However, Snapchat’s archive starts to dive into showing how much weird data social media sites have on you and openly share with advertisers and other groups. It does include an archive of images and videos you’ve submitted to either public stories or the themed “our story” collective public snap stories (like this gem I took before finals week last year). Instead, it only lists a log of communications on Snapchat and other accounts that only goes back about 3 or so weeks (for me). While it’s pretty common knowledge that most of your snaps stay on their servers after someone views them, no private snaps appear in the archive. I wasn’t able to find much on what they consider data to send to advertisers, but since my account is public, literally any advertiser, government agency or Nardwar-style interviewer could find it all pretty easily. csv of the archive in excel to search for keywords in tweets you don’t want to be public anymore, just so you don’t have one of those embarrassing situations when you’re famous or something and someone finds a horrible tweet from back in the day. I clearly have a life!īeyond this, one may use the. Based on this, I realized this past December was my most-tweeted month throughout my account’s four years of existence, during which my fingers cranked out a total of 812 golden tweets. html file includes a graph of how much you’ve tweeted each month. However, probably the saddest part of the archive is that the. Also, the archive does not include direct messages. Beyond going back to 2013 and cringing at how I tweeted (it’s nothing really bad, just me being a senior in high school), there’s nothing that scary included in this archive.
html file to explore everything in an offline website. In the archive, it’s essentially just a long spreadsheet of all your tweets alongside a handy. The size of the archive widely varies based on the service. When you submit your data request, it usually takes a few minutes for the archive to get ready. I’ll be going through these data archives in the order that they’re available to download for me. When you download data like this, it makes it even easier for people to access all the personal data you don’t want public.
One warning if you choose to do the same, regardless of the archive you download: keep this file in a secure place, don’t send it or put it anywhere publicly, and maybe even delete it after you take a look through it. So, for the sake of journalism and potentially reliving parts of my life I never want to visit anymore, I downloaded my archives from all three sites. However, it’s also worth noting that many other tech companies, such as Twitter and Snapchat, allow you to download data archives that include some of the data they collect as well. I’ve been mildly familiar with Facebook’s privacy policy and the fact that you have the ability to download your complete facebook archive for years now.
However, even if you were to abandon Facebook, there is still a treasure trove of data associated with your account still on file. I’ve seen countless stories of people accessing their own archive and seeing that Facebook has everything from group messages to even Android devices’ phone call and text message logs stored underneath their name.Īs someone who’s gone completely numb to how much data social media companies, advertisers and the government have stored about me, I decided it’s probably a smart wake up call to download some social media archives and see what dirt on me these people have access to.
Since then, attitudes toward Facebook and the data they collect have been incredibly hostile, leading many people to try to boycott the world’s largest social media website. A few weeks ago, it was reported that data firm Cambridge Analytica had gained access to tens of millions of Facebook users’ private data without permission, which they used to orchestrate and run Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign.