I know a lot of people in the security industry, and I know a lot of people who enjoy Facebook. However, there's not much overlap between these groups. As someone who's in both groups, I'm an oddity. Many security experts either always steered clear of the social network or are currently advocating deleting it. I closely follow security topics and products such as antivirus utilities, and I also use Facebook, but carefully. I don't see any need to delete my Facebook account. But now that Facebook has made it so easy to download everything the social network has about me, I went ahead with that process. Perusing the resulting archive, I ran into some surprises, both positive and otherwise.
I've known for years that with Facebook, I'm not the customer, I'm the product. I keep my profile private except to friends. I don't post a lot in my visible profile, and not all of what I display is true. For example, while it's true that I studied Existentialism in college, I'm not actually a Pastafarian; I have not been "touched by his noodly appendage." I never wildly click links that seem shady. And I maintain a security suite that warns if a dangerous link gets past my radar.
I never play Facebook games; you'd be surprised, or appalled, at how much data games can gather. I had to silence one family member because of a Farmville account that kept pinging me to come play. I've been known to try some silly quizzes, but only the ones that ask you questions to figure out, say, which Game of Thrones character will kill you. Even then, the questions better not be the kind of thing that might answer your security questions. Those quizzes that offer to scan your Facebook data and give you a result? Those are poison! I don't touch them.
I never use Facebook (or my email account) to log into websites. Doing so makes your Facebook password a single point of failure. One exposure and all your accounts are wide open.
Instead, I use a password manager to create strong, unique passwords for every site.
But being careful myself isn't enough. Sloppy security on the part of my friends can potentially make some of my information public. So I tightened up my settings to keep Facebook from sharing my data. I went all-out, choosing the option to totally disable the sharing platform. Facebook offered dire warnings about how doing so would disable my apps, and keep me from logging in using my Facebook credentials. I smiled and went ahead. Now I'm fine, right? Well, maybe.
These days, it's easy to download an archive of all the data Facebook has on you. (At least, they say it's everything…) Well, it's fairly easy. You do have to go through several steps, which are in place to prevent someone else from stealing your archive. Here's how I did it, and how you can get your own archive.
Note that you'll have to supply your Facebook password twice during this process, because this is sensitive information. Facebook also warns that you should protect the downloaded data, as it contains sensitive material. Your best bet would be to encrypt the data when you're not actively studying it.
Once you unzip the downloaded archive, you'll find you have a folder containing a file INDEX.HTM plus folders named html, messages, photos, and videos. Ignore the folders for now; just launch INDEX.HTM and start exploring.
You start at the Profile page, with general information about you and your Facebook account.
27.' At least Facebook doesn't have a hellabyte of data on me...
This page also lists all the Groups I belong to. It's a bigger list than I expected, mostly because at least half of them haven't had any activity for years. I'm not sure there's any benefit in actively disengaging from moribund groups, though.
Clicking the Friends link got me a list of all my Facebook friends, sorted from newest to oldest. No surprise there! But scrolling down farther, I found a lot more. It also lists: Sent Friend Requests, Received Friend Requests, Declined Friend Requests, and Removed Friends. That's right. Facebook knows everybody you've unfriended, and ever friend request you've denied, or ignored.
I dumped the list into Excel for analysis, because that's what I do. I found that several dozen of the entries appear in more than one category, and that some of these duplicates seem to tell a story. Some years ago, I purged my friends list down to something manageable, but later added some of the purged folks back.
And there they are—Removed Friends, but later, Friends. Others were persistent folks, Declined Friend Request followed later by Received Friend Request (which I ignored).
Possibly the most interesting category involve people who showed up in the Received Friend Request list and no other. That means I received the request and just ignored it, without actively declining. I confess to friend-request overload. And after ignoring requests for a while, it gets tough to actively go through and decline the unwanted ones. To the 70 people in that category—sorry!
At the tail end of the list, I found a couple other minor categories. I have exactly one Followee, meaning there's one semi-public figure that I follow without actually being FB friends. You may have more. Facebook's analysis of my friend collection places me in the Friend Peer Group called "Established Adult Life." Why? Perhaps for advertising?
