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After hearing people talk about finding very personal things in their archive like audio recordings, I tried downloading mine. I was almost disappointed to find that it essentially just outputted my public facebook profile. Nothing remotely unusual about the data, but i'm sure there's much more that they wont admit to or hand over.

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I wondered about that.

Facebook know what I visit a site with an embedded tracker. This isn't in my data dump, but things like "interest in X" are. Do they really use the tracking to influence those scores, then throw away the data?

I'd assume they keep every ping from the tracker but simply class it as "their" data instead of "your" data.

If that were the case, then they are not complying with the existing European rules giving "data subjects" (me) the right to see data about them.

They would be allowed to remove all identifying information from the ping, e.g. retain a date, approximate location and so on, but not an identifier than links to my account.

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...

Based on my archive and the fact that its the most strategic move, this seems to be the case.

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