Exploration/Facebook

We want to explore what data Facebook has about us.

It is highly suggested to do this in two phases: one simply observes what Facebook claims to know. The second step, a week later, makes changes. This allows some time period with more intense reflection on the use of those tools, while better knowing how you are tracked. Does simply knowing more influence your behavior?

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

Access your information

• "Off-Site Activity" (click on the icons to get a full list)
• 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.

• What do we care about?
• How do we design it?
• What's a metric for each characteristic?