It would take an average of 76 working days to read all the privacy policies you encounter on the internet in any given year, so it's no surprise that many users don't always take the time to read the fine print.
Spanning 14,000 words, Facebook's terms and conditions are hardly succinct, so if you're one of the platform's 1.4 billion daily active users you may want to think about whether you properly understood what you were signing up to. Especially in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
One Facebook user, Dylan McKay, obtained his raw data last week and was shocked at the pages of personal call logs and messages it contained.
Others also found similar quantities of information when they requested the files from Facebook and hundreds of people have started contributing to a shared Google doc with their personal findings.
Facebook has responded in a statement, saying the data uncovered is, and always has been, obtained through means that users themselves agreed to.
"Call and text history logging is part of an opt-in feature for people using Messenger or Facebook Lite on Android...people have to expressly agree to use this feature."
In fact, you haven't just agreed to a personal call log, but many other things the social media site has on file, including (but not limited to) your current or past addresses, all apps you have added, places you've checked into, your birthday, pending friend requests, deleted friends, your education, email address (even those you've removed), events you have been invited to, your last location, and phone numbers of people who don't necessarily have Facebook.
Facebook also records every IP address you've ever logged into Facebook from, and geographical coordinates of these logins. And has facial recognition data based on photographs you are tagged in.
Come as a surprise? If you have agreed to share this information without even realising it, then what else have you agreed to? We went through Facebook's legal terms (last updated on 31 January 2018) to find out.
