Facebook is the most influential platform of our everyday life. First of all, we all are quite addicted to it. It allows us to share our information very easily. Moreover, they also optimize the platform for becoming more attractive so that people spend more time. Thus, they’re able to provide you a free service in exchange for your personal information that businesses love so much to get!
Recently, #DeleteFacebook is going on really strong. It’s because of the recent disclosure of Cambridge Analytica incident where they stole the information of lots of people from Facebook legally. That’s a big shock to the community. Even tech expert like Elon Musk removed the FB page of Tesla and SpaceX.
You can delete your Facebook, and before doing that, you’re free to download a copy of all the information you shared and stored on the Facebook servers. Several users, downloading the copy, found out some info from the deep within.
Facebook collects call & SMS metadata
If you’re a smartphone user, Facebook app is the must-have of all, right? It allows you access the platform without any difficulty. That’s what Facebook wanted and collected some sensitive information.
The mobile app was keeping a record of phone calls and SMS transmissions from your device. The logged information includes the start time of each call, the duration, the contacts’ names etc. However, the app didn’t collect information about unknown numbers (not saved in the address book).
There were also traces of collecting all the sent + received SMS messages to contact list entries. However, Facebook didn’t collect the contents of the SMS. To prove the issue, here are some of the tweets of all the victims.
Oh wow my deleted Facebook Zip file contains info on every single phone cellphone call and text I made for about a year- cool totally not creepy.
— Mat Johnson (@mat_johnson) March 23, 2018
Download your Facebook account .zip off their site, unzip it, then go to the HTML folder, open the contact_info.htm file. See records of who you’ve talked to on your cell—not with the app, just on your regular cellphone—and for how long. https://t.co/l9BDEJu3Hx
— Mat Johnson (@mat_johnson) March 23, 2018
How to download the data
In order to verify the fact by yourself, you need to download the zip file from Facebook. Note that depending on your usage, the file may be very large (several gigabytes or more). That’s why make sure to download it in free time.
We have already shared the technique on downloading the file step-by-step. Follow the steps described in How to Delete Facebook and you’ll get your file. Using the steps, you can also delete your account if you wish.
For a quick refresh, here’s the technique in short.
- Go to “Settings”.
- Click “Download a copy”.
- Download your file.
The tweets above are the easiest way to find out all your unknown information Facebook gathered.
Note that the Facebook app didn’t collect the data by default. In this case, the users were prompted to give access to this information. Unknowingly, if you gave your permission, there’s nothing to cringe about.
You can control what information Facebook shares with 3rd-parties. Follow the tricks on controlling your Facebook.
