If I’ve got your number, so has Facebook
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Suddenly lots of people are waking up and asking themselves questions about Facebook. How much data am I sharing with the social media giant? Did I really give permission for it to be collected and stored?
And, even more seriously, have I handed over my friends' data to be stored on some Californian server?
I am one of those people and what I've discovered has left me somewhat shocked. Over the weekend I got hold of my Facebook data. It's easy enough, you go to settings, then general account settings and click on download my data.
An hour or so later an email arrived with a link to click and I was downloading a 675MB folder chronicling all of my life on the network since I signed up in 2007.
Big numbers
At first sight there was nothing very troubling - I would expect all the photos and videos I'd ever posted to be there, and scrolling down my timeline provided an entertaining glimpse of my life over the last decade.
I did notice that for some years every song I'd listened to on Spotify was listed, a handy reminder that when you link any external app to Facebook it then gathers a lot more data about you.
But then I clicked on a file called contacts. I was taken aback to find my entire contact list, thousands of phone numbers. Now this was not limited to Facebook friends and included many people in the public eye who might be disturbed to find that their private numbers were stored in this way.
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