How to Download Your Facebook Data

I know a lot of people in the security industry, and I know a lot of people who enjoy Facebook. However, there's not much overlap between these groups. As someone who's part of both groups, I'm a bit of an oddity. Many security experts either always steered clear of the social network or are currently advocating deleting it. I follow security topics and products closely, and I also use Facebook, carefully. I don't see any need to delete my Facebook account. But now that Facebook has made it so easy to download everything the social network has about me, I went ahead with that process. Perusing the resulting archive, I ran into some surprises, both positive and otherwise.

I'm Careful, Really I Am

I've known for years that with Facebook, I'm not the customer, I'm the product. I keep my profile private except to friends. I don't post a lot in my visible profile, and not all of what I display is true. For example, while it's true that I studied Existentialism in college, I'm not actually a Pastafarian; I have not been "touched by his noodly appendage." I never wildly click links that seem shady. And I maintain a security suite that warns if a dangerous link gets past my radar.

I never play Facebook games; you'd be surprised, or appalled, at how much data games can gather. I had to silence one family member because of a Farmville account that kept pinging me to come play. I've been known to try some silly quizzes, but only the ones that ask you questions to figure out, say, which Game of Thrones character will kill you. Those quizzes that offer to scan your Facebook data and give you a result? Those are poison! I don't touch them.

I never use Facebook (or my email account) to log into websites. Doing so makes your Facebook password a single point of failure. One exposure and all your accounts are wide open. Instead, I use a password manager to create strong, unique passwords for every site.

But being careful myself isn't enough. Sloppy security on the part of my friends can potentially make some of my information public. So I tightened up my settings to keep Facebook from sharing my data. I went all-out, choosing the option to totally disable the sharing platform. Facebook offered dire warnings about how doing so would disable my apps, and keep me from logging in using my Facebook credentials. I smiled and went ahead. Now I'm fine, right? Well, maybe.

Download Your Archive

These days, it's easy to download an archive of all the data Facebook has on you. (At least, they say it's everything…) Well, it's fairly easy. You do have to go through several steps, which are in place to prevent someone else from stealing your archive. Here's how I did it, and how you can get your own archive.

1. Log into Facebook, click the down-triangle icon at top right, and choose Settings.
2. On the General Settings page, click the last item, the link to download a copy of your data.
3. Facebook warns that collecting data may take a while. Click Start My Archive.
4. On the next page, click Start My Archive again, and wait for a notification that it's done.
5. Download your Facebook archive.

Note that you'll have to supply your Facebook password twice during this process, because this is sensitive information. Facebook also warns that you should protect the downloaded data, as it contains sensitive material. Your best bet would be to encrypt the data when you're not actively studying it.