Review your Facebook Activity Log
Your activity in and around Facebook has been logged, all the way back to when you joined. The pages, posts, comments and photos that you have ‘liked’, all the comments you have made on others’ posts and photos, articles that you have read, videos that you have watched, polls that you have voted in, your entire search history – everything you have ever done with Facebook is recorded in this section.
Your Activity Log also includes everything an app has done on your behalf!
This is a massive collection of very personal information.
I can guarantee that you’ll be shocked when you see just how much information you’ve shared on Facebook!
All of this information is available to Facebook to use to target you with ads. Although they don’t specifically say that apps or third parties have access to this particular treasure trove, it can potentially be included in a data breach, as seen by the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Review and prune your Facebook activity log
It may take you a while to go through this section, as Facebook doesn’t provide one convenient ‘Forget everything’ button. You have to individually change the privacy settings on each action, or delete them.
We recommend you spend a few minutes each day to get this section under control to protect your privacy.
The activity log doesn’t contain everything – too see (nearly) everything that Facebook has stored, you can download your data. Go to Settings > General and click on the Download a copy link at the bottom of that section.
This download will include everything you have posted, any actions you have taken, such as liking a page or posting a comment, and it even includes such private information like the active sessions and IP addresses you have used to log into Facebook.
Read more about accessing your Facebook data
More steps to protect your privacy on Facebook
Here are some additional steps you can take to protect your personal data on Facebook:
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How to protect your privacy on Facebook
Take control of your personal information online and learn how to keep it private on Facebook. We step you through each of the ways you can tighten up your Facebook privacy.
Stop apps and websites from harvesting your Facebook profile information
When you install apps, ‘like’ a web page, or use Facebook to log into websites, you let them harvest your Facebook profile information. Take control of your online privacy and change these Facebook settings today.