1) Request and download my Facebook data

This process is very straightforward: once I was logged in, I went to “Settings” and clicked the “Download a copy of your Facebook data” button. Doing that, you will send to Facebook a request for your data and after some minutes (< 15 min. in my case) you’ll receive a notification and your files are ready to download.

Let’s examine them.

Requesting a download of my personal Facebook data.

The file I received was a “.zip” file (350 MB, more or less), I extracted it and opened the “index.htm” file.

This is how it looked like:

My personal Facebook data.

As you can see, it’s full of well-categorized information that you can easily search through the side menu: media contents, messages, applications used, and more.

That’s a lot of data, ain’t it?

Some bad things: I found on Twitter some users that claim to also have received back scary data has shown below (this story also appears on The Hacker News when I was writing this post):

Yes, that’s crazy but fortunately it wasn’t my case, I didn’t found any data regarding my phone calls or my SMS sent or received.

“It seems that in older versions of Android when permissions were a lot less strict, the Facebook app took away contact permission at the time of installation that allowed the company access to call and message data automatically.” (The Hacker News)

Besides that, a specific category caught my attention: the Contact Info.

The title of this category is self-explained and in fact, I was able to retrieve the complete list of my Facebook friends with a huge list of my phone’s contacts, containing also old numbers that I don’t have anymore. It could be useful as a personal back-up, but I didn’t get why a lot of my contact has also their personal email address associated with it.

Facebook Contact Info page.

I’m also sure that all of these emails come directly from Facebook and not from my phone’s contact list: I checked every single email and I found on my phone less than 5% of these contacts. So, they came from Facebook.

In fact, Facebook gives you the opportunity to share your email addresses with:

everyone

just your friends

nobody

For most people sharing their personal emails is not an issue, I mean, that’s only an email address, right?

Here’s when my “blackhat personality” came out.