Thanks For The Memories?

For the past 13 years, I’ve given Facebook my photos, my videos, my likes, and untold hours of my time. Sifting through the detritus was amusing and surprising—and weirdly sad.

- Anna Wiener

I FOUND MY WAY to the Download Your Information tool in late March, soon after a whistle-blower revealed that the political-consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had gathered information about tens of millions of Facebook users. The tool, which Mark Zuckerberg referenced several times in his testimony to Congress in April, is tucked away in Facebook’s account settings. It allows users to access extensive archives of their own content, delivered by Zip file, giving a nod to demands for greater corporate transparency and helping the company satisfy new data- protection requirements in the European Union. It also offers an opportunity to view oneself through the eyes of Facebook’s partners, researchers, advertisers, and algorithms, in an act of reverse surveillance.

My own download held the usual digital flotsam—not all the information I had ever volunteered to the platform, but a lot of it: date of birth, phone number, schools. There were IP addresses from every time I’d signed on since 2009 (though I’ve had an account since 2005). There was a list of advertising topics for which I could be targeted––some accurate, some more like divination than data science— alongside content I’d created: chat transcripts, event listings, photographs, videos.