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For all the whining that goes on about privacy and how Facebook is always messing with the boundaries of what is right to share and what is private we still keep posting a whole lot of crap on places like Facebook, Twitter and now Google+.
Not that long ago Facebook announced that you could request a history of your activity on the site and they would do their best to provide it to you. Of course there were the typical jokes that ensued about the dump trucks full of CDs you would need to store it on but it turns out that Facebook is true to their word.
At least that is what 24-year-old Max Schrems of Vienna, Austria, found out when he asked Facebook for a copy of all the data that Facebook has on file about him. The good news is that it only took one CD to hold all the data (it’s still early days) but on the flip side there were 1,222 PDFs on the CD that documented his every move on the site.
According to Schrems’ discussion with the Threatpost blog this even extended to when he wasn’t on the Facebook site itself
Collected together were records of when Schrems logged in and out of the social network, the times and content of sent and received messages and an accounting of every person and thing he’s ever liked, posted, poked, friended or recorded. The archive captured friend requests, former or alternative names and email addresses, employment and relationship statuses and photos, in some cases with their GPS locations included, to name a few.
Think that is bad enough? Well try again because it seems that not only did they have data on him while away from Facebook but they also had data that Schrems had deleted from the site.
Also one lasr point – the 1,222 PDFs were based on his only having 234 friends so image for those having thousands upon thousands of friends.
You might want to hang on to that dump truck after all.
