What Does Facebook Have On You? Find Out with Their Updated ‘Download Your Information’ Tool

Facebook, in itself, is a force to be reckoned with. It recorded 845 million monthly active users as of December 2011 and revealed that these users spent a collective 10.5 billion minutes online every day (see related story here.)

With that many users, you'd have to wonder what Facebook is doing with all that data. A number of IT security experts have a lot of nasty things to say about the social network's privacy policies, but most users are just pretty much clueless when it comes to this matter. Until now.

Facebook has just rolled out an update for its 'Download Your Information' tool, which lets users download what information the social network has on them.

Starting today, you will be able to download an expanded archive of your Facebook account history. First introduced in 2010, Download Your Information lets you get a copy of what you’ve shared on Facebook, such as photos, posts, messages, a list of friends and chat conversations. Now you can access additional categories of information, including previous names, friend requests you’ve made and IP addresses you logged in from.

-- Facebook announcement

This announcement was met with mixed reactions. Some users were happy about the added options, while others responded with fear and disgust that Facebook had kept information that they had already removed or deleted from their profiles.

• Awesome!!!I use my FB as my online scrapbook so having access to things I have posted helps to re-inspire me.
• I don't want to find more information I want to be able to hide what is already there!
• So, this means all our informations never get deleted from your server. Good food for intelligence departments.
• When will we be able to purge our Facebook history?

Which side are you on?

Article by Hazel Chua
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