The Friends page makes sense, though it includes more information than I thought it would.
But the Contact Info page totally mystifies me. It lists hundreds of people, in no apparent order, along with one, two, or three phone numbers. Who are these people, and where did they come from? The list even includes entries for people no longer living, some of them deceased before I ever joined Facebook.
I dumped this list into Excel as well, and checked off any that I might have actually called on the phone. That accounts for just 10 percent of the list. About 6 percent of the contacts appear twice, most with the same phone number. Almost all of the names seem at least vaguely familiar, but not through Facebook.
For a sanity check, I used an Excel formula to flag every name from my Friends list that also appears in the Contacts list. That accounts for 11 percent of my friends. Looking the other direction, because there are more Contacts than Friends, just 6.5 percent of my Contacts match the Friends list.
I don't know for sure how Facebook got this list of contacts and their phone numbers.
I must have given it permission to see my contacts on some platform, but even then, I mostly keep email addresses (notably absent from this list), not phone numbers. It's a puzzlement!
At first, I was unimpressed with the page reached by clicking Timeline. Like many, I frequently post an image with a snarky comment. The Timeline view skips the images, and the snarky comments alone don't make sense. Then I hit Ctrl+End, to go to the end of the page. Wow!
Every post I ever made on Facebook is here in the timeline. I don't know if it's even possible to go this far back within the Facebook user interface. If it were possible, it would take hours, maybe days, of scrolling down, down, down. I found the nearly ten-year-old posts fascinating. The post "feeling chilled after biking 10 miles in the rain Sunday to watch the Amgen riders start the first 100-mile ride" reminded me of the thrill of watching the opening of the first Amgen Tour of California bicycle race.
And I was proud to remember my grown daughter's high-school success, Grand Prize in a regional animation contest.
Even in this convenient one-long-page form, paging through the entire Timeline would be too much to handle. But if you want to check just when a certain event happened, an event you posted on Facebook, you can easily search the page for details. In effect, it's an index for your entire Facebook history. What an unexpected treasure this is.
Clicking Photos gets you a similar list, a timeline of every photo or album you ever posted. It includes the date for albums, and any comments, but not the text you shared along with the album. When you click through to the individual photos, you don't see the dates, unless the photo itself has comments. Facebook reports a raft of (to me) pointless information. Camera make and model. Orientation, width, and height. F-stop, ISO, and focal length. In my oldest photos, these are all the more useless because they're often either blank or zero.
I couldn't figure out why some iPhone photos include a modicum of information, while others get nothing.
Some photos appear automatically in predefined folders such as Mobile Photos, Timeline Photos, and Profile Pictures. As with photos in your handcrafted folders, these display the non-useful camera data, followed by any comments. Any post that went along with the photo doesn't appear, nor is there any indication of a date, unless in the comments.
For a few photos, Facebook provides a link titled Facial Recognition Data. Clicking the link brings up a set of incomprehensible numbers and raw data. The fact that all of these were photos of Halloween pumpkins doesn't inspire confidence.
In my view, Facebook could handle this a lot better. Suppress the camera data except when requested. Include the date for any photo. And when I snap a photo and post it, include the text of the post with the photo.
Clicking Videos, as expected, gets a list of all the videos you've posted, from newest to oldest, with a 284 by 160 pixel thumbnail.
You also get the video's date and time, and any comments. When I clicked on a video, though, I got a surprise.
The Facebook archive stores videos as 400 by 224 MP4 files; it doesn't link to the full-size video that you posted. When I launched one of those, I found that the sound worked fine, but the video itself just showed shifting bands of color. I tried a half-dozen videos, and the same thing happened with all of them.
That was under Firefox. When I opened the same page in Chrome or Edge, the video played back just fine. Internet Explorer didn't try internal playback, but instead suggested opening the video in the Movies & TV app. Movie & TV blew the video up to full screen, making it blurry, but it worked. I'm not sure what the problem is with Firefox, but there are plenty of other browsers for viewing your archive.
