The Facebook data dump game

People have been downloading their Facebook data and discovering just how much Facebook knows about them. I decided to do the same.

Sifting through, it looks as if my privacy practices have basically worked — they have very little information of any significance. They don’t have a log of all my phone calls, as they do for some people. They don’t have any messages of significance, because I never trusted Facebook Messenger. They don’t know what doctors I’m going to.

They do have some contact information — it looks like they have out of date contact information from the last time I had the Facebook app on my phone, which was around 2014 or 2015 judging from who’s missing from the list.

The list of advertisers who’ve been given my contact information is long and bizarrely random. Swedish 18-wheeler manufacturer DAF is on the list, which I can only imagine is an accidental misinterpretation of my listening to German band DAF. Then again, ISS is on the list along with SABO, so maybe Facebook genuinely thinks I’m a Swedish trucker living in public housing.

The data export does confirm one thing that annoys me, though: the personal information I carefully removed from my profile page is still in Facebook’s systems.

Related: Is it time to leave Facebook?