There ain’t no such thing as a free service, and why I’m giving up Facebook in 2019.

I have been on Facebook since Thursday, September 28th, 2006 at 8:36 PM CDT, I know this because Facebook has kept track of that for all of these years. In the 12 years I have been on the platform I have reacted to 8,283 posts, removed 474 friends, responded to 668 events (most of which are Maybe), and have imported 664 contacts from my phone into the network. I knew Facebook kept track of things, and I’m honestly not surprised by how much information they keep track of. In total my information dump I received from Facebook was 2.26gb which also included all of my photos and videos in medium quality (of which accounted for 1.78gb). I’m also not against a company collecting information in this manner so long as they aren’t reckless with it.

Searching for new’s articles on Google with the query facebook privacy yields 667 million results in 0.33 seconds. It has been reported that Facebook was using information as a bartering tool with the likes of Netflix, Spotify, and others. The FTC is looking into Facebook’s privacy concerns yet again. Amid all of this pressure the share prices of the company have hit a 21 month low with a price-target cut as well. To put it bluntly, Facebook is not a company I trust with my information. With that said though, what information does Facebook have about me?

Let’s Start With The Basics

Facebook of course knows when I registered for the service. They know my current city, where I grew up, and everywhere else I’ve lived in-between. Oddly enough it does not seem to have my full relationship history, this might be from girlfriends deleting their profiles though. They know about my family members, my education and work history. They have my screen names for GitHub, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The social network knows I’m interested in women, am a liberal, and my religious views are agnostic. Most of this information is fairly basic though, anyone that is a friend of mine probably can already view this anyway.

Facebook also has a datapoint called Friend Peer Group which is described as:

Life stage description of your friends on Facebook

The current life stage of my friend group is apparently Starting Adult Life, which makes sense sine most people I’m friends with I either met in college or are younger relatives of mine. I’m still kind of surprised that they felt the need to categorize this though.

Of course my search history is readily available at my fingertips. Something that seems to be somewhat hopeful is this only includes my history that I have not deleted as I will periodically go through and purge that sort of stuff. Facebook has also kept tabs on places I’ve created which includes the Menard’s in Woodstock Illinois, and A Friend’s House in Dekalb, Illinois.

Unsurprisingly Facebook has also kept track of my profile update information. Rather than displaying this information in chronological order though it’s fairly scattered and I can’t figure out what order it’s actually in. As an example, stuff from 2012 is at the top while more recent events from 2018 are in the middle of this page. I’m kind of mortified that I tagged my girlfriend in a post about New Clothes shortly after I purchased a coat from Canada Goose this October; don’t worry they kept track of my exact location when I made that update.

Who Knew Messenger Had So Much Data

I guess it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that Facebook keeps your messages around. Having roughly 12 years worth of messages is still rather hard to comprehend. I found a message between myself and someone else I did not get along with, and I had the opportunity to relive petty arguments that took place 7 years ago. Going back even further than that I can read conversations I had all the way back in 2006. In some ways it’s a little shocking to see how far I have come since I was 16 years old, but at the same it’s rather creepy that Facebook has all of this information readily available.

Even deleting your account isn’t enough which was made obvious after scrolling through many Facebook User chats. One of those users was asking me if I could hack into someone’s Facebook account (because you know, everyone with a computer science degree can and will do that for free). A lot of these ones are messages from 2008–2011 and I have to admit, I have grown up quite a bit in that time. The way the information is presented makes it fairly difficult to go through every message and I get the feeling that’s intentional. In total the messages folder accounted for 438mb of the 2.26gb Facebook has on me.

The Advertisers Portion Is Unsurprisingly Worse

I want to start off by looking through the Advertisers Who Uploaded a Contact List With Your Information section. I guess you are able to upload contact lists as an advertiser for reasons I’m not quite sure on, however 678 companies decided to give my information to Facebook. I won’t list off all of them, however here are some interesting ones I noticed while scrolling through:

• Precision Garage Door of Austin (and Delaware, and Houston, and Southeast Michigan, and West Michigan). I’ve never needed a garage door in any of those areas, in fact Austin is the only city of those listed I’ve been to.
• Adam Panter For District Attorney, I’m not even sure who that is.
• Americans For Prosperity, as well as their regional branches in Colorado, North Carolina, Ohio, and South Dakota.
• Chipotle Mexican Grill, I ate there 8 times a week in college so I’m not shocked.
• Dallas Fort Worth Acura Dealers, I’ve never been to DFW so I’m assuming they just bought a list of people somewhere.
• Nike Japan, oddly enough Nike US did not give my information to Facebook.
• Roti Modern Mediterranean, I’m not sure if I ever gave them my email address so this is kind of disturbing.
• Uber Eats Kenya, why Kenya?

It’s good to know that once I delete my Facebook account that companies will still offer up my information to Facebook.

The company also keeps track of advertisers I’ve interacted with, albeit it seems like only for the past few months (I also may have purged this information too). It looks like back in October of this year I was really excited about shopping for essentials at Express though. Just the other day I was looking at an ad for the #1 meeting room booking system. They keep track of my ad interests as well which include 236 topics ranging from Timesplitters (a game that needs a next-gen remake) to the number 1,000,000,000.

They Keep Tabs On The Technical Stuff Too

It’s not just about making money off of your information at Facebook. The company also keeps plenty of information around related to your security and login information. According to their records I have changed my password 5 times (doesn’t seem right, so maybe they don’t track that anymore), although I have removed my profile photo 83 times. The company has been keeping tabs on logins and logouts since 2016 which include 56 logins and 58 logouts.

Facebook also know’s where I have logged in at going back to 2017. They have kept tabs on 280 IP addresses I have used while using their platform. Speaking of location, the company knows where I have been since 2017. Most of the records show up as me being in Chicago but they have also picked up on my recent trips to Florida and California. Anecdotally it appears the company did not collect much location information about me when I had an iPhone, however since switching back to Android they have been collecting information like crazy.

I’m Getting Rid Of Facebook In 2019

I didn’t get the chance to talk about the events or group activity that Facebook has kept about me. I’m also not sure what they have collected from my Oculus Go or Instagram. In writing this article though I have switched over to DuckDuckGo, so it’s safe to say I’m officially paranoid about what information any free service has collected about me.

Looking through the Apps and Websites section I have several accounts off of Facebook that I need to transfer over before I can safely delete my account. Over the next week I plan on migrating over to email logins for some of the 356 services I have associated with Facebook, while the others I’ll be okay with just orphaning. I will of course delete my Instagram account as well and I’m not really sure what to do with the Oculus Go. I do feel very fortunate for not purchasing one of those Facebook Portals though, I can’t imagine what this company will do with a camera embedded in households.

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