Facebook's profile-download apparatus comes up short

The amusing arrangement is able to let users download added of the claimed advice it food about them, but Facebook isn't acceptable to voluntarily acknowledge aggregate it knows about you -- that abstracts is the company's aliment and butter. 

Even accidental Facebook users can bound accrue a library of photos, videos, and posts absorption the noteworthy and banal moments in the lives of ancestors and friends.
Facebook lets you download abundant of this advice and afresh added its download annal to accommodate IP addresses acclimated by the account, accord information, and added categories of claimed data. 

The download-tool amend is actuality formed out gradually. (When I downloaded a Facebook contour this weekend the added categories of advice weren't included.) To use the contour downloader, assurance into your Facebook annual and bang the bottomward arrow abutting to the Home button in the top-right corner. Accept Annual Settings and bang "Download a archetype of your Facebook data" at the basal of the window.
Enter the annual password, bang Continue, and again accept Start My Archive. 

Facebook profile-download tool
Click the Start My Archive button to create a ZIP-file download that contains your Facebook photos, posts, and other profile data.


Facebook again bales your contour advice and sends you an e-mail back the contour is accessible to download. It took aloof beneath 2 hours for my annal to be prepared. Unfortunately, the contour didn't accommodate IP addresses or any of the added fresh categories of advice listed in Facebook's advancement announcement.

Facebook alert that it is preparing your profile download
It takes a while for Facebook to combine your profile data into a downloadable ZIP file and send you an e-mail with the download link.


The 466KB ZIP book independent the profile's images and videos, as able-bodied as 10 HTML files. Open the index.html book to appearance the stripped-down offline adaptation of your Facebook profile, which includes your wall, photos, friends, and messages.
The user advice Facebook is afraid to share
Facebook is beneath burden to accede with the European Union's acrimonious aloofness regulations, as Kevin J. O'Brien appear aftermost anniversary on the Fresh York Times Technology page. Still, austere adjustment of Facebook's use of the abstracts the aggregation collects about its users -- on either ancillary of the Atlantic -- is several years away, although EU citizens accept one big edge.
European association can appeal a archetype of all the claimed advice Facebook food about them by commutual the company's Claimed Abstracts Appeal form. The 880-page address (PDF) that resulted from one such appeal by the accumulation Europe against Facebook included applications, friends, activities, and shares.
Facebook, Google, and best added big-name Web casework accomplish their money by application what they apperceive about their barter to ambition the ads the companies serve to them through online ad networks. If the casework apperceive what you're absorbed in, they can bear ads based on those interests and you're added acceptable to bang the ads. That's the theory, anyway, and it appears to authority water. Lots of water. 

Much of the claimed data's amount is the aftereffect of its exclusivity. The added bodies who accept admission to the information, the beneath it's annual to the online announcement networks that Facebook and added casework advertise it to. If Facebook users had all the advice the aggregation collects about them, what would stop barter from affairs the advice themselves or award some added assisting use for it? 

The European Union's data-protection action is an attack to accompany bendability to the administration of data-privacy adjustment in EU nations. One of its basal credo is that bodies application a amusing arrangement should be told at the time they assurance up for the annual how their claimed advice will be acclimated by the company. 

The action additionally requires that bodies be accustomed to alteration their claimed advice from one amusing arrangement to another, and that they be able to abolish all traces of their annual back they conciliate it. Of course, users accept a appropriate to absolute admission to their claimed information. Whose abstracts is it, anyway? 

When you apprehend Facebook altercate that the advice the aggregation collects about you is the company's acreage and no best belongs to you, arch for the hills.