What It’s Like to Wallow in Your Own Facebook Data

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