Here’s how to see exactly what Facebook knows about you

Since the data leak of over 50 million Facebook users to a political consulting firm came to light, Facebook has been under intense scrutiny, with many users demanding to know exactly what information Facebook knows about them.

Facebook does provide a way for their users to obtain a copy of all the information the social networking has on someone since they joined the site, including what it knows about their interests, ‘likes’ as well as their photos, messages posts, comments, contact information and even data acquired by the Facebook app that can potentially include contact numbers, call logs and contact names.

It can be quite shocking to learn just how much information the world’s largest social networking knows about you. Many Facebook users have been surprised to discover that the Facebook app had been rummaging through their phone contacts, obtaining numbers and names as well as call logs (you can stop the apps from doing that by following our instructions here) and others were surprised to see that Facebook knew the adverts they had clicked on, topics they have liked and old events they had frequented.

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If you want to learn what information Facebook has on you, you can download your entire Facebook data archive by heading to your main settings (for desktop users, that means clicking the down arrow at the top right of the page) and selecting Settings, and that takes you to your General settings page by default, which includes a link at the bottom stating Download a copy of your Facebook data. Just click that and confirm, and you will get an email telling you when the data is ready to download (you’ll need to re-enter your password for security reasons.)

This is usually a large file, since it includes photos, videos that you’ve shared on Facebook (or across Messenger) as well as photos, files and videos shared with you by others. Facebook announced recently that with its updated privacy controls, users can download this data in sections, though at the time of writing this is not currently available.