What if your real urge is to find the full-scale original video that you uploaded? You can't get there directly from the archive, but it can be a help.
Check the date under the desired video, then open the list of videos right in your Facebook account online. Make a guess as to how far you should scroll down. Click a video and check the date in the post that appears. Scroll up or down as necessary to bracket the desired date. It's not ideal, but also not too difficult.
Facebook exists to tempt you and other users with ads. Every time you click an ad, that's another data point for your profile. The first thing you see when you click the Ads link is a list of all the topics Facebook thinks interest you. In my case, the list runs to more than five dozen items. Some make sense: coffee, California, computer security, network security, journalism, Alejandro Jodorowsky. Others have me head-scratching, things like water, landform, watermelon, and Order of Interbeing (what?). But those are the topics that inform just what ads Facebook inflicts on my feed.
More interesting is the following section, Ads History.
This is simply a list of ads and sponsored posts you've clicked on recently. I'm not sure of the time period; the oldest one in my feed is from about seven weeks ago. It could also be a fixed number of the most recent ad-clicks. In my archive the total number lists comes out at the suspiciously round number 100. Yes, I confess, I clicked 100 ads. To be fair, I avoid clicking unsupported "Sponsored posts," but I do sometimes click ads shared by friends.
At the very end, the archive lists "Advertisers with your contact info," eight of them, in my case. I recognize most of them, though I'm not sure how they got my contact info, or what it means that they did. But a couple are completely unfamiliar. I'm very deliberately not Googling these, figuring that doing so might just give The Watchers more information.
Don't Be Caught by Email Scams: How to Avoid Phishing
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7 Signs You Have Malware and How to Get Rid of It
Not surprisingly, Facebook keeps a record of every conversation you hold using Facebook Messenger.
All those conversations show up when you click Messages. And the resulting page is almost completely useless.
In my archive, there is a list of almost 200 names and name-groups, in no discernible order. To see a conversation, you click the name. Quite a few have no conversations associated with them at all. Others are attempts at Messenger chat from people I don't know. There's no way to tell if a given name or group leads to an actual conversation.
Checking on names where I know I have a Messenger history, I found that indeed it lists every exchange, back to the very first. The messages show up in reverse chronological order, so to read a single conversation, you must scan the date/time stamps to find the initiating message and then read from bottom to top. What a mess! And if you remember that you had a conversation on a certain topic, but forget who you were chatting with, forget about it. There's no way to search except by opening every name and searching.
Facebook, this could be so much better! Give us a list of names, yes, but show the number of messages associated with each.
Let us sort by name or by number of messages. When we open the list of messages for a given person, show them in oldest-to-newest order, and use some visual cue to show the start of each new conversation. Finally, let us search across all messages. Now that would be a useful list of messages!
I'm sure you've received invitations to plenty of events via Facebook. If I get an invitation to a truly personal happening, I make a point of actively choosing accept or decline. But if I'm just not interested, perhaps because the event is impossibly distant, or sounds boring, I don't usually do anything. Surprise! The Events page lists every event invitation you ever received, even those that you totally ignored. I don't see a lot of value in this list, but it seems harmless.
Likewise both useless and harmless is the list of pokes. Who pokes anybody these days?
I figured that clicking Security would show my Facebook Security settings, perhaps with a history of changes.
Boy, was I wrong!
This page starts with a confusing list of Active Sessions. It listed 17 active sessions, one (correctly) identified as Facebook for iPad and 16 marked Unknown. Who knows what to make of that?
The following list of Account Activity proved even more obtuse. A seemingly endless list of entries reports, in painful detail, on events like Session updated (these are the vast majority, for me), Web Session Terminated, and Login. The one slightly interesting entry accurately reported the date and time of the last password change. These entries only go back about two years.
Next up is a list of Recognized Machines, including entries for two iPads and two iPhones. Which ones? I've had several. The date/time stamps were no help; all four say they were created December 31, 1969 at 4:00 p.m. PST. That date seems unlikely. None of the last-modified dates are newer than 2014, and the entries include no identifying device information, beyond the IP address.
