


If I cared to click through every single file in my downloaded Zip, I would see similarly vague explanations for what HBO and TikTok and Glossier and the U.S. When I asked the company for comment on whether these data were useful and actionable for most users, I was directed to Zuckerberg’s blog post.) (Later, Facebook told me it could refer to a range of activities, such as signing up for a rewards program or an event. Facebook does not specify who is doing the customizing- Glamour or Facebook or me. According to “210.html,” I did something referred to only as “CUSTOM” on Glamour’s website on both September 19, 2019, and November 21, 2019. Whether someone, somewhere knows what kind of content was viewed is not specified. According to the file labeled “12.html,” Facebook also knows exactly when I did something described as “VIEW_CONTENT” on my credit-card company’s website. It took a good chunk of my morning to even uncover the proof that this is information someone definitely has. on Christmas Eve? Or 18 times on August 3, 2019-a day that I also RSVP’d on Facebook to a DJ set on a rooftop in Brooklyn? Or 12 times on the morning of my high-school best friend’s baby shower, which I posted about on Instagram? What would an advertiser do with the knowledge that I opened a dating app at 3:30 p.m. Tinder is, helpfully, first-file “0.html.” The webpage it leads me to shows the 685 times I’ve opened the Tinder app in the past six months (dating is a numbers game!), and each “ACTIVATE_APP” is time-stamped. They are labeled by numbers only, so I have to click through them at random.
#Facebook activity log settings zip file#
That Zip file includes a folder titled “ads_and_businesses,” which has a subfolder titled “your_off_facebook_activity,” which includes links to 1,081 HTML files.
#Facebook activity log settings download#
It is not immediately obvious, but after messing around for a few minutes, I find I can do so on the general “ download your information” page, where all of my personal posts, comments, photos, location data, log-in attempts, and device IDs are also available to download in a massive Zip file, in exchange for just one reentry of my password. To find out more about what kind of interactions Tinder shared with Facebook, I can’t just turn to the Off-Facebook Activity tool in my browser or in Facebook’s mobile app. Read: Welcome to the age of privacy nihilism But the amount of information Facebook has about each of its users undercuts the goal to present it in a way that could be useful. It implies a data set that is, at a minimum, literally fathomable-from a company that has only ever been motivated to be unfathomably large, and know unfathomably much. It implies that the personal information Facebook has about each of its users can be presented to those users in a way that they can readily process and comprehend. “Easily understand” is an interesting choice of phrase. “You should be able to easily understand and manage your information, which is why strengthening your privacy controls is so important.” “One of our main goals for the next decade is to build much stronger privacy protections for everyone on Facebook,” Zuckerberg wrote in this morning’s announcement. Originally called Clear History, it is only now accessible to all of Facebook’s roughly 2.5 billion global users, including 220 million in the United States. The Off-Facebook Activity tool is the culmination of a promise the company made shortly after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in the late winter of 2018. The interactions aren’t specified, but examples of what they could be are provided within the tool: “Opened an app logged in to app with Facebook visited a website searched for an item added an item to a wishlist added an item to a cart made a purchase made a donation.” The tool lets any Facebook user go into her settings and see a list of apps and websites that have shared her information with Facebook, organized by the most recent time they shared data, and paired with a number indicating how many “interactions” have been shared. In the past 180 days, it has reported 685 of my “interactions” with its app to Facebook, according to Facebook’s new Off-Facebook Activity tool, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a company blog post this morning. Of the 1,081 apps and websites that have been sharing my “activity” with Facebook, Tinder is the chattiest.
