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How to see everything Facebook knows about you, and what you can do about it

Patricia Arquette
Release: 2025-02-24 14:05:10
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How to see everything Facebook knows about you, and what you can do about it

As the world's largest social network, Facebook has data on nearly one-third of the world's population. Whether you are an active Facebook user or just use it to view local community groups, you should know how much personal data you provide to Facebook and its parent company Meta.

Facebook mainly uses the collected data to serve more accurate advertisements. Some people think this practice is too privacy-invasive, while others think it is the price of enjoying Facebook’s free services and tools. No matter how you view the ethics of this data collection, you should understand what information Facebook is collecting about you and how it can control the flow of information. While this guide can help, there are limited things you can do to protect your privacy. If you really want to stop Facebook from mining your data, the best way is to completely delete your Facebook account.

View your profile information

When you create an account, you entered basic background information, including your name and email address. The site will also prompt you to fill in your location, work and education experiences, as well as friends and relatives on Facebook. But by observing your behavior on Facebook, Meta gathers more information about you and your habits.

[Related: How to Secure Your Facebook Account]

A quick view of Facebook One way to know what details you are (and restrict others from accessing them) is to visit the your Facebook information page where Meta stores all this data. If you do not want to use the link, please log in to the website and follow these steps:

1. Click Profile Photo in the upper right corner, then click Settings and Privacy, and then click Settings. 2. The next page provides a variety of actions you can perform on Facebook information, you need to select the first option: Access profile information. Click View to view the data collected by Meta about you.

If you are using the Facebook app, the steps are slightly different:

  1. Click the menu in the lower right corner, and then click the gear icon in the upper right corner. Scroll down to
  2. Your Information
  3. Title, and click to access your information.
The website and the app will show you several types of information you can browse at will, with recent activities displayed at the top. What you see may vary depending on how much you use Facebook and how you do it on Facebook, but we can tell you what you expect to see.
  • Your activity on Facebook: This will show you all the actions you perform on social networks, including posts, photos, activities you are tagged, and items you sell on Facebook Marketplace.
  • Personal Information: Click here to find Facebook to learn about your information, including your name, hobbies, relationship status, and employer.
  • Connection: If you want to view your friends, followers, and the requests you send and receive, this is the category you need.
  • Recorded information: Here you will find information about your activity tracked by Facebook, such as search history and your primary location.
  • Security and login information: Where you log into Facebook, the device you use, and your history of each login and logout.
  • Apps and websites outside Facebook: If you have connected other apps and websites to your Facebook account, you will find the relevant data here.
  • Preferences: Any actions you take for a custom account, such as making it more useful and less toxic, will be in this category.
  • Advertisement information: This data is collected here whenever you interact with ads and advertisers on Facebook.

Check your Facebook ad preferences

Ironically, if you want to check out the topic Meta thinks you like, you won't find it under "Ad message." Instead, select Recorded information and then select Advertisement Interest to view the data Facebook uses to serve ads for you. To prevent Facebook from serving ads to you based on these details, just click Delete next to any of them.

This does not require you to remove useful details from your profile – for example, you can share your relationship status but prevent ads from serving you based on your relationship status. If you are interested, Facebook also allows you to learn more and learn more about ad preferences. But be aware that editing this data is not good for you – it is good for Meta, which will be able to locate you more effectively.

It may still be collecting this information even if Facebook does not sell your information to advertisers. In addition to making ads more relevant, the company can also leverage your data (from your phone model to your most used apps) to fix bugs and change social networks. If you are unwilling to provide certain information to the social network, you can completely remove this information from your profile by visiting your Facebook profile and selecting Edit profile to see which you can adjust content. You can't delete everything, but you can delete details like your work location and school. You may also want to check out the More drop-down menu where you can unfollow the page and manage other content you like in the process.