I found little use for a list of logins and logouts during the previous year. A list of Login Protection Data reveals cookies and IP addresses used or updated in the last year. The list ends with estimated locations based on IP addresses, just simple decimal latitude and longitude, with no link to a map view.
At the very, very end is a short section that might be useful to some. The Administrative Records section lists things like changes to your password, changes to your security answers, and something called "Checkpoint completed."
So, OK, it's true that Facebook keeps painfully detailed information about your logins and devices. You can look at it until your eyes cross. A security expert might dump this data to detect possible hacking, but the average consumer will find little of interest.
Before my recent experimentation, I hadn't really thought about what-all data Facebook keeps about me. Clearly, it has to retain my posts and pics, and I know it uses some techniques to decide which ads it'll show.
Downloading and paging through my Facebook archive was a real eye-opener. I ran into real surprises, some positive, some negative, some just…surprising.
If you haven't yet done it, scroll back to the top of this article and follow the instructions to download your own archive. Page through it, think about it, do your best to get past the poorly designed parts. The archive isn't just evidence for you of what Facebook has on you. You can also make it a useful resource, assuming it doesn't inspire you to simply delete Facebook.
Presuming you're keeping Facebook, I strongly advise that you bite the bullet and disable the platform that lets Facebook share your data.
Yes, that means you give up your games and apps, those nasty little spies. And you must log in to websites using unique passwords. But these are good things! With these precautions, you can keep using Facebook and still keep (most of) your privacy.
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Did you know that Facebook users upload millions of photos every day? If you’re one of those users and have posted many pictures over the years, it might be time to clean up your albums.
But before you delete all the photos from Facebook and lose them forever, downloading them first might be a great idea. That way, they will all be in the same folder.
Fortunately, you don’t have to download each photo separately. You can download all images simultaneously, and this article explains how.
One of the reasons some Facebook users decide to download all their photos in bulk is that they want to delete their accounts, but there are other reasons as well.
”
Click on the “Deselect all” option.
Note: When choosing to download all Facebook images in bulk, the created folder also downloads any other data residing in the specified folders. Keep in mind that the number of videos and pictures you have on Facebook determines how long it takes for the file to download. Once the process is complete, you’ll receive a notification and an email from Facebook.
You can only download all photos from the Facebook page for which you are the administrator. However, you will also have to download all other data to download all images and videos.
Essentially, you’re making a full copy of your page. That’s the only way it works on Facebook pages for now.
Here’s what you do:
It might take a few minutes for Facebook to create a downloadable file. Once complete, you can save it to your device.
Unlike Pages, Facebook doesn’t allow data from groups to get extracted. There are several reasons why this could potentially be the case. Some groups have tens of thousands of members who want to protect their information.
On the technical side, extracting files from groups would create large files. Some browser extensions and add-ons can download separate albums from Facebook, but they don’t always work very well.
iPhone users also can download all photos from their Facebook profiles to their devices. Before you start, ensure that you have enough storage on your phone when it’s time to download the compressed file.
You can choose to save your compressed file to your iPhone camera roll or iCloud.
Android users can also download all their Facebook photos in one compressed file. If you have an Android phone or tablet, here’s what you need to do.
If you’ve already exchanged plenty of photos with your friends, you can’t retroactively download them all at once. You download them individually by tapping on the image and saving it to your device.
However, if you want Facebook image downloading to be an automated action in the future and avoid having to save the files manually, here’s what you can do.
Once you have completed the above steps, your Messenger photos and images will automatically get saved to your device.
You can download all photos at once from Facebook only within your profile account or page, regardless of whether you’re using a browser or the mobile app version of Facebook.
The created file can sometimes become several GBs, so ensure you have a stable internet connection and enough storage to save the file.
Sometimes, you don’t need every photo or video from your Facebook account, just a particular album. There’s a simple way to download the album you want. Here’s how to do it.
