As presented, this material runs the gamut of comprehensibility. Old photos are old photos, while old chat transcripts, or a collection of “likes,” verge on absurdity. Facebook, it turns out, encourages you to engage in a lot of behaviors that only make sense when parsed by Facebook. At the time you might have felt you were interacting with an old friend, or your aunt — which you were — but you were also feeding data into a gigantic piece of machinery.

This archive also contains something else: a summary of your life on Facebook, as the company sees you. Included, for example, is a list of some of the ads you recently interacted with, a list of which advertisers have your contact information and the ad categories the company has associated with your account. This information is mostly useless for reconstructing, or preserving, your personal experience with Facebook. But it provides a rare glimpse of what else could happen after Facebook dies, as well as the preparations they are already making themselves. What survives of your personal Facebook profile is, as always, ultimately up to you. But what happens to your other Facebook profile — the one that Facebook, Inc. used to convert our time on Facebook.com into billions of dollars — remains out of your hands.

Facebook has lived a full life — should death come, the cause will be the social media equivalent of “old age.” If 2018 does indeed represent some sort of apex for Facebook the site, Facebook the company won’t be surprised. Unlike peak Myspace, with its impatient and half-interested owner, Facebook, still helmed by its founder and flush with cash, has the time and the freedom to begin planning for the future on its own terms. The company recently installed the executive who oversaw the growth of Facebook’s News Feed to run Instagram, which has already grown from 30 million users when Facebook acquired it in 2012 to more than one billion. The founders of WhatsApp are gone, too, its 1.5 billion users now more freely and fully available to Facebook. And while Facebook is still the parent company’s main moneymaker, the transfer of assets — and of data — has already begun. Instagram users have long been asked to link their accounts to Facebook; WhatsApp account information is already used, by default, to “improve” a user’s “Facebook ads and products experiences.” Advertisers buy ads for Instagram and Facebook using the same tool.

The advertising data exposed in a user’s personal Facebook archive is, of course, just a sliver of what is available to the company. Facebook’s real profile of who you are — the one that it uses to fill your feeds and show you ads — is far more comprehensive. The company’s relentless accumulation of user data isn’t just a grab for power or a default behavior. It’s a long-term investment. You may forget Facebook; it could happen sooner than you expect. But it’s not likely to forget you.