Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Implements 'Download Your Profile' Option
eldavojohn writes "Facebook is rolling out some new changes (including groups) that are supposed to liberate user control. But something that might interest Slashdot readers even more is that they now allow you to download all your information from Facebook. That's everything — all your posts, pictures, videos, friend lists, etc. A video from David of the Open Source team at Facebook explains how it will work, although I don't see that option on my profile yet (they are slowly rolling it out). There's not a lot of details yet, but they at least require you to click a link from an e-mail and reenter your password to get this (to avoid spambots harvesting everyone's data and careless use of public computers resulting in data leaks). Perhaps competitors like Diaspora would be interested in using this base information to germinate user seeds?"
I hope there is an option to disable this in case your account is hacked and someone wants to download all of your data, oh wait, doh....
Having a bookmark to Google does not make you an expert on everything.
Facebook used to have a feature to dump your entire profile and contacts list as a csv. They removed that in the fall of 04.
Even if diaspora dies, Appleseed is still around
http://www.drumbeat.org/project/appleseed-social-networking
Technoli
Unless your account (or their servers) get hacked ...
If your account gets hacked, they still need to have your e-mail hacked. The link to download the zip file is later sent to your e-mail address when the processing is done. Zipping up videos and images takes a while so basically you request this data and they put it in a queue and an hour/day/week/month later you get your data to download e-mailed to you in a link and you re-enter your user password. I thought I described this in my summary but that means that even if your account is hacked they would need access to your e-mail and for quite sometime unless you had already requested it and left that e-mail in your account. Yes, this means that if they know the e-mail associated with your Facebook account, they can just hack that and then request a new Facebook password sent to that account and then initiate the profile zipping.
... it just presents the possibility that a hacker could more easily zip up your data ... and then that requires time ... and access to another resource of yours. For me, this risk is acceptable consider the benefit involved. As I mentioned, I suspect this will allow you to move the history of your profile to another site, which is really really good.
Let's say their servers get hacked. Well, the data is still not zipped up unless they are retaining that data after someone requests it. So at most they'll have access to whoever is waiting to retrieve their data. And it's going to be a lot of data. So there are a lot of logistics involved to get access to only a few random person's data. And even if the hackers are smart enough to invoke the zip script for every single account, that's not something that will happen overnight.
Basically if they have access to your account or the Facebook servers, they already have access to everything on your profile or Facebook as a whole (respectively). So while this presents mild security issues, it's already assuming that everything is compromised
My work here is dung.
I love how people used to bitch that you couldn't get your data off of Facebook (which wasn't even completely true, given Platform and Connect), but now that they added that exact feature, people are bitching that it will allow spammers to get information or that it trains users in some bad way. Can you give them a fucking break? They are honestly trying to add a feature exactly for the demographic here (most users probably don't care about this level of data portability one bit) and all most people can do is still complain.
Omnes stulti sunt.
Dude, it is one of the basic tenets in computer security to not click on links in e-mails that take you to websites where you enter login credentials.
Those kinds of e-mails are known as phishing and spear phishing attacks. They are very common and very dangerous.
Facebook has had no end of security problems. Now with the publicity that they will be sending out e-mails that have a link, wait a few days and see what hits in computer security news.
FINALLY!!! A way to preserve all the comments from people I havent seen in 20 years telling me we need to smoke a joint together,..
allow you to download all your information from Facebook
The question is, does it really allow you to download all of your data? Does it let you download everything anyone has ever posted on your profile? If it did, this could give you some idea of what Facebook has stored about you.
One thing that seems to be in the same update is removal of the "Clear Chat History" button in the chat window.
There are thousands of complaints posted about this already.
It doesn't take much imagination to see how not having this feature when one is expecting it can lead to comedy.
This is absolutely shocking. For the past few years it seems every article I have read has advocated that data be soley kept 'in the cloud' and that users will never need to download their data to a perosnal machine ever....
'The Cloud' is hype. Just like all the other hyped techs in the last 15 years (ATM will change networking, Java will be out OS, thin clients will rule the business world)
I? do think it will be interesting if real competition comes to FB how this will be used to transfer data.
Thank you Facebook for supporting data portability and not use it as lame anti-competitive lock-in feature like Yahoo and M$ does.. I don't care how other slashdotters think, but you will earn more of my respect as you make your platform more open and release more open source projects. Well done for your effort, keep it on!
It's equally likely that after receiving black eyes instead of kudos, developers left Diaspora in droves.
If only there were a term to describe it when people suddenly flee en masse from a larger group of people and/or location.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.