If you have a business page on Facebook, you can download all the data, including your photos and videos. Unfortunately, you can’t just save pictures alone. Regardless, here’s how to download your images from your Facebook business page.
In closing, whether you want to purge your Facebook profile or just clean it up, there’s no need to lose all the photos forever when you don’t want them on Facebook anymore.
There are several ways to download your precious images and videos and preserve them forever. How you go about it is up to you!
Yes, you can save your Facebook images to your devices and the cloud, such as iCloud or Google Photos. Navigate to “Settings>Your Facebook information,” then select “Transfer a copy of your photos or videos.”
Facebook asks you to choose a file location, and you can select “Google Photos” or any other destination you have in mind. Finally, just confirm the transfer. Facebook will send you an email when the import is complete.
Yes, you have the option to download all your photos at the same time. You can do it on mobile devices and your computer (Mac, Linux, Windows, etc.) The easiest way to get all images is to access the “Your Facebook information” section from the “Settings” menu.
Copying facebook images is just another term for downloading them.
There are three ways you can copy all pictures from Facebook.
The first option is to copy one picture at a time, but that might take a while.
The next option is to download one album at a time. If you don’t have too many albums, the process won’t take that long to complete.
The third option is to export all your photos and videos at once. Keep in mind that when exporting all the images in bulk, videos are attached too. You can’t just download all the photos.
You can transfer data from Facebook in a semi-automatic mode to four platforms. The platform is a service to which you want to transfer your information from Facebook:
VKontakte, at the request of users, has added the ability to save materials from Instagram: vk.com/instagram_manager.To transfer pictures, just enter your username on Instagram or enter a link to your account. They will be included in the closed album "Instagram", but privacy can be changed at any time.
In the future it will be possible to use the archive. Then the video will also be saved (in the "Video" section), as well as Reels (in the "Clips"). All materials will be visible only to you. So have time to download a file from Instagram with all the information.
Before moving on, let's determine what information is on the social network
Note. If you would like to download a copy of your Facebook information, check out the Download Your Information tool.
The View Your Info tool provides a summary of your Facebook profile that you can see in one place at any time.
In the Your Information section, we've divided this information into categories to make it easier for you to find the information you're looking for.
To check your Facebook information (eg recent activity), go to Your Facebook Information in Settings. Below is an instruction on how to go on your own, or you can use direct links and follow them, they are after the instructions.
To view your Facebook information:
icon in the top right corner of the Facebook window.
The following tools and resources are available in Your Facebook Info settings:
In the activity log, you can see and manage the content you've shared (posts you've commented or liked, apps you've used, and content you've searched for) and manage it. Learn more about the activity log. You can select the platform to which you want to transfer a copy of your information in section Select platform function settings Transfer a copy of your information .
If you delete or disable your account, the transfer may be interrupted. 
There are no social networks Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki in the list, so we download the information in JSON format. As of 02/26/2022, there is no possibility to import data to another social network, but it will appear in the very near future.
To download a copy of your data from Facebook, use the information download tool.
To download a copy of your Facebook information:
icon in the top right corner of the Facebook window.
2. Press Settings & Privacy and then Settings .
3. Select Your Facebook information on the left.
4. Next to Download information click View .
5. To add or remove data categories to the query, check or uncheck the boxes on the right.
6. Select other options such as:
7. Click Create file to confirm the download request.
Submitted download request will get status Pending and will appear in section Copies available of your download tool. It may take several days for us to prepare the files at your request.
You will be notified when materials are available for download.
To download a copy of the requested data:
To view information about the download request (such as format and expiration date), click More.
Note. To learn how to manage your data and privacy on Facebook, visit the Quick Privacy Settings page. To check recent activity on your Facebook account or view information about it, use the View My Info tool.
1. Log in to your Instagram account. Go to "Settings" then to the "Privacy and security" section, go to " Data download" and click "Request file". The "Download a copy of your information" screen appears.
