Facebook now lets you download more of your data, including previous names, friend requests and IP addresses
Coming under fire over its access to private information and its advertising services, Facebook today announced that it has expanded the breadth of its ‘Download Your Information’ tool …
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook's data practices were already under scrutiny: a 2011 report documented its retention of records such as every poke a user had received, while a 2009 initiative asked users about sharing their information. The expanded export makes more of that previously retained account history visible to the people it concerns.
The change arrives amid criticism of Facebook's access to private information and its advertising services. Coverage by multiple outlets on April 12 signals that account-data access had become a broader consumer-technology issue, not merely a settings feature.
First-order effects
- Facebook users can retrieve additional account records, including prior names, friend requests and IP addresses, through the Download Your Information tool.
- Facebook makes the scope of information attached to an account more legible at a moment when its handling of private information is being criticized.
Second-order effects
- Greater visibility into retained records gives users and privacy critics a concrete basis to question Facebook about what it stores and how that information is used alongside its advertising services.
- Facebook's account-data export becomes part of the practical boundary between information users have shared and information the platform retains about them.
Third-order effects
- If major social platforms answer privacy criticism by exposing more account records, data access tools may become a baseline accountability mechanism rather than an obscure account feature.
- The lasting tension is likely to be between platforms' dense archives of user activity and users' ability to inspect the records that shape privacy and advertising relationships.
The trend: Social platforms are being pushed to make their internal user-data archives more inspectable as privacy concerns collide with advertising-driven services.