How much Facebook knows about you?
A step by step guide to know what exactly Facebook knows about you
Unless you were living under a rock, you would have heard about WhatsApp’s latest privacy policy and Elon musk’s tweet asking everyone to start using a platform like Signal.
In light of this latest debate on data privacy, I went on a search to figure out how much data do I share with Facebook, and based on that how much does Facebook actually know about me. On my quest, I found ethi.
Ethi helps users understand & uncover what Facebook really knows about them. They are a not-for-profit organization that is fighting for users' rights to control data they share with big tech.
It’s not a free tool. I paid a $7 one time fee to use it for a month and the results were shocking.
Here is a guide to use ethi.
Step 1: Download Your Facebook Information File
The first step is to get the data from Facebook.
Navigate to Settings & Privacy > Privacy Shortcuts > Access your information.
Once on the “Access Your Information” page click on the download your information hyperlink which will take you to the Download Your Information page as shown below.
On Download Your Information page un-check Photos and Videos, select Format as JSON, Media Quality as Low, and click on the Create File button.
After you click on the Create File button you will see the below screen stating “A copy of your information is being created”.
Once your file is ready you will get an email notification. This usually takes 4–5 minutes.
Once you get the notification you can go to the Available Copies tab show in the screenshot below where you will find the file ready for you to download.
Click on the Download button to download the copy. You will need this file for the next steps, which will perform on ethi.
Step 2: Upload Your Facebook Information File to ethi
Now go to ethi and click on the select folder button and select the folder that you downloaded from Facebook.
After selection of the folder click on the Upload Data button which will start the upload process.
This can take up to a minute or two and once the upload is complete you will see the below screen. Now you can start exploring your data.
Step 3 — Explore your data
Tracking
The first section is the Tracking section where you will be able to see your off facebook activities, your location, Facebook activities, and your watch time of videos on Facebook.
The most shocking part for me was my off-facebook activities. These are the third-party app that shares your data with Facebook. This means Facebook is tracking you even while you are not on their platform.
In the debate of big tech using and selling our data to 3rd parties, we have forgotten that even the third parties share our data with companies like Facebook.
Profiling
In profiling, they try to evaluate your personality, traits, and mood based on your Facebook activities.
Unfortunately, I could not see my personality traits as their API was down.
When you send a message, hidden in the words is a clue about how you were feeling at that moment. By analyzing and aggregating those clues, Facebook can track your mood over time. This was an eye-opener for me. I could see my mood cycles on a chart.
Targeting
This section covers your interest, preferences, and based on which how many ads were targeted at you and how many times you engaged with those ads.
As you can see in the screenshot below 1831 advertisers uploaded a list with my contact in it.
It's amazing to see how accurately facebook can target ads according to your interests and mood. This is Facebook’s bread and butter this is where they get money from selling ads. The more accurately they can target a user the more they can charge companies to run targeted ads.
Socializing
Who is your BFF?
Ask Facebook and it will tell you. Based on your day to day interaction with your contacts on Facebook, Facebook can predict who your close friends are.
Imagine how accurate Facebook will get once they have your WhatsApp data like contact details, group name, group members etc.
Security Hub
This section gives you an overview of the sensitive content found in your comments. It can be an email, phone number, account number, or password you might have shared in a comment.
Based on this exercise now I can take an informed decision on whether to keep using Facebook or move to a more responsible platform like Signal.
Some people might be okay with using Facebook and how much Facebook knows about them doesn’t really matter and that is completely fine as long as you know exactly what data you are sharing and how it's being used.
Hope you find this to be useful and I will let you pick your own side on Facebook/WhatsApp vs Signal
Thanks for reading.
