How can you find out what Facebook (and Google) know about you

By , 25 November 2015 at 09:00
How can you find out what Facebook (and Google) know about you
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How can you find out what Facebook (and Google) know about you

By , 25 November 2015 at 09:00
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PRIVACY

Facebook collects an unimaginable amount of our data. Discover everything that Facebook knows about you:

The issue of privacy of personal data on the Internet is a hot topic. And Facebook, as one might expect, is not an exception.

This can easily be ascertained by doing a Google search on “Facebook privacy lawsuits”, which will lead to a considerable number of links. In fact, one of them received significant media coverage last April, and involved some 25,000 users in 100 countries, which led to a historic judgement, as reported here.

As a result of these legal disputes, the company founded by Mark Zuckerberg adjusted its privacy policies and among other initiatives, made a tool available to users (which, let us bear in mind, today number around 1,500 million people around the world) which enables us to obtain (and download to our computers) a copy of all the information that the big “F” social network holds on us.

Does this remind you of Big Brother from George Orwell’s “1984”?

How? As reported here: “you have to go to the general section of your Facebook settings and click on “Download a copy of your information”, and discover what they have about us on file.

I believe that it is not only an interesting exercise to do so, but also necessary. Especially if you see what Facebook explains in this link, fortunately, in full detail, where it shows you what information it holds about your account and your activity on that social network.

And there are all kinds of things, from what every user writes in the “about me” section, to “deleted friends”, and even “ads that you have clicked on”, “applications that you have added” or “credit cards”, which, according to Facebook, refers to “if you make purchases on Facebook (for example, via applications) and you have provided Facebook with your credit card number.

Does this remind you of Big Brother from George Orwell’s “1984”? And I have not even mentioned Google, which also holds a great variety of information about us. But do not despair: it also provides a similar option.

In this article from the La Nación newspaper, a journalist tells of what they discovered when using the Facebook tool.

This post was originally published in Telefónica’s Digital Trends blog.

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