How To Know What Facebook Knows About You

A guide to learn step by step all the information that Mark Zuckerberg's company has about you.

Facebook, the social network created by Mark Zuckeberg, has been involved in a data breach scandal, when it was disclosed that the company Cambridge Analytica collected personal information from more than 50 million profiles to manipulate voters and influence the outcome of the presidential elections of EE. UU of 2016.

From there, many users have begun to think about what data Facebook gets and what it offers. On the one hand, the social network has the data of all the users that accept the Terms and Conditions of its Privacy Policy, since that gives them permission to access them.

What data does Facebook have?

If you want to know, you just have to follow the following steps:

One can download the data from Facebook, and in this way know what information they are using from us. To obtain it, you must go to the configuration of the account, in the "General Account Settings" section and look for a link called "Download a copy of your information".

After a few minutes you will receive a link to download a compressed file in .zip format, whose weight will depend on the activity carried out in the social network from the first minute of registration. After unzipping it, you will find five folders: Photos, Videos, Messages, Index and Html.

"Index" is an html file that offers the information in a visual way, "Videos" contains all the videos uploaded by the user to the network with its corresponding thumbnail, the "Photos" folder also contains all the images uploaded to the social network from the first day (geolocation data and image adjustments included) and "Messages" contains all the messages sent to each of the people you have on Facebook.

Finally, "Html" is the folder that has the most interesting data for companies. In it there are several .html files that can be opened directly in the browser: "Ads", "Apps", "Contact_info", "Events", "Friends", "Messages", "Photos", "Security", "Timeline " and videos".

Ads Archive

The folder "Htlm" is enough to know what image Facebook has on you. To know it, you must enter the "Ads" file, in which a list of topics appears with which Facebook defines the user to send you advertising. In addition, it also knows in which ads you have been interested. To see it, "Ad History" is the right place, because the ads you click on appear there.

On the other hand, "Ads" facilitates the information of which companies have the information of your profile. Just look in the "Have your contact information" section.

Following in the "Html" file, we have "Security", where you will find a record of all the activity of each and every one of the sessions carried out on Facebook. In addition, in this data you can see the date, time, IP, device and browser of each session, and the record of all the security changes you have made.

Contacts are also public and so are all conversations with them. The access permissions to the contacts (for example, to look for friends in the social network) allow Facebook to save all your contacts from the mobile. Therefore, if you open the "Contact_info" file, you will see all the contacts uploaded.

"Friends" is the place to see all the friends, since when did you begin to be, the date of application, acceptance or rejection.

Finally, your activity also has a timeline in the homonymous folder, which collects everything you have done since you registered until today.

How to know if your profile has been used by Cambridge Analytica?

That is another one of the big questions that Facebook has started to answer, in an easy way. If you are one of the victims of data traffic, the social network notifies you of this in the notifications.

If Cambridge Analityca used your information, Facebook will inform you in the notification that you have prohibited a site called "This Is Your Digital Life", since that place shared your data without consent. In addition, the message includes a link that shows you where your data has gone.