Facebook Data Dump Contains Your Call Logs, Which Advertisers Have Access to Your Personal Data, and More
Facebook hasn't
had a good week, ever since the social media giant got caught up in the data
privacy scandal linked with data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica (CA).
Just to recap, CA allegedly procured personal user data on over 50 million
Facebook users, and this data was used for social media targeting in political
campaigns. Since the scandal came to light, users have been looking for ways to
remove their data from the social media website prompting the #DeleteFacebook online campaign. Part
of that process, would include downloading all your data from the social
network, so that you can retain your information even after deleting your
account. Several people have been doing so in the recent past, and, there were
some interesting revelations to be found within the data - including which
advertisers have access to your data, as well as complete call records in some
cases.
Facebook
Privacy Scandal How to Check Which Advertisers Have Access to Your Data
A tweet thread by software developer Dylan
McKay suggests an interesting revelation wherein Facebook has access
to call history details of McKay's conversations with his partner's mother. Add
to that, Facebook seems to have historical records of all contacts (even those
deleted), metadata of text messages, and metadata of cellular call logs.
Notably, he was using an Android phone during November 2016 and July 2017 when the data breach seems to have
occurred.
To view the history of your Facebook
account's data, log in to Facebook.com on the desktop browser, click on the
drop down icon on the top right of the page and select Settings. In the General
tab, you will see the Download a copy
of your Facebook data option. Clicking that will prompt you to
re-enter your Facebook password; now select Start
My Archive to initiate the download request. An email containing
a ZIP file will then be sent to your registered email address. File size can
depend on the activity frequency and age of your Facebook profile. In our case,
the size was a massive 4.29GB.
Talking about advertisers
extracting data from your Facebook profile, the ZIP file was spotted
to contain an HTML folder, which has a page titled 'ads.html'. Here, you can
find the list of "Advertisers with your contact info" buried at the
end of the HTML page. The page also contains an "Ad
Topics" section which includes the list of keywords that are used by
third-party advertisers to potentially target ads on your timeline. Another
interesting section in the file is titled "Ads History" that lists
every ad you have ever clicked on since your account's inception.
The ZIP file also contains the
entire list of third-party apps that you have installed on or linked with your
Facebook account. It has IP addresses you've logged in from, email addresses,
contact numbers of all friends you have added and pages you have liked; even
all your phone book contacts from Android smart phones you have used to log in
to the Facebook account. Apart from that, it contains metadata on Facebook
events, your friend list, messages, places you have checked into, videos you
have uploaded/ been tagged in, and also every like and poke you've made.
To remove this access, you might have to
completely delete (not deactivate) your Facebook account. If that is not an
option, you can limit access by changing your preferences and revoking access
to third-party apps. The latter can be done by going into Account
Settings > Apps > Logged in with Facebook and removing the apps you
wish to revoke access from.
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