Access Your Information
"Last week showed how much more work we need to do to enforce our policies and help people understand how Facebook works and the choices they have over their data."
- Erin Egan, VP and Chief Privacy Officer, Policy and Ashlie Beringer, VP and Deputy General Counsel at Facebook. March 28, 2018 3.
The "last week" casually mentioned in the opening paragraph of this March 2018 blog post from Facebook is a reference to the more than 50 million profiles harvested by the data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica, tied to Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, one of the biggest known privacy breaches Facebook has had to date.
In an attempt to regain the trust of their users, Facebook announced the Access Your Information tool, which is meant to simplify the process of downloading your Facebook data. The download includes far from all of your information. Facebook provides limited information about the advertisers who have shared user data with Facebook, only the name of the company and no way to contact them. Additionally, Facebook stores data for varying amounts of time, so older data is less likely to appear in the report.
​
As promised in their blog post, it's relatively easy to download my Facebook data. After locating the Access Your Information tool in the website's privacy settings, I was asked to verify my account password and thirty minutes later I was able to download a large file with eleven years worth of information. It's divided into almost thirty folders, but the content of all of them is displayed via a single, user-friendly html file.
​
For Facebook, winning back public trust means giving users the impression that they are in control of their information, and that intention is present in the design of the interface they created to show us our data beginning with the message stamped at the bottom of every page of the report:
Literally speaking, this statement refers to the date and time I requested to download my information. However, the language brings to light a question of agency. The word "generating" seems to imply that the data was created by me at the time I requested it, but the data already existed, and it exists because Facebook has been collecting it since I opened my account in 2009. Even then, "collecting" suggests that data is out there in the world, naturally occuring, waiting to be harvested. In reality, data is the way we break down continuous occurrences into small, discrete parts. What gets broken down and how is up to the data collectors. As with every other platform I will be looking at, it's a choice that Facebook gets to make, and that is what I'm keeping in mind as I scroll through eleven years worth of information generated by those choices.
​
Note: Hovering over some highlighted sections will reveal data.
The Data
Facebook has kept a log of every post, picture, like, and comment, even the ones that I have since hidden from my timeline, but not deleted. It's all information I knowingly gave to the platform. Though at the time, I was thinking of it as content visible to my Facebook friends, rather than an entry into a personal database.
​
Every post is marked with the date, time, and page I posted it on. In recent years, my posts mostly consist of happy birthdays to my relatives and postings on housing pages in search of a summer subletter for my apartment.
​
Further back, around the time I would have been in middle school, are more frequent postings: inside jokes between old friends I no longer remember the punchline to, snow day predictions for winter 2011, chain messages threatening a haunting if I don't pass them on. I don't remember posting as often as the data shows me I have.
The record of my joining and leaving Facebook groups over the years manages to track signifcant life events.
​
"You became of member of Class of 2016" marks my high school graduation.
​
"You became a member of Alice Zawideh Pictures." My dad created this group when his mom died. He wanted the extended family to be able consolidate all their photos of her in one place.
​
"You stopped being a member of MJR Waterford Coworkers" August 25, 2017. 9:52 PM. -- Twenty-two minutes after my final shift scooping popcorn at my hometown movie theater, my job the summer before I transferred schools.
​
Even the beginning of the pandemic and the move to online classes is noted by my joining a group called "Zoom Memes for Self Quarenteens" on March 16, 2020 at 11:54 PM EST.
Records of discontinued features like the poke live on in data.
Facebook's separation of my data into two groups, "Your Information" and "Information About You," is telling. There's a clear distinction between data I've provided directly, as in the previous section, and the inferences that have been made based on that data. One type is decidedly mine. I have the ability to add to or delete it at any time.
The other type was created by and for Facebook. It's the "about" data that tells me a bit more about who Facebook thinks I am.
Facebook provides short explanations of each of the subgroups under the About You section. For example, Friend Peer Group, which has been labeled University is a "description of the life stage of my friends."
​
One of the more puzzling inclusions is the Facial Recognition data, which I expected to be a file containing all the images on facebook containing my face. Instead, it’s a totally indiscernible string of letters and numbers and no way to understand their meaning. The terms "raw data," "threshold," and "example count" don't do much in terms of explanation.
A few of the items listed under Your Topics, like Microsoft, Disease Outbreaks, and Writing, are not hard to understand. I listed Microsoft as my employer on my profile last year and even made a rare post about it - so it makes sense that it would take on disproportionate weight in my categorization. Additionally, most of my current Facebook activity is centered around running the page of a student literary journal. Since the name of the journal is Writer to Writer, it’s not an insane logical leap for Facebook to conclude that I am in fact interested in Writing.
Disease Outbreaks is self-explanatory, given we’re living in the midst of a worldwide pandemic. Of course my impulsive checks on news and numbers on coronavirus would translate into an interest in Disease Outbreaks. I think everyone has an interest in Disease Outbreaks these days.
As for the Musical Theater categorization, I had a short-lived enthusiasm for Hamilton in 2016 like the rest of the world, but that hardly qualifies the entire genre of Musical Theater one of my top interests, so I’m at a loss as to why that topic is there and featured so prominently.
While I'm not much of a baker or even a fan of desserts, I could attribute all the food, dessert, and baking-related categorization to Tasty cooking videos from Buzzfeed, which saw peak popularity a few years ago and were constantly on my feed during that time period, but for content I haven’t thought about or interacted with in years to completely dominate Facebook’s understanding of me in this context doesn't make a lot of sense.
​
Takeaways
Scrolling through old posts, comments, and even my group membership activity, I'm slightly tempted to veer into nostalgia and view my Facebook data download as a type of time capsule. However, findings like my facial recognition data and largely off-base interest topics remind me that this is not an exercise in reminiscing. Really, my group membership activity is just a list of dates, and the idea that they map onto certain significant life events is a meaning I have assigned to the data, knowing its context, and not a meaning the data creates on its own. In comparison, my facial recognition data is totally meaningless to me since I have no knowledge of what the list of letters and numbers represents.
​
Additionally, I reacted to my interest categories based on my own understanding of what they might mean, but I don't actually know how Facebook has defined "Musical Theatre" as a category, how I fit into it, or how being grouped into that category has affected my feed - which does not regularly feature musical-theatre-related content.
​
At first glance, the Access Your Information tool seems to accomplish Facebook's goal of perceived transparency. However, most of the information provided leaves me with more questions than answers about how Facebook uses my data to understand me as a user.