Reddit user group called How to annoy Facebook sets out to do just that after data sharing gives rise to fresh privacy concerns

This article is more than 9 years old

This article is more than 9 years old

A community website appeared to have got the better of Facebook on Thursday after a guerilla campaign overloaded the social network with requests to send out hard copies of personal data it holds on its users.

The campaign, blatantly called How to annoy Facebook, was started by a user on the social news site Reddit and quickly became the number three story in its "what's hot" section.

Under some data protection laws in Europe, Facebook has to send a hard copy – likely to be a CD – of your personal data. In the case of the UK and Ireland, it must send out a CD within 40 days.

However, the group's mischief may be somewhat stymied by the fact that Facebook does not have to supply the information in the format requested.

The UK information commissioner's office told the Guardian that Facebook could lawfully send out the data by email, or whichever format was the most convenient. The social network could even direct users to its "export your data" webpage if that satisfied the request.

Facebook evidently has been flooded with requests — according to technology blog ZDNet, the company's data access request team have been forced to send out emails telling users there will be a significant delay in getting their personal data out to them.

The amount of data would include a user's photo gallery, social calendar, wall posts and all other personal data such as date of birth. ZDNet reported that a typical personal data file will be a PDF that runs to more than 1,000 pages and more than 100MB in size.

The watchdog website Europe vs Facebook received a 780-page personal information file – 34MB in size, roughly the same as eight MP3 music tracks – when it requested data from Facebook.

Facebook had not responded to a request for comment at the time of publication.

The online campaign follows fresh privacy concerns about what data is held by Facebook after it launched features last week that automatically share what users are watching, reading and listening to on certain sites.

Spotify attracted criticism for the changes, which meant that every song a user listened to was automatically shared on Facebook, unless the user explicitly opted out.

The Anglo-Swedish streaming service on Thursday introduced a "private listening" feature in response to users who complained that they didn't want Facebook friends being notified of every song they listened to.

Daniel Ek, co-founder and chief executive of Spotify, announced the changes on Twitter. "We're rolling out a new client as we speak where you can temporarily hide your guilty pleasures. It works like a browser's private mode," he tweeted. "We call it 'private listening' and you can find it in the Spotify/File menu and toggle it on/off."