2. Enter the email address to which to send the download link.
3. Select the JSON information file format.
4. Enter the password and click on the button "Request file ".
5. Within 48 hours (much faster) you will receive an email with subject Your information in Instagram , it contains a link to an archive file with messages, photos, comments, profile information.
6. Download the data, the link is only valid for 4 days after sending.
Yes. When you download a copy of your data on Facebook, you can specify which categories of information you are interested in, as well as set a date range to download information for a certain period. You can set such settings when requesting to download information. Learn more about the information contained in the downloads.
What is the difference between HTML and JSON copies of data?
When requesting a copy of your information from Facebook, you can choose the file format: HTML or JSON.
HTML. This is a Facebook data format that can be easily viewed. You will receive a ZIP archive. After opening it, extract the files from it. An HTML file called index. This file can be opened as a web page in a browser. The archive will contain folders with the files you requested, including images and videos.
JSON. This is a machine-readable format with which you can transfer your data if you want to upload it to another service.
When requesting a copy of your information, you can also choose the quality of the media files (photos and videos). If you select a higher quality, the downloaded file will be larger and take up more disk space.
The Administrator can download a copy of the information from their Page. Copy includes:
To download a copy of information from your Page:
When the file is ready, you will receive an email or notification (depending on your privacy settings). In the email or notification, click Download Page and enter your password to continue. The link to your file is only valid for 4 days.
Photos and videos
You can only transfer copies of photos and videos that you have uploaded to Facebook and see on your profile.
Publications
You can only transfer copies of posts you create that you see on your profile, including:
In such cases, only the content is migrated. 
Note. Comments and reactions to posts will not be transferred. Notes
You can only transfer copies of the notes you create and see on your profile. Copies of some Facebook notes cannot be transferred. These include:
Events
For events you have created, you can transfer:
If you're an admin, editor, moderator, analyst, or advertiser and you've created an event for your Page, you can only transfer the title, time zone, and start and end times of the event. For other people's events you've been invited to, you can transfer:
To transfer information about another user's event to which you were invited, first respond to the invitation by selecting Attending or Interested in . You can't transfer information about events that you declined or didn't respond to.
in the top right corner of the Facebook window.
Transfer a photo copy
Move a copy of the video
You may need to re-enter your Facebook password. Complete the transfer by following the instructions on the screen. Move a copy of publications
Transferring a copy of notes
Move a copy of events
There are several ways to view and manage your Facebook information in your Facebook settings:
Sources:
https://www.facebook.com/help/230304858213063/
https://www.facebook.com/help/212802592074644/
https://www.facebook.com/help/466076673571942/
https://www.facebook.com/help/1700142396915814/
Internet
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To download all photos from your Facebook profile , there is a button in the settings section. The main function is to create a downloadable copy of all information related to your account, but it is possible to get a file containing only photos and videos that you have shared on a social network.
Although this process can be done from both a mobile phone and a PC, there are some aspects that need to be considered.
If you want to upload copies of all your photos to Facebook , please be aware that this process may take some time, because there are probably a lot of photos. Similarly, the file being downloaded is heavy, so it is recommended that you carry out the process from a computer over a stable internet connection. In this article you will find the procedure for both cases, more about it below.
To download all the photos you have shared on your Facebook account from your computer, first go to https://www.facebook.com/ and log into your account. Then follow the steps below.
Once these steps are completed, download all the photos stored in your Facebook profile will start automatically. You just need to wait for the process to finish in order to save them to your computer.
In order for to download all photos from your Facebook profile from mobile device , you must use the official app. The Lite alternative does not have this feature, perhaps because the download can consume a lot of browsing data, which is contrary to the concept of the option, which, among other things, allows data to be saved.
If you want to back up your Facebook photos to your phone, it is recommended to turn off mobile data and use a Wi-Fi connection. Also, you need to make sure you have enough storage space. To download all photos, sign in to your account and follow these steps:
After completing these steps, you will only have to wait for the download process to complete, which may take several minutes, as these are usually very large files.
is returned Several factors can cause a error when uploading all photos from your Facebook profile . If this happens, you have several options for solving the problem:
