Facebook: Your very own "War and Peace"

Twenty Something Asks Facebook For His File And Gets It - All 1,200 Pages

Excerpt:

Be careful of what you ask for. That's a lesson that Max Schrems of Vienna, Austria, learned the hard way when he sent a formal request to Facebook citing European law and asking for a copy of every piece of personal information that the world’s largest social network had collected on him.

After a wait, the 24 year-old law student got what he was seeking: a CD with all his data stored on it - 1,222 files in all. The collection of PDF format documents was roughly the length Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace but told a more mundane story: a record of Schrems' years-long relationship with the world's largest social network.

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. To Schrems' dismay, much of the data he received from the network was information he thought he had deleted. Facebook, it seems, doesn't think much of the Delete key and continued to hold copies of the data on its servers.

Comment: Makes one wonder whether one should Facebook!