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Comment by rasur | Hacker News Reader

A slightly off-topic thing, but I'm curious as to if anyone else here with a FB account has tried to download their FB data, but never actually received the notification email or data itself?

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Honestly, the aspect that originally drew me to Facebook was as an online address book that everyone updated themselves so I always had their most recent phone, email address, etc. Unfortunately now, because of all the privacy concerns most the time I can only send a message asking for their phone number or begging them to call me. A lot of people don't even have email addresses up anymore. I think the change came about around the time they let everyone have an account.

Sorry that was meant to be a reply to G-Garon, fat fingers and iPhones.

Was having a chat with a friend a couple of days ago about something similar. Essentially having my own 'app' (ie I'm the only user) and seeing what data I can obtain about my network through it (assuming I give it full access).

Of course, the simpler solution is just to ask friends who develop FB apps what they can access.

First time I issued the request - no response. Second time, after an hour (probably less) I got a link to download a zip file that did indeed contain what looks like all the data I fed into facebook and in a (surprisingly) fairly usable form to boot.

Interesting.. I've been trying to get friends to conduct this experiment, and - albeit with a ridiculously low sample size - we've had 100% failure so far.

This happened to me twice. Finally got it on my third try.

I've tried 4 times, with no success. I know my gmail account is pretty accessible, so I doubt it's an issue there.

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