Dear FB, My Data, Please!

Nov 30, 2011 by Ando    No Comments    Posted under: Opinions

I’ve been following Europe Verses Facebook for quite some time now and very much approve of the notion. I requested a copy of my data about a month ago and received a dry reply today. Not surprisingly, I was directed to use the profile download tool to get a copy of “all the data that we believe necessary to comply with the requirements of data protection law“.

Like hell. I’m more interested on what goes on behind the scenes. Luckily, there’s a dumbed-down version on how to persuade Facebook to do peoples bidding.

Now to the month long wait, again…

You can access your data immediately any time, free of charge. In this download, we’ve included all the data that we believe necessary to comply with the requirements of data protection law. Please note that this tool provides you with data that is currently held in your profile (timeline).

Please note that we are currently undergoing an audit by our European data protection regulator, the Irish Data Protection Commission.  This includes an examination of the categories of data that should be provided in response to a subject access request. This may result in changes to the download tool in the future.

- Email from Facebook to Ando Roots

Note: Facebook has made it more and more difficult to send an access request since the beginning of your campaign. The legal deadline of 40 days is currently ignored. Users get rerouted to a “download tool” that only allows to get a copy your own profile (about 22 data categories) but does not provide you the data Facebook is collecting and storing in the background (about 35 data categories).

- From http://europe-v-facebook.org/EN/Get_your_Data_/get_your_data_.html

Update: I didn’t hear back from Facebook after the legal deadline so I wrote to them on paper. A bit more difficult to ignore now. P.S! You owe me 1.09 €.

/–/

Please note that as this reply contains all the information necessary for you to exercise your subject access rights we will not enter into further correspondence about your specific data through this email address.

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We’ve built a convenient self-service tool to offer people who use Facebook the opportunity to access the personal data we hold about them in accordance with the provisions of EU Directive 95/46/EC.

/–/

 In this download, we’ve included all the data that we believe necessary to comply with the requirements of data protection law.

- Annotated excerpts from the email

Facebook is sending out e-mails in which they claim that you can download all data via the “account settings” page on their web page. In fact you only get a minimal amount of data when downloading this file (about 22 data categories instead of more than 76!)

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