Download your Facebook message

You can never find all the information Facebook knows (or thinks it knows) about you: its secret algorithm makes some reasonable speculation about who you are based on your profile and online activities. Facebook uses some of these assumptions to group people so advertisers can target them. Whether these assumptions are completely correct does not matter, as long as they make the advertising platform more efficient in general. In 2016, The Washington Post published a report on 98 different data points related to Facebook’s identity. This data includes data extracted from other companies and services—such as the year you purchased the car and the type of credit card you hold.

However, Facebook is not a completely closed black box. If you want to back up your data or save it for any reason, you can download all the data – just navigate to your Facebook Information page (steps above) and find to download profile information > and click next to view . You can choose the date range, file format, and the quality of photos and other media in the final file. [Related: Share photos with these settings for the best quality]

There were once a number of third-party tools that tried to provide this information and predict how Facebook tracks and interprets your data, such as the now-defunct website Stalkscan and Google Chrome extension Data Selfie. Now you can navigate directly to the

your Facebook Information

page and click to download your information. You can choose the date range, file format, and the quality of photos and other media included in the file. If you need more guidance, we provide a complete step-by-step explanation in our article on how to delete a Facebook account. Disable location and network tracking

In addition to the information you listed in your profile and your click mode (from likes to photo comments), it is worth discussing two other important data in more detail: Where you are on Facebook (through you) ) and your activities elsewhere in the internet.

[Related: How to stop websites from tracking you]

There are some benefits to letting Facebook’s mobile app know where you are. It allows you to check in locations, search for interesting locations nearby, and even easier to find your friends. It also tells Facebook where you tend to hang out, allowing the service to serve ads more accurately.

If this makes you uncomfortable, you can turn off its ability to track your whereabouts. On an Android phone, open

Settings

, click Application, find Facebook, click Permission, and select Location. On your iPhone, open Settings, click Privacy and Security, then click Location Services, find Facebook in the app list, and then Select Never from the list of options that appear. If you don't see Facebook under Location Services on your iPhone, you may not be doing anything in the app that might require your location. Even with these precautions taken, Facebook can still track you—for example, when your friend tags you, it will notice.

The simple reason Facebook tracks you on the internet should be clear now: better advertising. For example, it can receive notifications when you spend time on a specific web page. Additionally, the marketing platforms and websites Facebook sends your information to can also provide social networks with data they themselves carefully collected about you (this is called an activity outside Facebook). What is in this data? You can't know for sure except checking the categories of applications and websites other than Facebook mentioned above.

To prevent Facebook from tracking you on the Internet, visit the

your Facebook information page (above steps), and click next to Events outside Facebook to view . You have three options:

Disconnect active connections outside of a specific Facebook

Whether you are on the network (

disconnecting a specific activity) or on a mobile application (selecting the activity you want to disconnect), you will need to enter your password to continue . You will see a range of brands and websites Facebook associates you with, you can choose either next to the bubble (network) or Close (app) to make your choice . Then click Continue (network) or Close future activities (app) to disconnect your Facebook account from the account you have selected. Facebook will also provide a lot of information about this process, including that Meta may still get information from disconnected places, but it will not be associated with your account.

Clear your history outside of Facebook

Select

Clear previous activity (network) or Clear history (app), and you can disconnect activity history outside of Facebook from your account. The data may still exist, but Meta means it will not be associated with your account.

Manage future activities outside Facebook

There are two paths here:

Connect future activities or Disconnect future activities. The former will allow Meta to continue to collect activities outside Facebook from certain places on the web and link them to your account. The latter will prevent this from happening, the company said. On the web, you have to click next to the bubble of your choice, but in the mobile app it is a simple toggle switch.

Open the

Advertisement page, find Advertisement settings from the menu on the left, and select Advertisement displayed outside Facebook. Switch the toggle switch to Don't allow . You can also access the Digital Advertising Alliance and specifically opt out of many cross-site tracking programs, including those running on Facebook.

Today, Facebook is more focused on explaining the types of user information it collects, but you still can’t get all the information back – something you sacrificed when you sign up for the service. What you can do is to know more about the type of information you reveal when filling in your profile, reacting to news feeds, and browsing the web.

This story has been updated. It was originally published in 2017.

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