Facebook Keeps A History Of Everyone Who Has Ever Poked You, Along With A Lot Of Other Data
Your Facebook report might be 100s of pages long — Across the pond, European law grants citizens a “right to access,” meaning that companies have to provide a person with all of the personal data they have on them if they request it.
Context & Ripple Effects
Europe's 'right to access' rules are doing what Facebook's own settings pages do not: handing users the complete file the company keeps on them. Requested reports run to hundreds of pages and include a full history of everyone who has ever poked you — a retention practice that echoes the 2007 Valleywag scoop that Facebook employees could see which profiles you viewed.
First-order effects
- European users who exercise the access right get an unfiltered view of what Facebook retains — poke histories and other activity records that no Facebook setting exposes — while users elsewhere have no equivalent lever.
- The disclosures land mid-f8 fallout, when Facebook has just announced Timeline and confirmed frictionless sharing that posts app activity without user intervention, sharpening questions about how much is recorded versus shown.
Second-order effects
- Facebook's defense of gathering data from logged-out users via Like buttons — which it says prevents improper logins and is quickly deleted — now sits alongside evidence of deep retention, forcing the company to reconcile 'we delete quickly' with reports spanning years of pokes.
- US regulators and privacy advocates gain a concrete exhibit: the gap between what American users can see and what European law compels Facebook to hand over becomes an argument for importing access rights.
Third-order effects
- If access-right regimes spread beyond Europe, data retention itself becomes auditable by the people it describes — turning 'right to access' statutes into the main inspection tool for social platforms' hidden record-keeping.
- The pattern points toward platforms being judged on the delta between disclosed data and retained data, with legal jurisdiction, not product design, determining how much of that delta users ever see.
The trend: Privacy accountability is shifting from what platforms disclose in their interfaces to what access-to-data laws force them to reveal, making European statute the de facto audit mechanism for US-built social networks.