24-Year-Old Asks Facebook For His Data, Gets 1,200 PDFs

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday December 13, 2011 @12:20PM from the ask-and-ye-shall-receive dept.

chicksdaddy writes "Be careful of what you ask for. That's a lesson Max Schrems of Vienna, Austria learned the hard way when he sent a formal request to Facebook for a copy of every piece of personal information that the social network had collected on him, as required under European law. After a wait, the 24-year-old law student got what he was seeking: a CD with all his data stored on it — 1,222 files in all. The collection of PDFs was roughly the length of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, but told a more mundane story: a record of Schrems' years-long relationship with the world's largest social network, including reams of data he had deleted. Now Schrems is pushing Facebook to disclose even more of what it knows."

1 of 291 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Not that uncommon by james_van · 2011-12-13 12:59 · Score: 5, Interesting

I've worked for a number of tech companies that dont actually delete anything, the simply mark the record "deleted" in the database. It's a pretty common practice that didn't really ever get talked about until it came to light that Facebook did it. Let's face it, once something is out there, it never ever really goes away, whether it be on Facebook or somewhere else,