Facebook was forced to disclose some of the information here.
        • in tab Who have uploaded and shared a list with your info, you can find a list of all the brokers who have passed on advertising list to others. For each, if you click View Details > Advertisers using lists with your info, you can see how many end users of this list there were.
        • in tab More > Whose websites or apps you may have used, you will find a list of websites and apps who have tracked you. How?

Download your information

At "Settings > Your Facebook Information > Download Your Information" you can download some of the information you can otherwise access visually via the "Access Your Information" page.

• use the tool to download some of your information
• explore this in raw format so you can make sense of it independently of Facebook's interface
• ask yourself a few questions:
  • what format does it use?
  • what size does each part have?
  • is it exactly the same? (for instance, for face recognition?)

Exercise suggestion

Let's do a comparative study of our privacy settings. How do we design it? What do we care about?