Everyone and their mother wrote about the recent Facebook user data leak. If you didn’t notice or decided not to care because it’s yet another fuck-up by the blue app, who can blame you? But what is interesting, as Wired reports, is that it’s hard to find where this data actually came from. Facebook just says it’s from 2019 leak and now it just got published. Nothing to see here. But there were a couple that year. Surprise.
In short, the leak available online contains data on roughly 533 million users. E-mails, phone numbers, Facebook IDs and a lot of other information. The leak included information on various politicians and Mark Zuckerberg himself.
You can easily check if you are affected on HaveIBeenPwned website. It’s actually a good resource to keep at hand because it checks all the available leaks. My data wasn’t in this one, but there were a couple of others to worry about.
Regardless of the result I started wandering, what information Facebook has on me. I went to Facebook settings (actually opened Facebook for the first time since November) and requested a download of all the information from my profile. After a couple of hours I got a link for around 500 MB of data.
It starts with the obvious — all your posts, friends, likes, comments, photos and videos. There are also devices, IP addresses and locations you’ve logged into Facebook. If you’ve used voice features, there would be recordings (not for me).
There are also some things that Facebook tries to guess about you, like for example your interests (which were pretty meh for me):
Or life stage description of your friends:
It also keeps every profile you’ve visited and when, what you were searching for and what languages you might speak.
Then there is a list of companies who uploaded your contact information to Facebook to spam you with their offers — almost every popular app or store you’ve registered in.
The most interesting is your activity outside of Facebook. In my case, among others there was a local bank Luminor which reports to Facebook every time I open the app.
I know it’s automatic, but let it just sink in, a bank in Latvia is telling a social networking company in the US about every time I’ve opened their app. Just why?
There is much more activity from another bank — Citadele, but I found it hard to understand what it corresponds to.
You can actually turn off this activity outside Facebook “feature”, but as Facebook itself warns before you do, it’s not actually turning it off.
Although I know it’s hard to actually delete information from the Internet and there are shadow profiles on Facebook, I still think this is the only logical step. As I mentioned, I wasn’t using the social network for six months, so I don’t think I will miss it.
Surprisingly, the process of deleting the account looks fairly straightforward, you just choose Delete:
It even reminds you to download all the information (which I already did):
After that, you have 30 days to reinstate your account, which I did once accidentally.
If you log in to Facebook by mistake in those 30 days, it will just … log you in, without even asking and the “deletion” process will be stopped. So, you have to be careful. I had to go through the deletion procedure for the second time.
There are still Instagram and WhatsApp installed on my phone. I’ll have to decide about those later. Although moving from WhatsApp is impossible now because of work, I already started minimizing the number of chats I have there. Instagram on the other hand I think will have the same trajectory as Facebook, I will use it for some time and at some point I just won’t.