Facebook offered even less clarity on other issues. When I asked whether the download tool showed all location data that Facebook collected from a user’s phone, including GPS, rather than just instances where a user knowingly checked in, the company answered a question I had not asked, telling me that GPS location information is controlled by a device’s settings. I tried a few more times. But Facebook would only say that users with location history enabled can manage the data through their Activity Log and that device location includes GPS. Again, questions I had not asked.

Facebook’s data-collection and -handling practices are so obtuse that even Zuckerberg became confused and had to correct himself before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Zuckerberg initially said users could download a list of websites that Facebook knows they visited, as well as inferences Facebook makes about users for advertising purposes. The Facebook CEO later asked to “clarify” his statements, stating that Facebook temporarily stores browsing history for the purpose of creating a set of “ad interests.”

The difference between what Facebook knows about you and what it includes in Download Your Data underscores mounting consumer privacy concerns and the limits of self-regulation. Zuckerberg presented the tool as a check on its power, but Facebook controls what it reveals. Likewise, Zuckerberg says people own their data — it was right there in his notes — but the company considers the insights squeezed from that data to be its property. Using those insights, Facebook generates $40 billion in annual revenue, hefty profit margins, and a market value approaching $500 billion.

The practice of collecting this type of data is neither new, nor unique to Facebook, but the gaps and omissions in “Download Your Data” offer perspective on Facebook’s recent emphasis on transparency and rebuilding users’ trust.

Sandy Parakilas, a former Facebook operations manager, says the company is generating economic value by using data about you “to predict how you’re going to act and manipulate you.”

“You have no right over those inferences, that’s a pretty terrible position to be in,” Parakilas says. “This is a company with $40 billion in cash and some of the best engineers in the world. They’re building an AI to predict your behavior and they can’t give a file of your browsing history? Come on.”

Fatemeh Khatibloo, a principal analyst at Forrester, says the download tool shows users raw data about themselves, but not how individual scraps of data are combined and analyzed. “The fact that you like Snickers candy and Red Bull and you like that stuff at 2 o’clock in the morning, they’re using that information to determine you’re a club kid,” she says. However, those categories “don’t exist until someone wants them.” Once advertisers ask to target club kids, “that’s how Facebook is going to figure out how what that audience size is.”

Under Pressure in Europe

Facebook’s data-handling practices---including the limits of Download Your Data---are particularly important in Europe, the company’s second-most lucrative market after North America, representing a quarter of Facebook’s revenue in 2017. Individuals in the EU have had the right to ask for access to the data a company has collected on them. New privacy rules that will take effect next month include stronger provisions for transparency and data portability, as well as enhanced rights to go after companies don’t comply.

In fact, some of the information available through Download Your Data is the result of dogged work by privacy activists in Europe. The “Advertisers who uploaded your contact information” category was added in early 2017, after months of requests from Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a Belgian mathematician and cofounder of PersonalData.IO, who wanted to know what Facebook knew about his browsing habits and which advertisers had uploaded his contact information. But the information only goes back two months. And Ad Topics is a current snapshot, rather than a historical list.